A Brief History of John Baldessari is probably the very best mini-documentary I’ve seen recently. Narrated by Tom Waits and directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the guys who made Catfish. This is not boring art.

While exploring the farthest reaches of some external hard drive yesterday I found this b&w test render of the portuguese version of Change Your Habits Today. Somehow I like it more than the orange-cast original (or probably I just got bored of it). Naturally I’ve uploaded the find to Vimeo.

Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s influential 1936 documentary Night Mail.

Tomorrow the first public showing of Damião* will take place at 6:30pm in the Teatro Nacional S. João, here in Porto. The short film is a ‘mockumentary’ about the watchman at an abandoned shopping mall. It is an adaptation of the play Damião das Chaves by Pedro Estorninho, who also plays the title character.

I’ve just finished a trailer. The song is Dandy by Carlos Gardel, and, despite what YouTube’s bot police tells me, it is very much in the public domain.

* If you don’t speak portuguese, do us a favor and please pronounce it ‘Damien’.

Logorama, by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, won the Oscar for best animated short in 2010.

If you happen to be around Venice, Italy next Friday (September 2nd) night, be sure to check out a screening of Change Your Habits Today at the Circuito Off Film Festival.

Yes, it may be true moneymaking necessities made my filmmaking career take a backseat to multimedia and hired video stuff, but it’s not entirely out yet. In fact, I’m ready to announce that I expect to have new film called Damião will be ready for premiere by the end of September. More on that soon.

A History of the Title Sequence, by Jurjen Versteeg. Made as a meta title sequence. (via Fubiz)

Video & Film Logos of the 1970s & 1980s: Cool and horrid in equal measures.

Now these are short films: A bundle of twenty 5-second films. Many are indeed funny and poignant. But come on: how much ADD do you expect of you viewers to rush things like this?

Amazed by the color pictures of London in the 1940s I posted the other day? Here’s
London in color film, 1927.