Tag: movie

Categories
New

Things 99: Rules for Stories, Sci-Fi Map, Movie Bar Codes

Video
When an important character first appears in a movie, it’s generally good practice to have the first few things they do give a strong indication of what kind of person they are. I think this is why people get so upset about the “Han shot first” debacle, since it was such a character-defining moment.

Occasionally, real life can give us the same speedy insight into a person, such as these 14 seconds:

Quote
In screenwriter Todd Alcott‘s series of insightful and fascinating posts analysing The Shining and how it fits the standard three-act structure set against a driving need of the protagonist, provided that you consider the hotel itself to be the protagonist (which is actually quite a compelling argument; read it in full in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), he has the following aside:

[I]n order for a protagonist/antagonist dyad to work dramatically, the protagonist must be aware that the antagonist exists, and is acting upon things, and vice versa. This is why […] fantasy stories always have magical characters who can see the future and know what’s going on in distant lands – because otherwise, the protagonist and antagonist would never know that the other exists.  If Gandalf is just some guy who tells Frodo to throw the ring into a volcano and Frodo says “okay” and sets out, there is no drama to Lord of the Rings.  It must be that Gandalf is a wizard and that Frodo can have visions when he puts on the ring and that Sarumon has a magic ball that sees things, or else everybody is just kind of doing things.

I wasn’t so sure about that when I first read it, but ever since then I’ve seen it more and more. I think it’s actually more the case that when a writer has a story in mind it’s very difficult for them to separate their omniscient knowledge of events from the far more limited knowledge held by the individual characters. If you have some kind of fantasy setting, it’s almost irresistably tempting to get around this by including some kind of magical information transfer. Harry Potter leans on this story crutch particularly heavily (although to be fair Rowling does fold the implications back into the narrative).

Picture
Ward Shelley’s History of Science Fiction, originally posted at scimaps.org:
(click for big)

Puzzle
Imagine taking a frame from a movie, and squashing it horizontally to produce a thin vertical line. Now imagine doing that to every frame of the movie, and putting those lines next to one another in sequence. While I’m not sure of the precise transformation used, this is what Movie Barcodes essentially does.

For many movies, this will tend to produce a set of incomprehensible stripes that show little more than the general color grading of the film. The Matrix is a perfect example (click for big on this or any of the others in this post):

Films using distinctive palettes at different times reveal their underlying pattern, for example the distinct striations of Hero:

This begs the question: are there any movies which you could recognise from their “bar code” alone? I suspect this is only reasonable if you’re given a subset of movies to guess from, or if the movie is particularly distinctive. So for this week’s Things, see if you can guess the following movies (the answers are in the filenames of the images):

A famous Disney movie:

Another famous Disney movie:

A film I like:

New movies are regularly added to the Movie Barcode Tumblr, and most excellently they sell a variety of prints of some of the most popular!

Categories
Old

Things 40: Big Dog Robot, Movie Marketing, Facebook Principles

(Originally sent February 2009)

For those that are new or may have forgotten, ‘Things’ is intended to be weekly, I’ve just been abnormally busy recently. I’m getting this one done by adding bits in stages throughout the week, but since it has somehow become much longer than usual it has actually taken more than a week for these incremental efforts to add up…

Movies
The movie Push was much better than I had expected, being unusually well thought-out and executed for the genre.

My review:

I’m currently undecided on which I want to see of these two films:

The Unborn – implementing all ‘best practice’ horror cliches
(IMDb 4.8/10! Rotten Tomatoes 13%!)

Franklyn – Possibly ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ for adults, but less mature
(IMDb 7.8/10 Rotten Tomatoes N/A)

(Don’t forget you can switch off YouTube annotations via the icon in the bottom right)
[Much later I did eventually see Franklyn. Unfortunately I don’t recommend it. – T.M. 20/2/11]

Video
‘Big Dog’: Once again, technology jumps forward a bit faster than I was expecting, this time in robotic quadrapedal locomotion:

Link
I found this New Yorker article on the marketing of movies absolutely fascinating.

Warning – long article! Recommend consumption in chunks!

Excerpts:

“Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease.”

“Even as movie attendance has dropped nineteen per cent from its peak of 1.6 billion theatregoers, in 2002, the number of films released each year since then has increased by thirty per cent. A dozen new films—three of them big studio releases—now vie for attention on any given weekend. To cut through the ambient noise, major studios spend an average of thirty-six million dollars to market one of their films.”

(Note that the average is probably the wrong figure to consider – a handful of gargantuan budgets will massively distort it. I would guess the median figure might be around 10 million dollars based on similar power-law distributions)

“the industry-standard multiplier for ultimate box-office—two and a half times the opening weekend’s gross”

Quote
Nat Torkington of O’Reilly Radar, on the trend for applications and data to be run and stored in the ‘cloud’ (the external network, e.g. Google Docs or webmail) rather than your own computer:

“Data in the cloud can be a privacy problem, because you’ve outsourced your privacy, so you’re vulnerable to attack not just from hackers but also from governments, competitors, and incompetence.”

Taken from a very important but annoyingly presented talk you can click through (yes, talk you can click through, that’s why it’s annoying) here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/web-meets-world-privacy-and-th.html

Puzzle – previous
Last time I asked what people thought digital cinema projection combined with mobile phone interaction might cause to happen. Here’s some of what came out…

Storytelling used to be interactive with the storyteller flexing the way the story is told depending on audience reaction – this sort of thing becomes possible again. The mood could be flexed (perhaps with the soundtrack – dynamically generating suitable music is something already being used in video games), lines changed, or even the ending. But where does the input come from?

Live ‘what happens next’ competitions with prizes for audience members (!) and for scriptwriters…

Crowd-source optimisation of the presentation – up/down volume, focus, alignment. (I heard some cinemas in the US already do this – a few chairs in the auditorium are equipped for the audience member to give instant feedback on these issues, or it may have just been a single button that means ‘something is wrong’)

Product placement: can be localised (different product appears in same film when shown in different countries, or different locations in those countries), or placed on the screen in real time using some kind of eye-tracking, and optimised using mood-measurement, and cinema temperature control!!

Personally I suspect it will go through a process of hype (a few gimmicky movies where you can choose the ending, a rush of adverts with some kind of audience interaction tacked on), it will rely on sponsorship from a mobile operator (probably Orange), and it may ultimately fail because Cinema is a ‘sit back’ medium, rather than a ‘sit forward’ inherently interactive one like the web. (TV is a ‘sit back’ medium, which is why nobody presses ‘the red button’).

Or maybe I’m wrong – apparently the statistics actually show that 11 million people press that button every week, and a ‘killer app’ that we haven’t thought of could always emerge in interactive cinema and transform the entire medium.

Puzzle – this week
This just in – Facebook are taking what I consider to be an incredibly significant step in that they are now approaching their terms of service in a way similar to the US Constitution:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=56566967130

Their proposals for a ‘statement of rights and responsibilities‘ and ‘Facebook Principles‘ are currently up for debate.

There are three parts which I think work very interestingly together:

Principle 1. Freedom to Share and Connect
People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

Digital technology has blurred the line between ‘information’ and ‘content’. As such, the very first principle sounds as if it endorses p2p file sharing…

R&R 2.3 For content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos and videos), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform or display, distribute, modify, translate, and create derivative works of (“use”) any content you post on or in connection with Facebook. This license ends when you delete your content or your account.

Facebook need your permission to share your content with those you want to share it with, certainly, but imagining them modifying and then publicly performing it sounds a bit strange (I’m imagining a personal photo being photoshopped in some bizarre way and then paraded around Tokyo on a sandwich board with a strange slogan in order to promote Facebook) – and the idea that they will then stop such a thing as soon as you ‘delete your content’ is also hard to imagine…

R&R 5.1 You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.

Does this contradict Principle 1? Does that matter?

A picture
After an unusually intense edition of Things, here’s a nice little story and picture from the surprisingly entertaining Cake Wrecks blog.

Categories
New

Things 95: Modern Movies, How to be Happy, Mouse Mystery

Video
A beautiful demonstration of physics (or perhaps chemistry):

Quote
Scott Rudin, quoted in this GQ article about why movies are all rubbish these days:

Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they’re right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint.

Incidentally, while there’s clearly a huge argument to be had about the relevance of the data to the argument, let’s just contextualise the “things are terrible now” discussion by looking at the breakdown of what proportion of pre-2010 films in the IMDb top 250 come from each decade:

We see a broad trend that is the opposite of the “films used to be better” argument, apart from a post-war spike.

As I said, this is a starting point for huge arguments, and if I was going to start one I would begin with one of the following:
-Any popularity poll will tend to bias more recent candidates
-Demographic bias of IMDb voters and the scoring calculation used for the IMDb Top 250 will skew the result away from the “Objective Truth” (ha ha ha) of the matter
-This data does not speak to the more important issue of ‘typical’ film quality by decade

This week’s question
A mouse can fall any distance and survive. How is this possible?

Picture
I’ve had this obvious-but-actually-important thought myself, and this is a pretty great way of expressing it:

Answer to the previous question
In Things 94, I asked why ovens didn’t come with a built-in thermomenter.

Uncharacteristically, the Things community was unable to answer – or perhaps you weren’t interested. So I asked the internet using my secret research alter-ego* on Yahoo Answers, and also on Quora just to try that out.

You can see the range of responses I received on Yahoo answers, some of which are quite useful. The question on Quora has yet to draw a response, so I’m guessing the community there is still too niche to cover this kind of thing.

Putting together the suggestions from YA and my own thoughts, this is my conclusion:

1) It’s difficult (and therefore expensive) to make an oven thermometer that will remain accurate for the device’s lifetime. If it wasn’t, I suspect ovens would be thermostat-based, and we wouldn’t have the problem to begin with. (As I said, baking books insist there is a problem, and anecdotally I can report my gas oven is almost two gas marks cooler than it should be, and adjusting for this significantly improved my baking results).

2) It also must be difficult (and therefore expensive) to design and calibrate an oven such that it accurately produces the intended temperatures throughout its lifetime, because (once again) if this wasn’t true the problem wouldn’t arise.

3) The solution to the problem is to have a separate thermometer and use it from time to time to calibrate your oven. That thermometer then doesn’t need to maintain integrity for every use of your oven, and even if it does break it’s much easier to replace than an integrated one would be.

4) Admitting there is even a problem looks bad, so any oven manufacturer supplying such a thermometer unit with its devices would be perceived as worse than those that pretend there isn’t a problem.

5) Even if a manufacturer did include a built-in thermometer, people unaware of the oven temperature problem would again presume the oven must be sub-standard to need one, and people that know enough to worry would realise an integral thermometer couldn’t be trusted for long.

I suspect similar principles apply to protective cases and screen protectors for mobile devices.

*A long time ago I thought it might be prudent to separate my question-asking online identity from my confident-and-opinionated online identity. This doesn’t seem quite as important any more, and now that Things is a blog it’s very easy for someone to connect the two anyway, so now I don’t worry about linking from one to the other. But I’ll still use it anyway.

Categories
New

Things 94: Black Swan, Vampire Squid, Stock Market Returns

Video
I saw Black Swan recently and recommend it to anyone that likes the look of the trailer, so long as you’re not squeamish as that’s a whole side of the movie the trailer skims over:

With a reported production budget of $13m (which, as I never tire of telling people, would be just enough to cover Tron Legacy’s costume budget, and was also so restrictive that Natalie Portman opted to forego her trailer in order to afford an on-set medic), I was particularly fascinated by the beautifully subtle (and some not-so-subtle) digital effects they nonetheless managed to achieve. Most excellently, you can see a showreel of how these effects were put together on Look Effects’ website, although if you haven’t seen the film you should steer well clear as it will completely ruin the film for you.

Links
Have Instapaper or Read It Later at the ready because I’m about to flag up some serious long-form content. I don’t think it was available online when it was first published, but you can now read Matt Taibbi’s dilligently researched yet seething explanation of quite what Goldman Sachs does over at Rolling Stone, in which he memorably begins:

The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Over a year later even publications like The Week will casually refer to them as “Giant vampire squid Goldman Sachs”, which is I think excellent. It’s long, but well worth it, and it has a great twist ending.

As a nice follow-up (or much shorter way of cutting to the heart of the matter), Charlie Stross explains how we got to this point. Or if you want the whole thing in one pithy excerpt:

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

I think the way we tend to automatically expect groups of humans to behave like individual humans is one of the most disastrous mistakes we make on a daily basis.

Puzzle
All ovens that I’ve seen have some kind of temperature ‘input’ dial, but why do so few have any kind of readout of the actual internal temperature, to the point that there is a market for independently purchased oven thermometers? Shouldn’t market forces guide the manufacturers to include such a feature themselves?

Picture
I see a lot of data visualisations that make me angry because they do little more than treat data as almost random input for some kind of procedural image generation process (which is actually very cool when it doesn’t claim to be something it isn’t). This New York Times visualisation of stock market returns over the past 90 years, on the other hand, is actually quite practical at giving you both an overall sense of the patterns while still making each data point quite clear.

I'd just like to make it clear that I'm using the 'ragged edge' functionality of FS capture to show that this is only part of the image. A while ago, when everyone at work had just got in to FS Capture, it was used on just about every image you saw. Those were dark days.

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why we seem to be so intolerant of variation in things like driving speed or grammar pedantry.

Angela suggests it’s all to do with herd instinct:

We are constantly (often subconsciously) comparing ourselves with others around us and balancing the desire to fit in (be part of the herd) with our desire to ‘self-express’ (stand out). Even small differences between us and others in the herd could potentially threaten us if they lead us to be ostracised or confer upon others some advantage in terms of survival or reproduction. I think that’s one of the reasons we a) notice and b) are so perturbed by even slight differences – they could signify a real risk to our deepest interests.

I think that’s part of the answer, although it doesn’t explain why we’re more tolerant of a lot of other things, or at least tolerant of variation in one direction (such as how we judge others’ use of free time).

I initially thought it covered those particular areas of life because we recognise them as prisoner’s dilemma / tragedy-of-the-commons areas, where a few people taking the easy way risk leading society to a collectively suboptimal Nash equilibrium.

However, I now think there’s two separate factors at work. In driving, even slight differences in speed add up to one car overtaking another, which we can’t help but read as a social signal that one is ‘doing it wrong’ (and we see the same thing with walking speed).

On the other hand, things like specific bits of grammar pedantry or household hygiene fall into a category of behaviours drummed into us as children, which we then cling on to tenaciously through a combination of Anchoring and Status Quo Bias. Deviation from these things is more on a sub-task basis (“I can’t believe they don’t clean their skirting boards!”) rather than a spectrum, as we adhere to whichever specific rules we were taught.