RES Magazine:
March/April 2006 issue
Sue Apfelbaum and Jesse Ashlock, Editors
80 pp. illus. 80 col.
$5.95
New York, Res Media
Group, 2006
Journal website: http://www.res.com
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
It is good to see RES magazine
still publishing in 2006. This reviewer
first picked up a copy at a seminar held
at San Francisco State University in 1999
when the magazine was based in that city.
At that time, digital cinema was an exciting
and promising new concept that was more
ideal than reality, largely unused by
a skeptical Hollywood though beginning
to blossom in short productions. It offered
shrimpy streams, or a few products downloadable
over the Internet...for those willing
to wait.
One issue of RES in 1999 discussed
works at Sundance Festival and two-minute
films, shorts on ifilm.net steaming over
RealNetworks technology. Michael Moore,
at work on the BRAVO network TV series
"The Awful Truth" on downsizing,
expressed interest in MiniDV cameras,
while George Lucas announced that
subsequent Star Wars episodes would be
shot digitally. A 2000 issue discussed
high-end camera equipment and underwater
digital camcorders, the conceptual pranksters
®™ark, <www.rtmark.com>,
and Tim Burtons Shockwave comic
Stain Boy.
The March/April 2006 issue of RES
is Volume 9, Number 2. It covers the several
directors of the band Death Cab for Cuties
videos, songwriter Tom Zé and Beastie
Boy Adam Yauch, documentary filmmaker
Rachel Boynton, the latest movie based
on comics by Daniel Clowes, and an unassuming
diary of internship at Weiden+Kennedy
ad agency. There is a useful item How
to Sell and Promote Your Videos Online.
RES is now published by Res Media
Group of New York, with offices in Los
Angeles and London. For nine years it
has sponsored the Resfest <www.resfest.com>
of short films, animation, design films
and music videos. RES has many
of the same advertisers as WIRED
magazineSony, Toyota Scionas
well as others more specialized for media-makers,
like the San Francisco International Film
Festival, AVID, and the Ex-Centris commercial
complex in Montreal, seeking creative
tenants. The cover image of cartoon clouds
by Anoine+Manuel (collaborating artists
Antoine Audiau and Manuel Warosz of Paris)
has its production process, in both traditional
gouache on aquarelle paper and digital
scanning and manipulation, explained on
the masthead page. The cover promises
coverage of Film/Music/Art/Design/Culture,
and, like in WIRED, the reader
finds CD, game and "gizmo" reviews.
There are reviews of design books and
other contemporary design works as one
finds in the industrial design magazine
I.D.
The RES reader encounters ads for digital
and cinema design programs at Full Sail,
NYU, Los Angeles Film School and San Franciscos
Academy of Art University. The magazines
annual Res 10 selection highlights emerging
artists in film, video, design, ads, music,
and media art. It is followed by a Student
10, this year ages 19 to 35, who are doing
interesting work in various schools. The
cover of this short, sharp, sprightly
journal might read RES: the Hip
Magazine for Cinema Students.