Michael Morgenstern

Shabbat Dinner

And..another Shabbat Dinner test screening!

Well, the edit is almost done. The color is quite close. The sound is off and the music is temp, but let’s never mind about that. What matters is that we are 90% done and we need your fresh eyes and ears to finish the job. January 3, 2012(

Musings

Nobody knows what the heck is going on.

There are visionaries we look up to who seem to have a preternatural sense of the world: Ghandi, Obama, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hawking. These and so many others we trust to make decisions based on a deep understanding and insight. But whatever they know about

Wanting the We

Working alone can be lonely. When I was deciding what career option to take I considered programming and decided that I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer all day – filmmaking was a chance to work with people. Well here I am. And the freelance work is

Comics

Idea to clean up New York

Purism has no place in film

Perhaps because it’s an industry where you have nothing to show for your skills until you have a movie out, young filmmakers develop ways to show that they are good at what they do. I’ve found myself in many a contest over who has seen more Kurosawa films

You're invited to a test screening of Shabbat Dinner!

(cross posted on Kickstarter) Whew! We filmed on November 12-13 and I’ve been editing ever since. We have a good rough cut, and because we are trying to hit some festival deadlines in TWO WEEKS, we’re fast tracking the editing of Shabbat Dinner. This means that we need

10 steps to (really) speed up your mac

Don’t buy a new computer for the holidays. First try bringing your old one back to the speeds you remember it having! Even with the beautiful OS that is Mac, the system accumulates a whole bunch of crud and slows down over time. It turns out that there are

Filming finished! Editing begun!

(this is also cross-posted on our Kickstarter.) Well, thanks to your support, we filmed last weekend over Saturday and Sunday. The shoot went fantastically and I hope to put up some video from it soon, but for now I am steadily editing, editing. I’ve got a rough cut of

films

Shabbat Dinner: Funded and Raring to Go!

Wow! It was three weeks ago that Aidan and I were discussing our film’s budget and how much we thought we would be able to raise. We picked a number that we thought was acheivable, but we really had our doubts–and we were blown away. With every new

drawing

Portrait

Google Reader

Tools for the Google Reader diaspora

Well Google did a dumb thing just a few days ago. A few dumb things, actually..and I can’t help but wonder if it’s the new management or just old structural problems that are leading them down this terrible direction. They got rid of the sharing features of

films

Support our short film, Shabbat Dinner!

This is the official announcement of a project I’ve been working on for the past several months: I am writer/director of a short film called Shabbat Dinner. Making a film is a labor of love, and I am happy to be able to share this process with you.

Preproduction on my next film, "Shabbat Dinner"

What a whirlwind pre-production is! I’ve spent much of the month with producer Aidan Levy (NYT and VillVoice) working on my short film, “Shabbat Dinner,” which I wrote and will direct. The film is about a Friday night Shabbat dinner on the Upper West Side, where the two 15-year

#occupyoccupywallstreet

Before I go into this rant let me reiterate that I am with these protests in mind and spirit. Things are bad in America and our world on all fronts, and drastic, coordinated action is necessary. But let’s delve into process… I’ve been had before. It was the

You know what would be cool?

A program that captures what you type and what you are reading (whatever is in the active web browser, chat window, etc) and does a continual Google Image search for these things. It would make a computer have synesthesia!

technology

You know what would be cool?

A program that captures what you type and what you are reading (whatever is in the active web browser, chat window, etc) and does a continual Google Image search for these things. It would make a computer have synesthesia!

Invade Wall Street

I got a sketchbook and some pens!

The Unbearable Lightness of Cabbage

Proposition for a new Zak naming structure

Some beautiful Burning Man images from Reuters

From this Daily Mail article. This face connected straight to my heart – it’s a face I saw so many times on the Playa. (I don’t know what was going on in her head, but to me) it speaks of majesty, awe and pain that there can be so

In Transition

(as usual..) When my life gets interesting, my blog suffers. In a perfect world it would be the other way around, but since I like to use this space as a way of making some relaxing writing, I always prefer to get creative rather than descriptive. But I think it’

u+i

Lady Gaga just released her music video for You and I. Alejandro and I watched it, and it’s beautiful. We thought about how cool it would be to work on something so grand and epic and have a team making projects like these. God would I have loved to

Video dance shoot last night

Owen David and I collaborated before on a film for his dance showcase, and we wanted to do one more collaboration before he left for dance school in Ohio. Last night was a six-hour insane experiment in tempura paint, cloth, lights, and dance. We’re not sure what it’s

Chase no Face

an LED projector, a hacked Kincet, a beautiful music video. Code, software, light, music. Chase No Face / BELL from zach lieberman on Vimeo.

Why QWERTY saved mobile text

When I learned the keyboard, I also learned the history of QWERTY and why it was created. The QWERTY keyboard layout is the standard one we're all used to. It was designed in the 1870's for typewriters, with the specific goal that the most-used keys be