Ben Model’s blog
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There’s a reason a lot of home movies or home videos are hard to watch and that so many photos look like “snapshots”. Most of the time the person taking these isn’t thinking of how this will look to whoever is looking at it. They’re thinking of what’s in the…
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Over-scans and Purple-Green Bands
Believe it or not, I have not been able to find answers to two basic questions about YouTube live-streaming. They’re issues I’ve been noticing for the last four weeks on the Silent Comedy Watch Party, and I can’t believe that one of them hasn’t been picked up on and hack-suggested.…
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Revisiting the Films of John Bunny
John Bunny enjoyed a popularity in his day that has evaporated with time. To some extent that process began right at the end of his screen career. The mid-‘teens saw the rise of slapstick in the manic Keystone comedies and those of Charlie Chaplin and others. The polite social, situational…
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Two Weddings and a Sandwich
Programming shorts to a theme is often useful if you need to draw a potential audience’s attention or if you have a hard time making choices from a long list. And sometimes it just happens without any planning at all. Case in point: this Sunday’s edition of The Silent Comedy…
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Adding a Page to Watch Party Menu
“Can I tell you about today’s specials?” Okay, it’s been a couple weeks since someone’s asked you that question. But in the case of The Silent Comedy Watch Party, it applies. With people hosting movie-viewing watch parties on social media left and right, the floodgates of copyright-ignoring seem to have…
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Opening the Gates and Letting the Laughs Out
Last week’s premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” was a success, so it seems I was right about going ahead with doing the stream. I was also wrong about something. Luckily that was easily correctable, and it was something I should’ve seen coming. I spend most of the…
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“The Silent Comedy Watch Party” – *premiere*
The premiere episode of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” streamed live on Sunday March 22 at 3:30pm EDT (New York, east coast USA). Hosted by silent film accompanist Ben Model and film historian Steve Massa, the one-hour program will present three rare slapstick comedy shorts. The films are streamed live…
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William S. Hart in “Three Word Brand”
Turns out I have a few silent films on hard drives here that I’ve never published or released. While looking for, oh heck I don’t even remember what it was, I came across a William S. Hart western I’d scored years ago. There aren’t a lot of good versions of…
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I Threw Spaghetti at the Wall – and it Stuck
A farmhouse in Ireland, a park bench in Manhattan, living rooms in Denmark and Australia and Texas and Nebraska and Kansas. These are some of the locations people watched the pilot of “The Silent Comedy Watch Party” yesterday afternoon, a show I broadcast live from my living room. This was…
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Doing a Silent Film Show While Working From Home
I’ve had the idea for this for a few years, as well as the tech for it, but was always reticent to give it a try. And for good reason. Streaming a live-accompanied silent film program defeats one of the core elements of silent cinema — the live theatrical experience.…