Outside Editorial and Big Sky Editorial Company, both in New York, and Margarita Mix Santa Monica topped the spot category nominees for the fourth annual Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Awards, which recognize creative and technical excellence in the art, science and craft of postproduction.
Outside garnered three nominations while Big Sky and Margarita Mix each earned a pair. Work from Outside and Big Sky accounted for the three nominees in the Outstanding Editing-Commercial category: Outside editor Neil Gust for NASCAR’s “Start Er Up” and Jaguar’s “XF/XK”; and editor Chris Franklin of Big Sky for Bing.com’s “Syndrome.”
For the Outstanding Color Grading-Commercial category, colorist Alex Bickel of Outside scored a nomination for Jaguar’s “XJ Launch Film” while Big Sky’s Valerie Junge earned nominee status on the strength of American Express’ “Members’ Moments.” Rounding out the nominees in the category was colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of bicoastal Company 3 for Pepsi’s “Pass.”
Company 3 scored another nomination–this one outside the spot realm–for Outstanding Color Grading in TV for colorist Siggy Ferstl on the basis of Yankee Stadium Tribute-Yogi’s Bronx.
Margarita Mix’s two commercial nominees came in the Outstanding Audio Post category, one for mixer Nathan Dubin for Honda Civic’s “Grooves”; and the other for Jeff Levy for Honda Fury’s “Unleashed.” The latter was a shared nomination as Margarita Mix and audio artisans Paul Hurtubise, Richard Cooperman and Thom Blackburn of Santa Monica-based Solid worked on “Unleashed.” Rounding out the category was mixer Parv Thind of Wave Recording Studios, London, for Sony’s “Extreme Detail Bond.”
And the nominees in the remaining spot category, Outstanding Compositing, were: Geoff McAuliffe, Jimi Simmons, Sean McLean and Robin Hobart of Brickyard VFX, Santa Monica and Boston, for NBA’s “Amazing Playoff Moments–Bird Steals The Ball”; Brady Beaubien and Brandon Peterson of Los Angeles-based Interlace Media for the “International Landmark Destruction Campaign” promoting The Day The Earth Stood Still; and Colin Renshaw of Animal Logic, Sydney, for Toyota’s “Ninja Kittens.”
HPA Award winners will be announced and honored during a gala evening ceremony on Nov. 12 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. For a full rundown of nominees spanning the feature and TV categories, log onto www.hpaawardsnet.com.
Already known are the honorees that evening for several other HPA kudos. Ben Burtt will receive the HPA’s Charles S. Swartz Award for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Post Production. Burtt has worked in every facet of film production for over 35 years spanning directing, producing, sound design, sound editing, editing, voicing and voice design in motion pictures, TV, specialty, educational and documentary. He was the sound designer for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series, has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards for sound effects work and has won four Oscars.
Meanwhile slated to receive the HPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award is post icon Paul Haggar who rose through the studio ranks from the Paramount mailroom to apprentice editor and ultimately to executive VP of Postproduction for Feature Films, a position he held for more than 20 years.
And finally the HPA Engineering Excellence Award winners are DVS Digital Video Systems for the CLIPSTER hardware and software turnkey finishing system; Signiant for its Content Distribution Management (CDM) software which was developed to centrally manage, secure, accelerate and automate the movement of rich media content; and S.Two Corp. for its OB-1 Uncompressed Digital Recorder, a complete system for providing images from digital cameras to post.
Review: Director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” Starring Robert Pattinson
So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it'll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson's in Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an "Expendable," and by this we don't mean he's a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone's tired band of mercenaries ("Expend17ables"?). No, even worse! He's literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be "reprinted" once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong's hotly anticipated follow-up to "Parasite." There's creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn't know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he's adapting here is called "Mickey7" — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he's part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He's surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: "Haven't you died yet?"
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan... Read More