Intervaluino Test Video

Saturday, June 21st, 2008 | art, electronics, make, movies & tv, photography | 4 Comments

This video shows 4 hours of clouds at dusk, compressed to 45 seconds; it was taken with the Intervaluino on my Canon EOS 400D (manual focus, manual exposure/f-stop settings):

I’m quite happy with the result; there are some slight light-dark flickers which I don’t like, but those are probably caused by glare from the sun shining onto the side of the lens. By now I’m convinced that a prerequisite to getting good results using an SLR is to turn off autofocus and set your exposure values and f-stops manually – you can’t trust your camera to keep the values smooth.

You can find info about stitching jpgs into a movie on Metafilter.

Tags: arduino, electronics, intervaluino, movie, movies & tv, time lapse, timelapse

Expendable

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 | humor, movies & tv | 1 Comment

If you like the tackiness of James Bond clichés as much as I do, don’t miss Expendable - a really funny short film by David “Wondermark” Maki about the ordinary lives of henchmen.

[Link - YouTube video, 18min]

Levels of Fear, or: Why You Don’t Need an FPS Engine to Scare People

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 | games, movies & tv | 2 Comments

I’m not scared easily. Blame it on me too many horror flicks as a teenager, but I find most “scary” movies rather funny than scary. That’s because most of those movies rely on overly obvious techniques – call it horror kitsch. If you look closely, you will find that horror is a layered process. There are, as Stephen King summarized it, three levels of how people can be scared:

1. Revulsion: Show explicitely disgusting or visually disturbing elements (gore, slime, torture)
2. Shock: Show the unexpected, startle the audience (a sudden noise, a surprise around the corner)
3. Fear: Slowly build up an undercurrent of angst and fright (music, odd and alienating behavior)

The most shallow level, revulsion, is the easiest to achieve (although movie directors go a long way to push the envelope here – just watch Hostel if your stomach is strong enough). However, it is also the narrative approach that requires the most sophisticated technical means (special effects).

Fear on the other hand, is much harder to create: The narrator needs imagination, time, and a solid understanding of the audience’s state of mind. But to build up fear you don’t need a big budget – because technical effects do not matter, you can create it with any narrative medium. Even with simple 2-D computer games.

The Chzo Mythos

Enter The Chzo Mythos, a series of amateur point-and-click adventure games that I’ve finished yesterday. If you’ve grown up with C-64 and early PC computer games as I have, you will remember the glory days of Sierra On-Line and LucasArts adventures, long before the days of Half-Life, World of Warcraft and Halo. The Chzo Mythos, although created after 2003, are technically very similar to early adventure games such as Space Quest or Maniac Mansion, featuring simple 2-D graphics and a point-and-click interface, allowing to use and combine objects you find in the game.

The Mythos consists of four games called 5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice, which tell a rich story of murder, despair and sacrifice. The story starts with a cat burglar trapped in a haunted mansion, but ultimately develops into a Lovecraftian, time-bending story arc spanning several centuries. Kind of like The Fountain, only featuring a machete-wielding guy in a welding mask.

It is an amazing game series, well-written, funny, and entertaining. And really scary.

You can download all four games for free. A donation will give you special editions (and is just nice). Important: Be sure to start with the first one (Five Days A Stranger), or you will miss out on the story.

Humor over the Decades

Thursday, November 15th, 2007 | blogs, culture, humor, movies & tv, pop culture | No Comments

I normally would have tagged the following as an “Interesting Reads” headline, but one of Scott Adam’s latest posts on the Dilbert Blog is too good for a sideline. In “Humor as a Seasoning“, he describes accurately how, over the decades, humor has changed from clever and nonsensical to being an ingredient for other content – a seasoning. Great (and surprisingly serious) post that speaks from my heart.

[Link: Humor as a Seasoning]

Salad Fingers goes into round 8

Sunday, October 21st, 2007 | movies & tv, web | 2 Comments

If you like the movies of David Lynch or David Cronenberg, you should know Salad Fingers, a Flash animation series by David Firth (NSFW). For all those initiated out there, check out Salad Fingers, part 8 (NSFW). For all the others, check out my Salad Fingers post from two years ago.

[Link: Salad Fingers 8: Cupboard (NSFW)]

[Link: The Honeyjar: "The Dark Side of Flash"]

Review: Air Guitar Nation

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 | art, movies & tv, pop culture | No Comments

I really enjoy that the number of documentaries receiving mainstream attention is on the rise; and not only movies about high-profile topics such as global warming or the US healthcare system get noticed: There are a lot more documentaries about important yet less dramatic topics around as well. This Film Is Not Yet Rated takes on the US movie rating system, F*CK explores the origin and cultural significance of a popular expletive, The Bridge takes a close look at suicides on the Golden Gate brigde, and Never Been Thawed tells the interested viewer everything about enthusiastic frozen entré collectors.

But none of these documentaries can keep up with Air Guitar Nation – a close look at the secret world of underground air guitar contests. Air guitar, for the uninitiated readers, is the art of pretending to play the guitar without the actual instrument, usually to the sound of rock or metal. Part dance, part pantomime performance, air guitar serves as a artistic form of expression for people who know how to rock, but not how to play an instrument

Air guitar has a long tradition in Scandinvia, which has led to the creation of the world air guitar championships taking place in Oulu, Finland. Hundreds of air guitar enthusiast come together every year to celebrate  Air Guitar Nation follows two American contestants – C-Diddy and Björn Türoque – to prepare for and participate in this global challenge.

Spiced up with a lot of hilarious while stunning on-stage recordings, Air Guitar Nation is a thoroughly entertaining documentary about a very new art form whose proponents don’t take themselves seriously at all, and just for this reason has good chances to become an accepted form of pop-artistic expression. Apart from that, the movie has tremendous entertainment value, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Mystery TV

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 | movies & tv | No Comments

Serial dramas are the official name for TV shows that rely on continuity and require the audience to watch every episode (24, Six Feet Under or Prison Break are good examples); among the ever rising tide of TV rubbish, serial dramas stand as shining lighthouses of quality.

Now, mystery serial dramas are a special subset of those dramas, which stories revolving some mystery – often supernatural or metaphysical in nature – to be solved. Lost is a perfect example, the question being: “What’s the deal with this island?” – an interesting one, but one we will not touch upon in this post. One very positive side effect of Lost’s success is that it triggered the production of new mystery serial dramas. Such as Daybreak and The Lost Room.

Day Break is a serial crime/conspiracy mystery drama, which starts rather conventional. Detective Brett Hopper has been framed for murder: According to witnesses, he has killed District Attourney Garza. He gets arrested, interrogated, put in prison, and ends up drugged in a quarry with some evil thugs strongly trying to convince him of playing the fall guy. So far, so good.
However, the next day Hopper wakes up, and it’s the same day again: He hasn’t been arrested yet, his girlfriend is still alive, and the world has reset to its former state – with only him knowing what will happen during the day. And he has 24 hours before it will reset again.

Day Break is a fast-paced and highly entertaining crossover between 24 and Groundhog Day. The mysterious setup of the ever repeating day provides an unique method of storytelling with its very own kind of situational humour. Unfortunately cancelled after one season, it is a great series for conspiracy buffs with a flair for metaphysical questions.

The Lost Room is a three-part mini-series screaming to be made into a regular serial drama. It tells the story of Detective Joe Miller, who in the course of an investigation receives a key to a hotel room. He soon finds out that if this key is used on any door, it will open a gate to a mysterious hotel room, which was ripped out of existence during a freak accident during the 1960s. All that is left of the room are around 100 Objects (note the capitalization), which come from the hotel room – each with its unique powers. Powerful groups and secret societies collect these Objects for their own dubious reasons, and Miller is quickly pulled into a vortex of electrifying ballpoint pens, time-stopping combs and bus tickets that ban people to hell.

Apart from being well told and extremely entertaining, The Lost Room has all the ingredients for a great serial dram: A well-developed cast (among them Peter Krause, the lead from Six Feet Under), an unique premise (what happened in that room?), and a continuous stream of plot ideas (one Object per episode). I highly recommend the mini-series – and who knows? The SciFi Channel might make a great show out of it.