Posts Tagged ‘movies’
Video: The Trailer for "Urbanized," a Documentary About the Design of Cities
The latest in the design trilogy from "Objectified" director Gary Hustwit
Hustwit's design trilogy has gotten steadily broader and more ambitious, and this newest film "features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers" pontificating on one of the grandest design projects there is: an entire city. There's a ton to talk about with this subject, so we're hoping Hustwit can bring his signature style and ability to both fascinate his viewers and make them feel like experts. The movie is due to hit the festival circuit later this year, followed by a theatrical release probably sometime in 2012.
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Mind-Reading Tech Reconstructs Videos From Brain Images
This is the first taste we've gotten of what the study actually produces. Here's a video of the reconstruction in action:
The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, "obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately."
Don't forget to check out on this work for some more background into what the researchers would really prefer we call "brain decoding" rather than "mind-reading."
Netflix, Stop Floundering Around and Making Things More Complicated
Netflix just divided in half: "Netflix" is now streaming only, while the DVD-by-mail service is now an entirely separate service called Qwikster
This is dumb.
The price hike Netflix underwent back in July aroused a sort of media-centric kerfuffle, despite the fact that the tech media, of all people, were surely aware that the ludicrously low prices Netflix was charging could not possibly stay so low if Netflix was to expand. (The same problem applies to music services like .) Aside from the day long eye-rolling about a raise in price, I doubted at the time that there would be any significant problem for Netflix down the road. Their service, especially compared to, say, cable TV, is insanely cheap, and I assumed people would grumble and then get used to it.
Apparently not, because this morning, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, sent out an email to subscribers notifying them of a pretty significant change: Netflix will entirely separate the streaming and the DVD-by-mail services. And not like they were before: the DVD-by-mail service is getting a new name, a new site, and will show up on your monthly statement as a separate bill.
This move doesn't solve anything, doesn't alleviate the woes of any of the crazies who cancelled their subscription to Netflix (which, might we say again, is amazing, and an amazing deal) over a four-dollar price hike. It simply makes it more difficult to have both a streaming and DVD service--and as many of the content providers (TV conglomerates like Viacom, movie studios) are being very obstinate about licensing content for streaming, a lot of movies and TV are still only available on discs, so it's not crazy to want both services.
Why does Netflix want to separate its streaming from its DVD service so completely? It's not for the customer. The DVD-by-mail service is dying slowly, and Netflix has made a whole mess of changes, some obvious and some not, to encourage people to think "streaming," and not "red envelopes," when they think "Netflix." And that's fine, but this separate services thing seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth just for some clear-cut severance.
Before the change, if you wanted to play, say, The West Wing, which you probably do because it's amazing, you'd go to Netflix, search for "the west wing," and find that, oh no, it's not available for streaming, but you can rent it on DVD. Easy! Now, if you did the same thing, Netflix would tell you "this title is not available." Then you can go over to Qwikster and search, if you remember that you pay for two separate services. Oh, also, ratings and reviews (which are pretty important, especially for Netflix's recommendation algorithms) will also be entirely separate, even when the exact same title is available both for streaming and on disc.
This isn't the end of the world, and I don't want to make it a bigger deal than it is. But here's why this is annoying: it is totally unnecessary. Aside from some psychological benefit of separating the DVD and streaming services in the customer's mind more thoroughly, there is no benefit to doing this, and it definitely makes using these services in tandem less convenient. Hastings did toss in a legitimately nice upgrade: Qwikster will also rent video games for Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. That is great! Very exciting! But there's no reason that couldn't have been integrated with the streaming service as well.
Is this a reason to abandon Netflix? No. Of course not, don't be ridiculous, I don't know why you'd even ask that rhetorical question that you didn't even really ask. But come on, Netflix. Focus on getting more content and stop worrying so much about what the tech press (yeah, I know) writes. The one big benefit I see from this is that it'll be easier, in the future, to ignore what's going on with the DVD service as fewer and fewer people care about it--though I do wonder why this move is coming after the price hike and not before, and why it seems so oddly haphazard (Netflix didn't even bother to secure the @Qwikster Twitter handle, which is by a stoner with lousy grammar). Let's just hope this is the last shake-up, and we can all go back to streaming episodes of Roseanne instead of venturing outdoors.
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Inspired by Science, Guillermo del Toro’s Hollywood Monsters Come to Life
Del Toro begins his creature creation with "the National Geographic approach"
Striking that balance requires study in physiology and evolution and a meticulous use of sculpture, computer modeling and 3-D animation. Case in point: the 10-inch homunculi that star in this summer’s thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, written and produced by del Toro and in theaters August 12. Del Toro knew the nocturnal creatures scurried through the walls of an abandoned Victorian mansion. But what would such creatures “actually” look like? How would they move?
After drafting the screenplay, del Toro and several designers combed magazines, books, nature documentaries and science journals for reference points. The naked mole rat, a nearly hairless burrower from East Africa, inspired the homunculi’s saggy, translucent skin. Human skeletons twisted by arthritis inspired its spindled limbs, and its gait was modeled after an ape’s. In some cases, del Toro concocted bits of evolutionary history. He reasoned that after generations of living in the dark, the homunculi would need night vision and concomitant protection from the occasional burst of bright light. His designers came up with “sphincter-like” eye sockets that squeeze oversized eyeballs outward and “foreskin-like” eyelids to shade them.
At del Toro’s favored fabrication house, Spectral Motion in Glendale, California, sculptor Mike Torres shaped the movie’s star homunculus in clay. Some filmmakers go straight to CGI, but del Toro prefers more-traditional methods. “If you’re doing flesh, bone, hanging tissue and pockmarks, you’re better off bringing in that fallibility of flesh through a sculpture,” he says. From the clay creature, Spectral cast a more durable, urethane-resin maquette, which was then scanned to create a high resolution, 3-D digital model.
At Iloura, an Australian CGI firm, technical designers reengineered the digital maquette into a living, clawing creature. Informed by del Toro’s original concepts, the team retrofitted a virtual skeleton and musculature within the digital model. That architecture, paired with footage of spiders, roaches and other alarmingly fast creatures, guided the homunculi’s movement.
Finally, Iloura’s technical directors refined the creatures’ outward appearance with custom “shaders,” algorithms that define how light should play over a given surface on a pixel-by-pixel basis. For example, skin calls for a great deal of subsurface scattering as light penetrates various translucent layers, from peach fuzz through the epidermis to the veins. After months of work, the creatures were finally ready for the big screen. The question is whether you will be ready for them.
2011 Summer Movie Smackdown: Unraveling Science Fiction From Fact
Five summer blockbusters get a shot of reality
for the summer movie science smackdown.
Disney Tactile Device Lets Games and Movies Literally Send Chills Down Your Spine
Tactile Brush works via a series of vibrating coils embedded in the back of a chair. These coils create illusions based on a variety of sensory phenomena that have been somewhat understood for decades but never really implemented into entertainment devices.
In one illusion known as apparent tactile motion, if two vibrating objects are placed near each other on the skin in quick succession, the skin often experiences the sensation of a single vibration moving between the two points. A similar illusion called phantom tactile sensation makes the body experience a pair of fixed vibrations placed apart from each other on the skin as a single vibration in between the two points.
And so on. Software that understands how this sensory trickery works can create a variety of sensations on command. Using a chair embedded with 12 vibrating coils in the back, the Disney researchers have created a system that can create a range of realistic effects. So if a person is playing a car racing game, for instance, the chair can gives the impression of gravitational forces pushing on the person in the chair when he or she makes a hard turn. Similarly, the chair can simulate things like rain running down the subject’s back, or someone touching the person from behind.
That could go a long way toward augmenting video games, horror flicks, and other experiences where a little tactile sensation would go a long way. The researchers hope to integrate it into 3-D theatrical film experiences to help theaters compete with the home entertainment experience and make moviegoing a more well-rounded sensory experience.
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See What Yuri Saw in "First Orbit," a Minute-by-Minute Recreation of His Historic Mission Shot From the ISS Window
Every six weeks or so, the International Space Station's orbit matches the same arc around the world traced originally by Yuri Gagarin's Vostok capsule, 50 years ago today. A few weeks ago who, working with an astronaut aboard the ISS, set out to film exactly what Yuri Gagarin saw out of the porthole. Today, the fruits of their labor, First Orbit has been released. Set your YouTubes to HD, folks—this is great.
The footage, shot by astronaut Pablo Nespoli, is synced in real time with mission control radio communications. So when Gagarin marvels at seeing the Earth from space for the first time, seeing green forest fading into white snow, so do you.
The film is free to download (the site is currently under a fair bit of load, as you might imagine) and stream on YouTube, and it will be shown at what is sure to be a raucous at locations around the world.
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