Today some bright spark decided it would be a good idea to drive a lorry into the Strand Underpass.
“Into” being the operative word.
You can probably guess the end result of this little exercise. It looked a whole lot like this:
Categories
Illusion of Choice
This infographic seems to be doing the rounds today. It is mostly US-centric but a similar sort of thing is present in our own media, albeit not to quite the same alarming extent. This is, however, the very thing that The Whimpering Pen, had I ever gotten it off of the ground, was going to be highlighting (it may return as an Xmas project, who knows, but since the phone hacking scandal it doesn’t seem as ground-breaking).
You might have guessed this wasn’t going to be an entirely self-penned post owing to the fact that it has catchy headline for once.
[via The Loop]
Source: Frugal dad
Despite some slight reservations, I bought the complete Star Wars saga on Blu-ray the other month (I presume they call it a ‘saga’ rather than the more technically accurate ‘hexalogy’ because the latter sounds both a) stupid, and b) a little too Harry Potterish).
Being as it was a big bastard 9-disc edition of the saga (which takes up less space than the 4-disc edition of the original trilogy we previously had, I would like to mention), they felt compelled to include in the set one of those single film cells as some kind of ‘limited edition’ dohicky.
As much as I think they can look pretty cool – I admittedly have four frames of Jurassic Park at home, although those were pinched from a presentation reel after the film snapped whilst preparing the screening – the idea that these are something special and unique, as the marketing people often seen to claim, is complete rubbish.
To explain – it’s not like these are original film negatives or anything. They were not passing through the camera during filming. The cells have not been within mere metres of the stars of whatever film they’re from whilst they were acting the scene you can see. They’ve probably not been near the stars at any point at all.
In fact, the cells are most likely from the exact same prints as you see in the cinema, making them approximately as common as muck. Just in case you wanted to see the sums that got me to this conclusion:
Every film runs at the same frame rate – 24 frames a second (fps). So, for every second of a film you see at the cinema, 24 of those little film cells are shooting past. That’s 1,440 a minute, or 86,400 an hour, or roughly 130-172,000 frames for the average 1.5-2 hour film.
If the sheer number of frames is difficult to picture, let’s look at it another way. 24 fps translates as somewhere in the region of two or three feet of film in a second. A single reel of film is usually about 1,800 metres or thereabouts, and most standard Hollywood fare will run for six or seven reels – which works out to about 11 kilometres of film for a single movie.
And that’s for just one copy of the film. Most big blockbusters these days open in somewhere in the region of 3,500 or more cinemas. The 2008 film Jumper, picking one partly at random although with a slight Star Wars connection, opened in 4,600 screens, meaning 4,600 copies of the film had to be produced and distributed – which, by my maths, works out at roughly 582,922,000 (nearly 583 million) frames of film, or 49 million kilometres.
When you look at your single cell at about an inch in length, you will see just how small a part of the whole it is. Remember, when talking about ‘limited edition’ stuff, ‘one in a million’ is bad. ‘One in a million’ isn’t really that limited at all.
It’s not quite that simple of course. Not every frame is usable for this purpose; some contain titles, or fades to black, or blurred action that doesn’t look that good as a single frame. Also, in my experience, major cinema chains don’t exactly treat their copies of the prints that well, and they are heavily abused during their time on cinemas, being screened multiple times daily for months, and usually end up being held together by tape by the end of a theatrical run.
So I’m pretty sure they make prints exclusively for this sort of memorabilia. My single Star Wars frame – which looks like it’s from Episode III – is almost certainly from a print deliberately produced for this purpose. This is because the film is in the Cinemascope aspect ratio of 2.35:1, or the ‘very’ widescreen format that still has back bars when viewed on a widescreen TV; due to the technicalities of screening this type of film the image is distorted on the print (see the image right) and corrected by a lens on the projector. However, the cell I’ve got contains letterboxes and the image is correctly proportioned (not unlike the image at the top of this post). Also, the film only contains an analogue soundtrack – the waves on the image above – and none of the more advanced digital soundtracks (the blue strips and the black specks between the sprocket holes on said picture).
This is probably getting a bit technical. But as I warned some time ago, I love this stuff and can talk about it for hours.
The future of these little bits of memorabilia looks a bit uncertain when you consider that I read an article a few months ago that said that the world’s last film camera had rolled off of the production lines somewhere. The film industry is moving inexorably towards an all-digital system, from shooting to screening, and that does sadden me a little. Compared to film, digital projection looks cold, clinical, inorganic. Plus, film smells so much better. I love the photochemical scent of it, and that – along with the heavy mechanical sounds of a running projector – is something you only get from being in the projection room.
With new films being all-digital, will there still be the desire for these film cells? Surely they will lose their only appeal when modern films have as much in common with a sprocket hole as an iPod does with vinyl?
Maybe when film resolution gets high enough, they will start releasing larger print movie stills, which also have the added bonus of being visible from across the room.
It’s that time of year again. The clocks have reverted from the cheery optimism of British Summer Time back to good old Greenwich Mean Time, accompanied – as usual – by the cheery reminders that “you’ll get an extra hour in bed” from newsreaders, weather presenters and the likes.
Bollocks.
Very few people got an extra hour in bed. Only those who wake to an alarm clock on a Sunday morning get an extra hour in bed. Everyone else, who wakes either to a child, a pet or simply their own internal body clock, will get up the same time as usual, which is of course an hour earlier. Back when I worked in retail and started my shift at 8am on a Sunday morning, I would’ve enjoyed an extra hour in bed – provided I remembered to adjust the alarm clock before I went to sleep. Last year, when it was my body clock that got me up, I was up and awake on a Sunday morning at 6am.
So instead of getting an extra hour in bed, you get an extra hour awake to manually change all of the clocks in your home. And unlike spring, where adjusting the clocks amounts to pushing the “+hour” button on whatever digital timepieces you have, you have to instead push said button either 11 or 23 times depending on if you have a 12- or 24-hour clock. Analogue clocks, of course, you just twist anti-clockwise, although I did hear somewhere that was bad for them – but that’s probably one of the many weird and largely apocryphal bits of advice my mother has imbued on me over the years.
And then what happens is Sunday afternoons – one of the most depressing times of the week, and what Douglas Adams referred to as ‘the long dark tea-time of the soul’ – drag on endlessly. When it feels like six o’clock it’s only five o’clock, when it feels like five o’clock it’s only four o’clock and too early for supper.
There is talk of doing away with changing the time in summer, and more talk still of throwing the clocks forward an extra hour and going ‘European time’. This really isn’t going to sort anything. I find the amount of daylight available at a certain time of day helps me judge the time of year at a level looking at a calendar can’t (not least because the only calendar on the wall in my house still says February 2010). The fact that it’s now getting dark as I arrive home from work is a nice reminder at an almost subconscious level that Xmas, and my birthday, are coming (although this might be technically a vitamin D deficiency rather than some subconscious awareness). I guess it speaks volumes that, at an age that is rapidly approaching 27, I’m still looking forward to my birthday and Xmas.
I have noticed recently just how useless the information on the outside of medication is. The adverts invariably say “always read the label” but compared to the leaflet inside (which sometimes amounts to a full book) the label is often uselessly vague.
Take, for instance, the antibiotics I’m taking now. On the front it tells me to avoid milk at the same time as taking the medication. It doesn’t tell me why, it just leaves me to assume that my stomach will explode should tablet and milk mix at any point. It also doesn’t offer any guidance on what exactly constitutes “the same time” – does in mean in the same mouthful, or do I have to wait thirty minutes, an hour, or three hours after taking the pill before I can have milk? Nor does it really elaborate on what it terms as ‘milk’ – is yoghurt okay? Cream? Should I avoid milk chocolate?
Categories
Free WiFi
Dear hotels:
If you are going to offer free WiFi to your guests, it does seem like quite a shallow offering if the speed of said WiFi is about four times slower than the speed of the local 3G network (the 3G is the top result):
From the “it wasn’t like that in my day” files, I present a headline from the BBC News website:
When I was younger we just had to sit through a short video about willies and where to put them. It seems they’ve expanded the syllabus quite a bit since then. These days it probably even includes Scarlett Johansson and a section about how to tell real from faked celebrity nude shots.
Categories
An open letter to George Lucas
Dear George,
Come on now, enough is enough.
I let you be when you first started playing about with the original trilogy. You said you regarded the six films as a single story and as such, they weren’t finished until the last one came out – I accepted that. I can understand the desire to fix continuity errors brought about by starting in the middle or updating the special effects because its taken you thirty years to finish this thing and the newer bits are making the older ones look a little dated. I get that.
However, when you tinker with things seemingly just for the sake of tinkering, and even worse start actually changing the events of the films, then you start crossing the line. Why must you meddle so?
I don’t mind you going back and adding Hayden Christiansen to the end of Return of the Jedi. No one knows who the heck the other guy was so we don’t really care (although I hope he does still get some token royalties, you greedy bastard). Adding Ian McDiarmid to A New Hope didn’t upset me that much because again, continuity. I don’t mind all of the CG things walking around the background in Tatooine in the original trilogy because you’re updating the older films to look a little more in line with the newer ones. This, as I said, is fair enough. You’re also at least going back and fixing the new problems you created with your pervious meddling, which I guess serves you right.
But – but – please don’t go back and change the actual fucking story. Don’t go and make Greedo shoot first. Don’t make Darth Vader scream “Noooo!” when he throws the Emperor down the shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Oh yes, and Yoda looks much, much better as a puppet. How can you go from campaigning for Frank Oz to be awarded an Oscar for his performance as Yoda to replacing him with a substandard digital version? At least you’re only doing it in Episode I and leaving the original trilogy be on that front.
I would love to be able to say that, with today’s release of the Blu-ray versions of the films, that you might sit back and quit meddling for a while. But no – next year, you’re starting this shit all over again by brining out A Phantom Menace in 3D. Hopefully you’ll be so busy trying to be the first person to do a 2D to 3D conversion that doesn’t look like complete shit (James Cameron hurt you, didn’t he, when he released Avatar and became the new pioneer of motion picture technology?) that you don’t have the time to fiddle about with anything else.
It does sadden me, dearest George, that a man who has done more for the film industry than anyone – you’re the father of modern special effects and cinema sound – now spends so much of his time continuously playing with his one hit rather than working on anything else. There’s Indiana Jones, of course, but as much of a part you played in that series it’s still Spielberg’s baby.
I’ve bought the Blu-rays, of course, because I’m an idiot and don’t have the gusto to stand up to you. But at least you’ve worked some of that old Lucas magic, as I understand the picture and audio quality on the discs are second to none.
But George, really, isn’t it time to retire to Skywalker Ranch and leave well enough alone?
Yours,
Rob
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