First Short Film + Thriller Dance
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Today we mapped out the idea for our first short film, a suspense movie.
Plot sounds great, not to complex and if the weathers right the location we've picked out should work perfect. Going to try & shoot it later on this summer, need to get approvals sorted, scripts, and storyboard it but should be a lot of fun.
If all goes ok, I'll build a site to publish it, and break the making-of into some short tutorials to explain our choices, etc. Hoping this'll be a regular occurence.
Keep you posted.
Prison Thriller!
"1,500 plus CPDRC inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines at practice! This is not the final routine, and definitely not a punishment! just a teaser."
- original post
Wedding Thriller!
"Surprise thriller for the folks at the reception."
- original post
Movie Thriller!
My personal favourite from 13 going on 30
Watchmen Opening Credits + Review
Saturday, 14 March 2009
--------- Spoiler Warning ---------
I've just read the writeup Total Film gave Watchmen and I have to agree it is a lot to take in if you're new to the story and haven't read the book.
From the opening credits which setup the backstory (see below) you instantly get a feeling these guy's really put a lot of love and effort into creating this masterpiece. Ok, it isn't for everybody, the good guys don't always win and not every cloud has that silver-lining but then the world we live in isn't such a pretty picture when you look between the lines. The superheroes are flawed, mothman goes insane and is carted off to the asylum, the comedian isn't nice with the ladies, and the Night-owl has performance issues, not to mention Rorschach's poor people skills.
This is definitely not another comic-book movie.
I went to see this recently with my fiancee Michelle and a couple of my friends and the reaction was very varied. Some thought it was too long (3hrs), some thought it was too slow and took too long to get to the action. One guy next to us kept dozing off but for me I was just in awe, I was really taken back by the attention of detail the cast and crew underwent to re-create the comic on the big screen perfectly. Some bits were altered and a few were left out (like the explanation of Rorschach's mask), but so much was crammed into those 3 hours that you could never get in just one sitting.
From the start it felt like watching Blade Runner with the rain, neon lights and dark corners. Then we see Rorschach picking up the pieces of The Comedian's untimely death, then visiting Dr Manhattan's laboratory where we meet Sally Jupiter and so on. There's lots of cameo's with Annie Liebovitz photographing Adrian Viedt, Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, Andy Warhol and then all those little characters and locations from the book The Gunga-Diner, The Newspaper Stand, the kid sitting on the corner reading his comic, The Frontiersman, Moloch's place all beautifully rendered straight out of the book and acted superbly. No big name star trying to steal the limelight, just a solid and truthful rendering given life on the silver screen.
Looking back I can't even imagine the kind of problems they must have had creating this, just keeping it quiet must have been a security nightmare. And then making sure it was done correctly and without people changing things to fit in product placements or such, Zack Snyder must have called in some pretty big favours to keep it's vision. The casting must have been difficult, what I found staggering was the level of detail they gave even tiny two second props was just incredible. If anything this film's destined for an oscar for the art work & costumes alone.
I also loved the choice of songs, Bob Dylan's 'Times are a Changing' was a perfect choice for the opening setup. Then Hendrix 'All Along the Watchtower' when things were getting hairy. Didn't quite get the lovescene song, and to be honest it was a little funny, but the prison scene was absolutely spot on, disturbing and dark.
I'm off to see it with my old boss next week, can't wait. It was exactly what I hoped for in a film. Gritty, dark and artistic. 5 out of 5 easily.
Courtesy of yU+Co
64-bit Flash Player for Linux
Thursday, 20 November 2008
A long time coming Adobe have finally released a 64-bit version of their Flash Player and it's for Linux.
It's in Alpha but reports suggest it's actually quite stable, so good news all around for us with 64-bit Ibex machines ;-)
You'll need to uninstall you're current Flash Player via either...
sudo aptitude remove flashplugin-nonfree
Or going into your ~/.mozilla/plugins directory and removing the old version.
To install simply download the tar file relevant to your distro, extract the plugin and drop it into your Firefox Plugins directory ~/.mozilla/plugins
Restart Firefox and you should be good to go,
Linux Video Acceleration
Sunday, 16 November 2008
Looks a non-starter but trying to find a way to enable video acceleration in Ubuntu.
You can list the hardware you've got from the prompt via:
lspci -v | less
From that I know my chipset's an Intel GMA 965, Intel one's are better supported so might be possible....
Doing this tells me I have direct writing 3d support enabled,
glxinfo |grep direct
Fusion-Icon may help,
sudo aptitude install fusion-icon
Allows you to switch between different window decorators (compiz & metacity), plus change some of compiz's options.
Sorted
Found a way to improve it, in terminal type
gstreamer-properties
Hit enter, this'll popup a dialog to alter the audio and video properties of your linux distro.
From here click the video tab and change default to X Windows System (No Xv), hit test to be sure, should improve the video.
You can also manage and test your webcam from here ;-)
Open Terminal Quicker + Improve VLC
Sunday, 02 November 2008
Open Terminal via Keyboard Shortcuts
Open System / Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts
Now find the one called Run a Terminal
Click on the column opposite saying disabled and hit CTRL+ALT+T, then close the dialog
Now everytime you hit CTRL+ALT+T a terminal window will open.
Improve VLC + Keyboard Shortcuts
CTRL+CURSOR-UP => increase volume
CTRL+CURSOR-DOWN => decrease volume
SPACEBAR => pause movie
Also don't install the XINE packages, GStreamer is much faster for video playback
sudo apt-get remove xine
sudo apt-get autoremove
Also if you've got a slow video card, try changing the de-interlacing mode in VLC to discard via VLC / Video / Deinterlace / Discard.
If that doesn't work, try changing your Appearance settings to Normal via System / Preferences / Appearance, then Visual Effects and select Normal. It's a good balance and you'll still get the cube desktop.
...also found this which suggests using the blend deinterlacing mode to improve DVD playback,
gedit ~/.local/share/applications/vlc-dvd.desktop
Scroll down and find the line reading...
Exec=vlc %U
Replace that with...
Exec=vlc --vout-filter deinterlace --deinterlace-mode blend --volume 512 %f
I know who i'd vote for ;-)
Thursday, 02 October 2008
Super Mario Rescues The Princess
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Hello James...
Monday, 30 June 2008
The Quantum of Solace
Bond 22, out November 7th 2008
Install Skype - Ubuntu 8.04
Sunday, 11 May 2008
To install Skype on an AMD-64 system, you'll need the 32-bit libraries (if you're distro is 32-bit, skip this bit),
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
Now grab the qt4 libraries,
sudo apt-get install libqt4-gui libqt4-core
Download the appropriate Skype package from...
Firefox should download it to your desktop so...
cd Desktop
sudo dpkg --install --force-architecture --force-depends skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb
And you're done, with the Webcam driver installed and enabled you should now be able to make video calls too.
Update 64-bit distro available
Webcam + Ubuntu on DV2000
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Setting up the built-in webcam on the HP DV2000 laptop isn't that hard, here's a quick run thru...
Dependencies
First install all the dependencies your going to need to build the drivers from source,
sudo aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r`
sudo aptitude install build-essential subversion
This will install the GCC compiler, linux headers, etc.
Build Driver
Now in Terminal,
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
cd trunk
sudo make
sudo make install
First you pull the Linux-UVC source from Subversion, move to that directory, compile the source the install the binaries.
Check for Webcam
Now check to see if you have any USB video devices (your webcam usually)
sudo lsusb -v
Scroll thru all the entries, one should be the webcam.
Use it
Next up we'll need some tools to use it,
sudo aptitude install ekiga cheese
Cheese is a simple webcam recorder, much like Apple's, allowing you to take a photo from your webcam and apply some neat effects to it real-time, the other is a more convential tool to use it.
Tested & Working on Ubuntu 8.04
