LOOM (Short Film)

Like short stories, short films are quick, easily consumable, bite-size experiences. But, lately, it seems as if the short films are going toe-to-toe with their longer cousins in terms of production quality and subject matter depth. LOOM is a brilliant example. As an animated short, this is a gut-wrenching yet life-affirming snippet of the world around us. Watch it below:

Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

Polynoid, the company that produced this has a few others they created before. Including their violently fascinating and creepy snail movie and the weirdly funny flap flap.

Movie Barcode

Movie Barcode is a fascinating look at movies. Basically each frame of the movie is shrunk down to a line, such that eventually the entire movie begins to look like a bar-code. What is fascinating is how some of the more visual movies still manage to retain and display their style.

Blade Runner, one of the more visually specific movies, is up first. The movie is about a dystopian future, and is shot under artificial lights, with a heavy blue-green cast. The dingy, cold, steel-like visual style comes right through in its bar-code.

Jaws is all about the terror under blue skies. Look at the alternating bands of the black of fear and the baby blue of a clear summer day. Notice also the scene at night towards the end of the movie.

Green and black - if ever there was a movie that epitomizes that palette, it is The Matrix. That white band a quarter of the way in is Neo's training.

Pan's Labrynth is a fantastic movie, symbolized by a deep rich color palette. Alternating between a blue reality of war and a golden-brown fantasy, the two colors represent different aspects of Ofelia's world. Captured beautifully in it's bar-code.

Dusty, dirty and hazy, Apocalypse Now, the quintessential war movie and cliche-dialog fest, is dominated by browns. This was surprising for me as I was expecting a bit more green. But going back to the trailers proved me wrong, there was always the promise of green beyond the frame, but never any in it. The blue band in the middle seems to be the night journey up the Nung river.

The trippiest for the end. 2001: A Space Odyssey. True to its nature, there is no limiting the palette of the movie, it wildly swings from one end of the spectrum to the other. Notice the black band at the end. If you have seen the movie, you know exactly what that represents.

Short and blended well

Blender is one of those tools you hardly ever hear about, and when you do, everything about it seems unreal. Blender is an open source, cross-platform tool for rendering 3D objects. In other words, you can use Blender to produce fully immersive three dimensional worlds. And render them either as stills (photographs) or movies.

From time to time, Blender Foundation releases short movies that showcase the capabilities of this powerful open source software. The latest in the series is called Sintel. The foundation had earlier released two other short movies called Elephant’s Dream and Big Buck Bunny. Sintel is embedded next, and the other two are embedded after the break.

Context Sandbox

This came to me when I saw some students carrying their CPUs to the presentation for a course. There is this course we have. Dealing with databases. And for that course the students have to do a project - a program. The platform could be anything, as long as it used databases for functioning - ASP, VB, VC++ whatever. And at the end of the term, the students taking that course have to make a presentation.

For the presentation, the students had to carry their CPUs to the professor. Why? Well basically, the architecture for the project required the students to connect to a remote database. And this was generally a painful process, considering that we are not doing Computer Science here, and most of the times, a final connection is establised through a lot of trial and error. By the time a connection is established and a connection string is finalized, a number of changes would have been done to the system that the student is working on, and the student would not be in a position to replicate the same on another machine.

Thus, this database project used to fail regularly, if the student just carried around the program as code, or as the executable (remember the DAOs and ADOs required were part of the OS) or in any other format. This almost forced the program to run only on the machine it has been written to run in. Thus we saw people carrying CPUs to and fro the prof's room for the presentation. The idea was that the all that needed to be added was power, and the program would run.

What do we have as part of a computer system. An application and data. Right? Wrong. There is also a context. The context is the executing environment of the application. Now in modern computing, this context is defined by the OS to an extent. And the context is realised by .dlls, APIs etc. The idea being that those entities not inherent to a particular application should be outsourced and be maintained by another party, or the OS. But look carefully, there are a lot of cases when third party tools are installed only for a particular program.

Lets look at some examples from the Windows world. Plugins into programs are one such set. Say Photoshop plugins, or Internet Explorer plugins, or Acrobat Reader plugins. For most of the scenarios, the application (Acrobat) and the data (.pdf file) alone would constitute the complete context. But for say some other scenarios, the plugin would also be a part of the context. Without it, having both the application and the data would be effectively useless.

Lets look at another example. Codecs. Say you have an AVI file. An AVI file normally can encode its video and audio streams in different formats and the application requires codecs to understand the two streams. Now what good is a great movie (data) on your machine (media player) without the Codec.

The above examples illustrate the need for an execution context in addition to the application and the data. Now lets look at what a context sandbox is.

A context sandbox is that minimum amount of information which will allow an action to be performed on a secondary machine, when the action is currently being performed as such on a primary machine.

There are some qualifications to be stated here:

1. It is assumed that the primary and secondary machines are fundamentally capable of performing the action. In other words no definable context sandbox can exist for your washine machine to play your favourite movie.
2. Information will be assumed to mean only that relating to software. Software will also be loosely defined as a sum of data and instructions. This means that information such as "Go get a life, buy another mp3 player" is not a context sandbox for a primary machine which is an mp3 player.
3. Quality of performance is not an issue we will be dealing with here. Fundamental capability does not promise quality of performance.
4. A machine is defined as the sum of all units that allow performance of a particular task. This includes hardware, software and any other environmental issues including power, temparature etc.
5. Performance "as such" implies without change to the machine. Of course the machine being as described above.

So that is the idea. We will look more into ramifications of it in future posts.

Watched Memento today. Really kewl movie. This is the second time. Nothing new was learnt, but spent some time on the nuances of the amount of overlap the screenplay writer allowed between the scenes. Really well thought out.

~!nrk

I am Jack's Laziness, and his excuses.

I like Fight Club, not for what it says, but for what it does not say.

Fight Club is like one of those strict teachers in school. They always mean good, but always end up being taken wrongly. That is Fight Club. I normally dont bother discussion films. One reason being that it is just not worth it. Most of the movies in our part of the world end up being exponents of faces, clothes, songs, dances and other acts.. never of thought. So is the case with a majority of the movies from other parts of the world. At the most they end up being cases of incredible CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). There are few movies that end up being those that change the way you think. That provide a new means of looking at life.

I could go off into a number of tangential directions here. I could talk about movies I like, for example. Or I could talk about the differences between movies in our part of the world and other parts of the world. Or mebbe I could talk about my new habit of quoting from movies and poems. Or i could talk about Fight Club.

But this is my BLOG, and I choose to talk about what films should be.

This is a problem I have with a lot of people. The way they assign abnormal properties to various items in daily life. There are units for entertainment, there are units for learning and there are more and more units. And we tend to make them water-tight. probably because we cannot handle different facets of the same unit. We cannot accept that something that is supposed to teach can be entertaining as well. And something that is meant for entertaining can teach. That is Jack's water-tight problem. And what people fear, more than cross-listing of functions is hidden functions. We just cannot accept anything that is subtle, or hidden. Especially when another meaning is apparent. Fight Club, is a sorry victim of the same. One friend told me, "it is telling you to discover your inner self. Destroy, attack and plunder and you will discover your inner self". I felt sad. I am Jack's shaking head.

What is especially sad is the fact that all through the guy just had a smile of his face. Incredible. I mean is this just going to be a big joke. Is that how we learn?

I'll come back to Fight Club in later blogs. But for now, birds are-a-chirping and the sun are-a-rising. And I think i need to go to sleep.

I am Jacks bbye,

~!nrk