visual madness

Not unlike a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, ever since I read what I now consider to be one the greatest books of all time, I’ve been eagerly trying to push it on to everyone I know. So far I’ve gotten almost all my good friends and even my sister to read it, and their reactions have been pretty much unanimous: it’s a stunning piece of work.

So with the film coming out in little over than three months away, I’ve been rushing to get more people to read it before they watch the movie, so that way they’ll be able to get the full experience of having their minds raped by graphic novel brilliance for the first time.

Alas, as fate would have it, there’s been one person as of late who’s has proven to be a bit of a hard sell. This Negative Nancy comes in the form of Allan Hagen, a fellow magician and flourisher from Norway who is also a very skilled and knowledgeable cinematographer to boot. Long story short, I’ve been egging him on to read the book for ages, but even after months and months of my constant annoyance he still hasn’t even gotten down to getting himself a copy of the book. Apparently him being a film nut meant he wasn’t much of a reader – but then again, graphic novels are just like storyboards, aren’t they? » Read the rest of this entry «

Music: “In the Bath” by Lemon Jelly (iTunes)

While a trailer for a book might seem an absurd concept, we felt that it would demonstrate the visual nature of the book’s material enough for people to want to buy it. Originally, we set out to film the trailer at the Disney Concert Hall (the same place they shot the trailer for Surfaced), but weather conditions led to us abandoning that idea. Instead, we ended up shooting it Dave’s room on a maroon tablecloth – one of the reasons the video was rendered in black and white.

Smooth Operations is available in both book form and PDF, so grab your copy if you haven’t already!

-Kev

I was lucky enough to bump into Paul Harris at LVMI 3 years ago. No, he didn’t show me any magic (given how tall the guy was, I was probably at a bad angle anyway), but the honor of finally meeting this living legend in person was awesome enough.

The Art of Astonishment was one of the first books I read when I was starting out, and at the time I’ll have to admit I just sort of breezed through it. Yes, I read through all the effects and learnt them, but in hindsight what I was really doing was just taking each item at face value and going ‘oh, I can do this… no, this one’s too hard… where can I find the gimmick for this?… I don’t know if this would work…’ so and and so forth. Flash forward to present day, and the only thing I do from the book is a variation of Reset. Kinda sad, don’t you think? » Read the rest of this entry «