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Roy Conli 20 year veteran of Walt Disney Animation talks about Bog Hero 6 and where the studio has gone right and wrong. Will the first animated Marvel film be Disney's next Frozen-sized hit? Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SBS2Australia Twitter: https://twitter.com/thefeedsbs Tumblr: http://sbs2australia.tumblr.com/
I really don't get enough opportunities to bring up eye make-up in interviews. Joel answers the campaign to boycott his new movie Exodus. He talks about having Ridley Scott draw eyeliner on him and having a giant sphinx with his face moved to Bondi.
His labour of love Felony is an exceptionally good film. Here's my full triple j review.
A great movie that wraps around you until you feel as guilty as the characters themselves
52 Tuesdays was a tiny Adelaide film production that's gone on to win huge attention around the world. I sat down with the team behind 52 Tuesdays.
The movie opened strongly in the United States taking $A76.7 million on it's opening weekend and it's since taken more than $400 million worldwide with a large proportion of the audience being adults.
Animation director Chris McKay says Warner Bros gave the Animal Logic team a lot of latitude with the film because of the team’s passion for Lego.
"On the one hand they were expecting us to sort of push the envelope a little bit," says Mr McKay. "They understood what we were trying to do."
The film is filled with pop-culture references but many of them are in the background - a style which Mr McKay says pays homage to the style of movies like 'Who framed Roger Rabbit'.
To many people The Lego Movie might feel like a stop motion film but it’s all computer generated. Mr McKay says the animators paid particular attention to things like camera movement and lighting to apply real world limitations to their 3D animation.
"[We] put the camera in places that on a set only the camera could go... put the lights in a place that only the lights could go" says Mr McKay. "That gave it a very realistic feeling."
The Lego Movie was made locally at Animal Logic in Sydney - the studio known for its work on films like Happy Feet.
But despite film being made in Australia we're one of the last countries to see it in cinema.
Mr McKay says he wished The Lego Movie could have been shown here earlier.
"I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself," says Mr McKay. "Top to bottom this movie was made here in Australia."
"There's nothing I wanted more than to show this to the people that made it."
It began in Africa with horny dancing Ethiopian goats. Legend has it that the very first effects of caffeine were noticed by Ethiopian shepherds who saw their goats eating these plump red coffee berries. Suddenly the animals began to dance and copulate wildly.
These days Some 25 million people around the world now grow it, and roughly 27 million acres are given over to farm it.
Coffee is consumed by the richest countries in the world and made by the poorest. The average Guatemalan coffee picker makes less than $2 a day while there are some that will pay up to a $1000 for a special brew delivered straight from the anus of a wild Sumatran cat. It is the world’s most popular and socially sanctioned psychoactive drug.
But the story of coffee is also the story of modern civilisation, politics and culture.
Coffee owes its popularity directly to the rise of Islam.
Back in the 16th century, as the Ottoman spread throughout the globe so too did their drink of choice - coffee - especially, given alcohol was a no-no. In fact the word coffee is actually derived from an old Arabic word for wine.
By the end of the 17th century, Europe was also hooked. London alone had 2,000 coffeehouses. So much so that the King of England Charles the 2nd tried to ban them arguing that coffee houses were where people met to conspire against him.
An early feminist group also demanded the coffee houses be shut down, saying that the drink was causing their husbands to become snotty, “Frenchified” fellows who had lost all interest in sex. Clearly it didn’t work.
Coffee was too perfect a product for every wannabe colonial power looking to exert their economic might. It was non-perishable, addictive, and conveniently made in places filled with slaves.
The relationship between coffee and slavery are unmistakable. By 1791 half the entire world’s coffee was being made by African slaves working on an island in the Caribbean. The conditions for slaves were so brutal; they burnt the plantations down and declared independence. Today we call that country Haiti.
High-powered politics and coffee have always gone together. (And we are not just talking about how George Washington invented instant coffee. He did, but that's not US President George Washington it is actually a Belgian man who was living in Guatemala at the time.) We're actually talking about the cold war.
Coffee was at the centre of the cold war. The US would use their huge buying power to poor Latin American countries like Guatemala, El Salvador just to make sure they wouldn’t align with soviets.
But why? What is the hold that this humble drink has had over us?
Well the key is these two the adenosine and adenosine receptors in your brain. They want to be together, but when you have caffeine in your system it pushes them apart. Your pituitary gland assumes there’s some kind of crisis on and tells the body to produce adrenaline which in turn boosts your dopamine levels and hello caffeine high.
A high that has given rise to empires, nations, corporations and to helping you get out of bed every morning. Because that is the power of coffee.
Graphics by Dan Holohan, Gabriel Virata, and Miller Marshall.
