Review is in! TOTR is a "a rip-roaring narrative"

Here's a fantastic review of TOTR in the City Arts online magazine, just in time for Saturday!!
(original article is here: http://www.cityartsmagazine.com/time-robots)

There’s much enchantment in the flickering images of early 20th-century fantastic cinema.
Decades before cinematic illusions could be wrought with a few mouse clicks and keyboard taps, pioneering filmmakers crafted strange worlds, space ships and robots with a few venerable optical tricks and a lot of imagination. Viewing those early efforts through jaded 21st-century eyes, it’s easy to dismiss them as pure hokum. But seeing a parade of those antiquated images—boxy robots portrayed by men in suits, gorgeously-rendered art deco spacecraft zipping across back-projected skylines, exotic women with features obviously sculpted in decades past—can’t help but captivate in the right context.

Seattle-based director Erik Hammen knows this, and he’s created a film, Time of the Robots, steeped deeply in that mystique. Hammen sifted through several hundred hours of public domain footage, weaving images from old cliffhanger serials and silent films into a rip-roaring narrative involving the appearance of a mysterious phantom planet and the attempts of its tyrannical emperor to overtake the Earth with rebellious automatons.

What stoked Hammen to create an original feature film from pieces of old ones? Part of the motivation, he explains, came from sheer love. “I was always trying to explain to my friends why Flash Gordon, King of the Rocket Men and Zombies of the Stratosphere were so great,” he says.
Ironically, he also took inspiration from a film he’d never seen. A New York Times article six years ago profiled a one-off screening of Peepshow, a 1960s film by underground filmmaker J.X. Williams.
“It purports to be a documentary on Frank Sinatra’s connection to the Mafia," Hammen says. "The movie uses clips of Frank Sinatra’s films to pretend it was this documentary. I couldn’t go to New York to watch it, but it was such an exciting idea. Then I took a look at the serials, and thought, I’m gonna make myself a little Peepshow of my own. It’s gonna be a science-fiction, silent Peepshow.”
Hammen worked on Time of the Robots over a five-year period while juggling full-time employment in the dotcom world and full-time duties as the father of two children. The film is essentially a one-man effort, with Hammen writing the script and taking on the mammoth task of editing the footage into a cohesive, unique whole. “It was so hard,” he says. “The footage would not do what I wanted it to do sometimes, and it was really important to me to make it work.”

Much of the film’s score is comprised of public domain music from the Edison Library, but Hammen ended up using sound effects and self-composed music to fill in the gaps. “The public domain music was too limiting at times,” he says. “I was so excited to do my own soundtrack. It was a ton of work, but so much fun.” He enthuses about punctuating one of the movie’s big action scenes (lifted from the old King of the Rocket Men serial) with his own music: “When the Rocket Man’s gonna take off, I thought, man, this guy needs a kettle drum!”

For all its pulp-cinema spirit, Time of the Robots also sports some cogent socio-political commentary. George W. Bush was still in office when Hammen began the project, and he admits that some of that awareness seeped into the finished product. “[Bush] was trying to privatize health care,” he says, “and I thought, we’re gonna give away civil society to a little group of people, and that’s the plan? It just felt so good to make a film that addressed that.” But Hammen feels strongly that he never lost sight of the film’s core of old-fashioned entertainment. “Within the structure, it’s total pulp,” he adds.

Hammen’s film career covers a wide swath: His first feature, the 2000 indie comedy Love My Guts, received kudos from experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and his 2011 short The Last City in the East features poet Paul Dickinson on a semi-fictionalized visit to Minnesota. Next summer, the director begins filming “a beach movie. “I’m shooting it here in Seattle," he says with a laugh, "so it’s a beach movie of the mind!”
Time of the Robots screens Saturday Sept. 29 at the Grand Illusion theater.

Time of the Robots poster in the very window of the Grand Illusion

We're up there with Steve Martin!

Saturday, Sept 29, 2012 -- 7pm only

Grand Illusion Poster

Time of the Robots Plays Seattle Sept. 29, 2012

I am proud to announce that Time of the Robots will be playing on the big screen in Seattle at the venerable Grand Illusion Cinema, one of the city's all time great movie theaters !

Showtime is set for a September 29, a Saturday night, at 7pm.

More details to come!

Updates coming soon

Stay Tuned !    The Robots are computing new ways to infiltrate the human population and they expect to have some data in the near future.

Yes, The Future... is Near!!

Interesting parallel - Star Wars prequels edited into single feature

I wonder what they'd think of a film edited using Classic sci-fi films??

"... Topher Grace is a film geek. He loves the Star Wars films, the Back to the Future movies and all the same signature titles of any film geek who grew up in the 1980s. He recently became interested in the editing process and wanted to learn more about the art form. Instead of cutting a short film, he wanted to use something he was more familiar with.
His idea was to edit the Star Wars prequels into one movie, as they would provide him a lot of footage to work with. He used footage from all three prequels, a couple cuts from the original trilogy, some music from The Clone Wars television series, and even a dialogue bit from Anthony Daniels’ (C-3PO) audio book recordings. He even created a new opening text crawl to set up his version of the story."

Here's the rest: http://www.slashfilm.com/topher-grace-edited-star-wars-prequels-85minute-movie/

Nice paragraphs on Special Effects, then and now.

I can't vouch for the rest of this article from the Onion AV Club, but I do love the opening paragraphs:

The trajectory of Peter Jackson’s career—from the homemade slapstick gore of Meet The Feebles, Bad Taste, and Dead Alive to the refined studio spectacle of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, King Kong, and The Lovely Bones—has been a case study in how special effects have changed, if not necessarily improved. Back when he was cobbling together those hilarious little creature features in New Zealand in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all the money and expertise in the world wouldn’t have given Jackson the resources to render the films’ stop-motion and puppet effects in CGI. And who would want to do that, anyway? By the same token, the Helm’s Deep sequence in The Two Towers has a level of pixelated detail that wouldn’t be possible in stop-motion—and who would want to do that, anyway?

Yet the thinking of these effects is often wrong, and Jackson’s fervent embrace of new technologies as a Hollywood filmmaker hasn’t helped matters. The important point isn’t that effects have gotten better, and that CGI is somehow superior to stop-motion, but that they’re different, and audiences respond to them differently. Who, besides maybe Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, would argue that Rob Bottin’s spectacularly grotesque stop-motion creations for John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing are inferior to the fluid ones-and-zeroes of 2011’s remake? Yet it would be inconceivable for a stop-motion version of The Thing or any other science-fiction/horror film to be financed by a studio in 2012, for fear that the effects would poke out from the visual fabric of the rest of the film. Gleiberman used the word “fake,” but why should we put a premium on realism when it comes to effects? Effects are not necessarily diminished by the audience recognizing them as effects. No one ever mistook Ray Harryhausen’s creations for seamless photorealism or Nick Park’s thumbprint-pocked Claymation wonders for the fluidity of computer animation. And yet they’re pleasing in ways that CGI could never be, perhaps because they’re so handcrafted and personal.

Read the rest, which is about Peter Jackson's film Dead Alive (which, again, is not endorsed by me or mine) here.