Movies are visual narratives that tell the story of a character's journey through scenes, which are further broken down into shots that, when edited together, take the viewer along for the ride.
Every journey must begin and end, and the narrative structure of a film makes the beginning and end of the journey extremely important, which thereby makes the opening and closing two of the most important shots in the entire film.
This comparative video by Jacob T. Swinney shows the opening and closing shots from 125 different films, showcasing how important these shots are to setting the tone of each film.
Sara Goetter participated in 24 Hour Comics Day and produced a story about two geeky girls who find each other in 7th grade. They are both going through the agony of puberty: Joanna is short, a bit overweight, and has a volatile temper, while Penny has acne and a unibrow and suffers from crippling shyness. They become friends over their shared love of anime. The 18-page story will remind you of the horribly awkward process of growing up, when making friends was difficult but having friends was crucial.
Goetter says these characters will return in a new strip she’s developing. I’ll look forward to seeing more of them. -via Metafilter
If you're gonna make hyper realistic wax sculptures of people you might as well use some of the most recognizable and beloved people, with those famous faces we love, as your inspiration.
Master sculptor Trevor Grove has a knack for capturing both the look and personality of each person he sculpts, and he obviously has really good taste because he chose both Tom Waits and Eddie Munster as his subjects!
He's also really good at sculpting amazing likenesses in small 1/6 scale, like this head for the Bill Murray- Actor action figure the world of geeky toys needs NAO!
The making of the movie The Martian seems almost like a fairy tale, or more specifically, a Horatio Alger-type success story. Computer programmer Andy Weir wrote a story about Mars in blog posts over three years, which then became a book, which was picked up by Hollywood and made into a critically-acclaimed movie directed by Ridley Scott with help from NASA. James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division, was tremendously excited when Scott wanted to speak to him about NASA’s help for the movie The Martian. The conversation led to a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and then more.
Beyond tours, NASA gave the filmmakers hundreds of photos—of Mars, of what's on a screen when scientists are commanding a satellite orbiting the planet, and of the layout of the control center. Green weighed in on what the Hermes—the spacecraft used by the Ares III crew in the film to travel between Mars and Earth—would look like. (The filmmakers went through two versions before settling on a third, which uses ion engines to get to our red neighbor.) He also read the script, jotting down notes and comments that he went over with Max when he came to NASA. Most of Green's comments “were really all about how to make the movie use some of the latest information about Mars,” he says. In most cases, though, the filmmakers decided to stick with what was in the book, which was fine with Green: “It’s cleaner. It’s easier. It is something they can fall back on,” he says.
Dr. Green spoke with mental_floss about the ways NASA helped to tweak the screenplay to make The Martian as realistic as cinematically possible. The article about the collaboration contains no spoilers, as far as I can tell.
Animators have always used photo reference and models to help them create character designs and make the character's motion look as realistic and fluid as possible, but Disney took it to a whole other level.
Their character performances are top notch, their human character designs are so believable we feel like we know them in real life, all thanks to their crafty methods of using live-action reference.
Disney animators used Kathryn Beaumont as their Alice in every way, since she also voiced the character and obviously provided inspiration for many of Alice's facial expressions as well.
The clip above shows how they turned a small acted out segment into an iconic scene from Alice In Wonderland, and below we see how Alice's character design was created by drawing over photographic reference of Kathryn, to keep proportions correct and make her more believable.
It may look like cheating, but when there are tens of thousands of frames of character animation to be drawn, inked, painted and filmed for the movie animators need all the help they can get!
The voyages of the Starship Enterprise are logged via stardates, and these seemingly insignificant set of numbers are meant to mark the episode's place in the series' timeline.
They sound like serious business, but how much thought and effort is put into continuity in the Star Trek series' in terms of stardates?
Well, as Chris Higgins of mental_floss discovered, the stardate system used in the original Star Trek series was "totally bogus" by design. Here's a snippet from the series bible:
Pick any combination of four numbers plus a percentage point [ed. note: tenths digit], use it as your story's stardate. For example, 1313.5 is twelve o'clock noon of one day and 1314.5 would be noon of the next day. Each percentage point is roughly equivalent to one-tenth of one day. The progression of stardates in your script should remain constant but don't worry about whether or not there is a progression from other scripts. Stardates are a mathematical formula which varies depending on location in the galaxy, velocity of travel, and other factors, can vary widely from episode to episode.
However, the writers and directors of Star Trek: The Next Generation were given an updated system that actually worked, and with the updated system we discover that one season of the show amounts to 1,000 days:
A stardate is a five-digit number followed by a decimal point and one more digit. Example: "41254.7." The first two digits of the stardate are always "41." The 4 stands for 24th century, the 1 indicates first season. The additional three leading digits will progress unevenly during the course of the season from 000 to 999. The digit following the decimal point is generally regarded as a day counter.
Of course they still goofed here and there, but that's a way better system than "pick four random numbers and a percentage point".
When the super saiyan slugfest known as Dragon Ball Z hit the airwaves some people found the fighting too over the top and the lack of character development disturbing.
But as the show got going and proved it was about more than people beating each other up anime fans of all kinds started going along for the ride.
With an epic 291 episodes and dozens of characters getting in to DBZ can be quite a chore, and even those who've seen every episode have probably noticed some inconsistencies and errors.
Things like fluctuations in animation quality, sudden character hair and wardrobe changes, and a character's disappearance from the series made viewers feel like their eyes were playing tricks on them.
But these are just part of Dragon Ball Z's charm, and if the creator and writer of the manga Akira Toriyama couldn't keep track of all the facts during it's creation we never stood a chance!
Frank Herbert's Dune is one of the most iconic science fiction series of all time, and yet for some reason the series has never received the animated series adaptation it deserves.
So far the book series has received a movie adaptation directed by David Lynch that came out in 1984, followed by two different miniseries covering the first three books that aired on the Sci-Fi channel in 2000 and 2003. But where's the cartoon?
Now, thanks to concept artist Matt Rhodes, we have an idea of what the character designs would look like for an animated Dune series, stylistically influenced by the films of Tarsem Singh.
Yes, this is Superman dancing with a woman dressed as Spider-Man in a Bollywood production number. It’s another of the many unauthorized copies of blockbuster movies that were made in countries around the world in order to cash in on a popular franchise. Without the royalties, of course.
This list from Screen Rant includes the famous Japanese Spider-Man TV series and the Turkish Star Trek movie. Most of these are based on comic book superheroes, but not all of them. Some are even supposed to be comedies, and the others… well, they are worth a laugh, too. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Ever wonder why normal people are intimidated by the thought of learning to code? Or for that matter, intimidated at the very thought of talking to geeks who make a living coding software? This is why. In middle school, my kids already figured it was too late to learn. This is the latest from CommitStrip. The top comment:
Ya, well, let's see how good your code is during the zombie apocalypse
The 2016 presidential election is already reaching levels of ridiculousness none of us saw coming...on second thought, some of us expected it to become a circus when Trump threw his hat into the ring, but that's just common sense.
Now that things are in full swing, and the candidates have let the world know what they think and intend to do about the problems we currently face in the U.S. we can now focus on each candidate's flaws.
But let's not analyze those flaws in that boring old “tear the candidate down so another will win” kinda way, let's actually play out their flaws via video game and see if we still like our candidate.
Cracked's Erik Germ created four simple Flash games that perfectly portray their boring flaws- Hillary's Shoot 'em Up, Donald Trump's Road To The White House, Bernie Sanders in Bernie: The Game and last but most fun to play Jeb Bush in Choose Your Own Jeb-Venture.
In most Star Trek scenes in which two or more ships meet, they'll face each other on the same plane, as though they were traveling in two dimensions, not three. This is physically unrealistic, but it's the only way to avoid the impression that a lot of ship captains are smashed drunk.
Lately, I've been re-watching Enterprise, the last Star Trek television program. The writers corrected many of inconsistencies from the previous shows. You can occasionally see ships meeting each other in non-parallel fashion.
When you're binge watching your favorite TV shows it's easy to see connections between them in terms of plot points, characterization, and gags, especially if the shows you're watching are all from the same genre.
But different shows by different creators rarely cross over for real, mainly due to licensing and network restrictions, so these theories about shows sharing a common universe are impossible to prove...or are they?
Creator of The Wire David Simon came up with a shared universe theory involving his character Detective John Munch from Homicide: Life On The Streets and Law & Order: SVU, and then he proceeded to blow our minds by putting Munch in shows like The X-Files, 30 Rock and even St. Elsewhere.
And that's where the Munchverse intersects with the Tommy Westphall Multiverse, which says that all kinds of shows are actually just playing out in the mind of young autistic boy Tommy Westphall, a character from St. Elsewhere. So does that mean Munch is actually God? Wait, I'm lost...
A bride chooses, a slave obeys and this bride and groom couldn't have chose a more awesome wedding theme than Bioshock. Sure, it might be a little creepy to see a Big Daddy walking down the aisle and I'm sure their grandparents had some complaints about "kids these days," but this couple's wedding is something they will remember forever -along with their guests.
Fans of the game will certainly recognize a lot of the stylistic choices and referrences in the Flickr set showing the entire wedding and there certainly are a whole lot of them!
Movie genres don't come much more iconic than the classic Western, where gunslingers and cowboys battle bad guys in black hats on behalf of the less heroic people trying to make a home for themselves in the Old West.
Fans know the theme songs, the look that means a shootout is about to go down, and the weather worn face of a Western hero trying to mind their own business in a world full of bandits and scavengers.
Smash TV put together an action packed, mega sized supercut called "Gunslinger",which is an hour long and made from over 50 classic Westerns so it's guaranteed to blow you away!
