Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary iPad app is about as close to a behind-the-scenes documentary as you can get without actual video. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired 
While filming Stanley Kubrick’s legendary war movie Full Metal Jacket, actor Matthew Modine documented the whole process with a borrowed medium-format camera and a richly detailed diary. To mark the 25th anniversary of the film, he has released a Kickstarter-funded iPad app that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Kubrick classic. (If you’ve never seen the movie, please stop what you’re doing and go watch it.)
As Private James T. “Joker” Davis, Modine was the star of the film, and he’s the star of Full Metal Jacket Diary, too, offering his first-person perspective on working with Kubrick, and alongside actors such as Vincent D’Onofrio and Adam Baldwin. He supplements his written diary entries, which run from 1984 to 1986, with more than 400 photos mostly shot by himself and fellow actors and crew.
The result is an immersive fan experience made even more so by about four hours of Modine reading his diary aloud, complete with sound effects, music, and impersonations. Users get to see set shots that look like actual war photos, a few of Modine’s family photos, and candid shots of Kubrick on the job, as well as details about asbestos and other environmental hazards at shooting locations (the whole thing was filmed in England), and the methods employed by both director and actors to make one of the greatest war movies of all time.
“We wanted to create something that Stanley Kubrick would hold in his hands and be proud of,” Modine told Wired in describing the app. “I think we did that.”
The user interface of the Full Metal Jacket Diary app is clean and easy to use, with a focus on photos.
On launch, the app shows off four rows of old photos sprawled across the iPad’s screen. Tap any photo and it switches to a new shot. A swipe in from the left side of the screen brings up the app’s menu, which guides you to different sections of the app, including each of the diary’s five chapters: Private Life, Vietnam, Boot Camp, On Leave, and Boot Camp Redux.
Modine says he never had any plans to turn his diary into a book, let alone what it’s become. He had kept diaries of previous shoots, and when Kubrick saw him doing it, he encouraged the actor to keep it up.
“Stanley would sometimes ask me to share what I had written in my diary on set,” Modine said. “And because he forced me to have an audience for the diary, something I didn’t anticipate before, it made me a better writer because I suddenly started writing knowing that people might someday hear it.”
The photos also came about by chance. Before heading off to London to begin filming, Modine borrowed an old medium-format Rolliflex camera from a friend who had noted that Kubrick himself was a photographer. Kubrick encouraged Modine to take photos on location. The film was shot at the decommissioned Beckton Gas Works, near London, and on a former British Army base in Cambridgeshire, England. The vintage cool of Modine’s photos — candid shots, portraits, and scenes from the shoot, in both color and black and white — seem all the more powerful in this age of cookie-cutter Instagram and Hipstamatic approximations. These look like they were shot on film because, well, they were.
Modine’s on-set photos capture the vintage cool that apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic aspire to.
In the app, photos take up about two-thirds of the screen. To the right of each image is a rolling column of chronological entries from Modine’s diary. As you swipe through the text, the images change to correspond to the diary content. And each photo has an “info” button that allows you to order a print or share it on Twitter. You can also tag them as favorites, which can be accessed from the app’s menu so you can return to them quickly.
The content swings from funny to fascinating as Modine recalls the intense pressure they were all under. In one entry, he describes landing the Pvt. Joker role and buying his first house, which he later struggles to pay for. In another he recalls arguing over a pancake breakfast with Val Kilmer, who feels Modine is stealing roles he could have had. Modine also describes fighting with Kubrick over whether the actor could leave to attend the birth of his first child and then, later, having Kubrick criticize him for naming his son Boman.
Modine said putting the diary app together, with photos and a voiceover that did require some acting skill, was at times an emotional return to one of the most important periods in his life.
“It was weird to go back and sort of experience that again because I am a different person than the person that wrote that diary years ago,” he said. “But, at the same time, one of the things I really love about the diary is that it was told in the voice of a young actor who went off to work with a genius director and it captures all the naïveté that went along with it.”
The Full Metal Jacket Diary, in either its book or app form, is an engaging first-person account of what it was like working under legendary director Stanley Kubrick.
This isn’t the first time Modine has released his diary. In 2005, he published the text and many of the photos from this app in Full Metal Jacket Diary, a metal-encased book of which just 20,000 copies were made. He and a film producer friend, Adam Rackoff, saw the opportunity to add new content and turn the book into a more immersive experience for the iPad. A little more than a year ago, the duo took to Kickstarter looking for enough funding to make the app more than a simple scanned PDF of the print product.
What Modine and Rackoff produced is a $15 app that’s about as close to a behind-the-scenes documentary as you can get without actual video.
Modine, in fact thinks that the book on the iPad has transformed into something the print book could never be. “We call it an Appumentary,” he said. “There’s never quite been anything like this before and I think these sorts of apps could change the way movies are promoted and the way fans connect with the movies they love.”
Actor and author Matthew Modine says his Full Metal Jacket Diary app demonstrates what’s possible with book apps on the iPad.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/full-metal-jacket-diary-app-matthew-modine/
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