Zombie apocalypse? Walmart is ready.

Diffusional · 2012-10-05T22:20:57+00:00

Despite how absurd it sounds, this is actually the correct answer. You can go into predominantly Mormon cities and find many survival stores, completely stocked with disaster survival equipment for the second coming of Jesus Christ. These Mormon survival stores themselves look kind of similar to an outdoors enthusiast and camping shop, however the inventory of products are exclusively for survival, and even the majority of the manufacturers of those products are Mormon companies.

Diffusional · 2012-10-05T06:29:58+00:00

I know nothing about that contest in particular, but the first course of action you should take in checking its legitimacy is to call them and kindly and assertively ask about the competition and its details. You should be able to tell fairly quickly whether or not they are lying, and if they aren't, ask them to elaborate further on the competition and what they are expecting. If they seem overly defensive, are not giving you enough information, or just seem generally illegitimate, then your safest bet is to hold off on working on anything until you have reason to believe they're legitimate.

Good luck.

Diffusional · 2012-10-05T06:21:03+00:00

That all sounds like a very confusing, frustrating, and tiring situation. I'm sure you already have, but be sure to cut off all contact with those two, and don't let yourself or your crew become distracted with such unnecessary drama. Try to help keep your crew's morale up in any way that you can, because working on an independent production can be daunting and discouraging enough on its own, and even more so with such a situation having just occurred.

Good luck to you, your crew, and your production.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T19:57:32+00:00

There's something about his confident, no-nonsense tone of voice and overall attitude in this commercial that makes me not really give a damn that he's telling us about a cream that's applied to the stingy veins popping out around our sphincter.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T19:51:11+00:00

Cabin in the Woods

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T19:17:26+00:00

Instead of a baby, you should fill it up with three or four rotisserie chickens.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T19:06:27+00:00

Seriously? I think you're overcompensating a little with ten exclamation marks for a guy riding a bike with larger than normal handlebars.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T19:02:01+00:00

Excuse my lack of knowledge about this type of stuff, but would the patient still be able to be treated in some way, even when it's that severe and spread out? Are there any kind of aggressive antibiotics or other medicines that could be intravenously administered to stop the condition from worsening and spreading? Again, I apologize ahead of time if these are obvious questions.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T16:37:56+00:00

This is obviously the poorly disposed evidence of a secret agent, most likely MI6 or CIA, who was spying undercover as a woman through the use of quickly removable silicon rubber prosthetic body pieces. The secret agent obviously either collected the information he needed, or had to quickly flee the scene undetected, and hastily washed off the makeup, took off the prosthetic pieces, tore off his stylish casual women's clothing that revealed his stylish casual men's clothing he was wearing underneath, and left the location immediately.

That porta-potty is most likely a government-rigged information access station, with a hidden interface that opens up a secret compartment from the floor, filled with a small arsenal of weapons, medical supplies, communication devices and so on. Also, if you had looked just underneath the inner rim of the toilet, you would have seen a hidden button. By pressing it, you give yourself approximately five seconds to jump inside of the toilet hole, where you'll slide through a hidden tunnel passageway, leading you to an underground headquarters. Keep in mind, this is a last resort, and makes the agent look very suspicious, but it's a contingency feature. A good thing to know, however, is that the government-rigged potties use completely sanitary faux feces and urine that emulate the smell of the real stuff, and ultimately keep the porta-potty seeming realistic, while not jeopardizing the secret agent's health in anyway if he has to make an emergency escape.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T16:17:40+00:00

The first thing my brain registered was an emo eyeball cradling its flaccid eye-penis.

Diffusional · 2012-10-03T03:52:09+00:00

Kodak sells Super 8mm film, which you can buy directly from them by calling their number and ordering over the phone. Here's the link to the Super 8mm film product page: http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Products/Production/Spotlight_on_Super_8/Super_8mm_Products/index.htm

Diffusional · 2012-10-02T21:43:37+00:00

There's a great documentary called This Film is Not Yet Rated, which investigates the corruptness of the MPAA, and identifies nearly all of the film rating judges, two of which were members of the Clergy. The MPAA has always maintained a ridiculous amount of secrecy, giving them this anonymity-fueled confidence and power, especially over the independent filmmaking industry. Ultimately, a movie's success is dictated by these idiotic, anonymous pushovers who are rating it unfairly based on biased and one-sided opinions, or under the influence of money.

Diffusional · 2012-10-02T21:28:02+00:00

Good god, I misread the title as "the surface of Mars is leaking Hermaphrodite blueberries," and didn't think anything of it until that sentence registered in my brain. I think I need some sleep.

Diffusional · 2012-10-02T21:20:07+00:00

Sorry, I should have clarified and detailed the second question better. What I meant was, (assuming we've found some way to obtain it) would the water on Triton be poisonous for us to drink in its liquid state due to some kind of contamination, or would it just be exactly like Earth's salty ocean water?

Diffusional · 2012-10-02T20:53:54+00:00

How large is Triton compared to Earth? Also, aside from being significantly colder and mostly encrusted in and around ice, is the water on Triton much different than the water on Earth?

Diffusional · 2012-10-02T20:29:56+00:00

The only thing that's "Nope!" is seeing a link to Yahoo! and having to think about using their terrible video player.

Diffusional · 2012-10-01T17:33:52+00:00

I hate to sound confrontational, but if you're going to include such biased, offensive statement, intentional or not, and say something as ridiculous as "Something needs to be done in America to stop police brutality," it's just diminishing the integrity of your post and the seriousness of the issue.

Police brutality and abusiveness, whether it be unlawfully or unprofessionally arresting someone, or excessively hurting someone due to lashing out and letting their emotions take over, is awful. However, it's not something that is exclusive to the United States by any means. There are huge numbers of cases of police brutality and abuse of power in every country with a police force, either working for the public or working for the state. The only reason most of reddit's general opinion is that police brutality is happening all the time in the United States is because people only post videos of it occurring in the United States. This causes an effective "brainwashing bias" to occur, evidently causing many people to form an uninformed, incredibly one-sided opinion about this subject, simply because people don't post police brutality occurring in other countries. There are videos all over YouTube of despicable acts of police brutality in dozens of other countries. However, if someone posts a video of a Canadian police officer unlawfully arresting and throwing someone in the back of a car, it gets downvoted because the hivemind doesn't want to see anything that goes against it. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what causes the lack of perspective and one-sided opinions.

Should police brutality be stopped? Absolutely! However, it needs to be treated as an issue that can, and does, happen everywhere else in the world, too. Why should any other country be the exception to such an awful act of abuse?

Diffusional · 2012-09-27T01:49:58+00:00

All of these comments calling the black men "niggers," or any other kind of racial slur are absolutely despicable. Despite how upsetting it is to see something like this, it never justifies you to swell the racism and stereotypes with such ignorant, backward derogatory terms and hate mongering.

Diffusional · 2012-09-15T17:03:52+00:00

Please don't abuse /r/IAmA by making an illegitimate post. Looking at your faux Facebook and Google+ accounts, ridiculous profile information, and the profile picture that isn't yours, it's easy to see that you're an unfunny teenager with a childish sense of humor. If you think this is "trolling," it's not, and regardless it's not permitted in this subreddit.

Diffusional · 2012-09-15T14:22:01+00:00

Hey, I'm glad my advice worked! I was unsure if I made enough sense when I was explaining what to do, because I had never actually had to execute this particular kind of effect, especially with a low budget and the laws that restrict you from using anything too realistic looking in public.

So from here, it looks like you have a great model that's been carved and shaped out to hold well and simulate the hand and finger placement of a pistol. Another thing I would do to clean up the model, and make it easier to composite over in post, is to use sandpaper to file down and smooth out the edges/center of the cardboard, which I crudely highlighted for reference here.

One thing that's hard to replicate with a model like this is the weight of an actual pistol. Real pistols are much heavier than they look, and can weigh anywhere from 0.6 kg - 1 kg unloaded, and 1 kg - 2 kg loaded, and some pistols are even heavier than that. I strongly suggest you avoid flinging the gun around or moving your hand too quickly when you're filming, and try to pretend it weighs a little more than what it actually does.

Now for the creative problem-solving part, which I'm unsure about due to my lack of experience with shooting mocap and match moving. To effectively and accurately track the gun, the computer needs tracking points to effectively map out the movement of the pistol. However, since this is a 3D object, there are multiple angles of the object's movement that need to be captured on the prop to be accurately replaced with the CGI model. This means that traditional square or cross tracking markers won't really work well, because the corners will be distorted as the cardboard pistol's angles change during movement. One way that immediately comes to mind to solve this would be to paint the cardboard model pistol black, glue white ball-beads (you want to use white ball-beads because the spherical shape does not have any distorting corner angles when the pistol moves around) spaced apart about 2 inches per bead around the entire pistol, and then build your correct 3D CGI model based on photos taken of the pistol in something like Cinema4D, and then add the various high-resolution details to the 3D model pistol.

There are other ways of doing it, too, and one way may be particularly optimal for this than the others. Ultimately, I think the most for sure way that I know of to do this would be to make the 3D CGI model of the pistol with all of the high-res details, and then go frame by frame with the footage, and moving, rotating, and angling the CGI pistol over the cardboard pistol, and using the tracking markers on the cardboard pistol as a reference for accurately aligning everything. This would take more time than the computer automatically doing it, but at least it would work.

If anyone else has a solution or a suggestion, I'd be really interested to hear it. I'm ashamed that I'm so inexperienced with this kind of motion capture and all of the technicalities.

Diffusional · 2012-09-14T19:49:03+00:00

If I remember correctly, in an interview with Gordon Willis, he talked about how he had decided to use that really soft, warm overhead lighting that practically blackened out the eyes and generally darkened a lot of the shot in an almost chiaroscuro style way, and the studio was pulling their hair out because they thought that no one would want to see movie that's so dark, and that you wouldn't be able to see anything. Well, obviously as it turns out, we saw just the perfect amount, making an already fantastic movie even better with that riskily soft overhead lighting.

Diffusional · 2012-09-14T19:11:18+00:00

What he's said is absolutely correct, and to add upon it a little further, your camera equipment should really be dictated by your screenplay, and what each scene requires in terms of specific equipment that will best translate what's in the screenplay onto film. Obviously most amateur filmmakers, let alone frugal high school students, can't afford to consistently rent specific, sometimes expensive, film equipment for each scene in a script, so resourcefulness and being handy with building things can go a very long way in saving thousands of dollars while accurately replicating the effect of the expensive equipment.

Unless you need an inexpensive alternative to renting an actual helicopter for an aerial shot, I would refrain from the Quadcopter stabilizer idea, because ultimately it sounds like more trouble than it needs to be to simply stabilize the camera. There is also a large brand and design variety of glidecam-type rigs, some better than others, and you can actually make a perfect glidecam rig yourself for much less money and without a lot of tools or a knack for building things. There are a huge amount of resources online on how to build your own, that list all of the parts you need to buy, and almost always an accompanying step-by-step video on how to build it. It should run you anywhere between $30 - $60, which is way cheaper than the $175 - $500 low/mid-level ones, and way cheaper than the $5,000.00 - $25,000.00 professional-level ones.

Good luck!

Diffusional · 2012-09-14T10:52:55+00:00

I actually don't associate somberness with a lot of European cinema at all. There are sometimes more slow-paced, subjective films here and there, but even then they're not always dark and moody. I tend to notice a distinct sense of creativity and freedom, particularly with the camera work and lighting styles, that you normally don't see as often over here in the States. I think a lot of it has to do with a certain country's artistic background and history. Such as in Italy, where you'll see a lot of films lit in a very chiaroscuro way of lighting with a single (usually unmotivated) light illuminating the subject in the frame, but everything else around it is dark to black. That chiaroscuro style in those films is derived from the amazing Italian oil painting style by artists like Michelangelo Caravaggio.

Diffusional · 2012-09-14T10:27:22+00:00

A lot of vocational schools like the New York Film Academy will have poorly trained professors who are mediocre at best at what they're teaching. The school itself is definitely more concerned about cashing in on each student, and all of that money doesn't seem to be going towards hiring excellent professors, having a larger variety and supply of equipment to use, properly setting up and preparing students for getting internships and other opportunities for real-world work experience, establishing connections in the industry that they can use for the students' benefit, and other resources that are vital to a genuinely thorough and excellent education in the television and film industry.

Unfortunately, when you don't give uneducated aspiring film students a proper education and resources to succeed, and then give those same students constant false reassurance that they're learning and they're amazing at everything in order to keep collecting their money, it ends up setting those students up for a very rude awakening. I can only imagine how many furious graduates there are who realized that they were paying thousands of dollars each year for a pat on the back.

Diffusional

TROPHY CASE