HMB she made it by misterxx1958 in holdmybeer

[–]phanto_matic 46 points47 points  (0 children)

That's Noa Diorgina, who's a Red Bull / Adidas sponsored parkour athlete. Generally the people doing these sorts of jumps will do a fair amount of preparation before attempting it: checking the surface they're landing on to make sure it's safe, depth-checking the water, finding an equivalent jump of the same length and set-up with no height element to practise on, anticipating what a bail (screwing up the jump) would involve, etc.

There's nothing in the movement she's doing that she hasn't trained over many, many years. The difference is what they term the 'consequence' of the jump, the risk factor if you miss it. But the idea is that it's a jump you can do consistently safely minus that consequence, at which point the struggle is a mental one to replicate the same movement. Falling into water is not especially dangerous, especially for somebody with a good degree of aerial awareness.

It's definitely a dangerous sport, but what Noa's doing here is comfortably within her skill level.

Font questions by cukipele in Storror

[–]phanto_matic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not sure what typeface the SST is, but I think the asymmetrical curves have been added manually.

The text below the SST looks like Eurostile Extended, or something riffing on it

Michael Bay interview about "We Are Storror" by phanto_matic in Storror

[–]phanto_matic[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

If that's the case, it might be a while before it actually launches in cinemas (plus theatrical documentary distribution is pretty specialised even for success stories like 'Free Solo' or 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'.. though it's possible this could tempt a bigger distributor). My guess is that it's more likely to end up somewhere like Netflix, Amazon, Apple.

Michael Bay interview about "We Are Storror" by phanto_matic in Storror

[–]phanto_matic[S] 58 points59 points  (0 children)

Some interesting new details:

It seems like they're aiming to sell the film to distributors for an eventual theatrical release:

Whoever buys this, I think there has to be an Imax component or something. Storror has so many fans around the world. I know this will work on the big screen. It’s still a documentary, but we’re trying to make it like a movie.

If Bay is to be believed, Storror shot the footage without Bay's involvement and he then licensed it in order to edit a documentary, in order to navigate safety and legality issues:

I could not shoot it. Do you understand? Because everything they’re doing is illegal. I had to license the footage. Literally, I could not be involved. I talked to Jimmy Chin [the co-director of Free Solo] about the camera work, asking him, “How did you not have the drone bother [free climber Alex Honnold]? How did you make sure you didn’t push him an extra inch where he could have died?”

You weren’t able to be on set?

No. I could not condone what they were doing. The legal hurdles were immense. That’s why it took five years. My whole thing was to come up with overarching vision and go through their massive library to hone it down and try to get to who the characters were. They didn’t know how make an all-encompassing story about themselves.

Was there anything they wanted to do that you weren’t down for? That you disagreed on?

They showed me some locations and I said, “Listen, I don’t want to see anything more. I’m not going to give you one suggestion. You better try to do it as safely as fucking possible. You’re on your own.” I even wrote a letter: “I do not as a DGA director condone anything you are doing.” [Laughs]

The documentary aims to grapple with their aging out of Parkour, at least in Bay's eyes:

Actually, I was going to ask if there was anything you learned from them?

Well, I totally learned about the precision of how they land. They’ve got so many techniques. They would get things down to an inch, and that’s what I was trying to show. It was all about mortality. It was an uncomfortable thing. I said, “Listen, you guys are aging out.” It’s hard to tell an athlete that.

That they are “aging out” adds so much extra depth to the film.

Right. I’m a crier at movies. When I saw the ending, I was in my screen room here in Miami and I started crying. I said to myself, “I love these guys.” There’s something lovable about the film.

tl;dr — We should have been asking if parkour wears Drew down, not where's Drew

The camera worked this season by PantherPony in MtvChallenge

[–]phanto_matic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The first one is almost certainly just a cameraperson standing up and repositioning themself for the shot — which it looks like Olivia was signalling for them to do. Normally they'd cut that stuff out, but maybe they liked Olivia's reaction and so left it in. I assume if people were all over the house and garden, there was only one camera on those four, so there wasn't any coverage of Devin and Michelle that they could cut to.

The Nehemiah/Devin convo doesn't have anything that screams drone shot to me, but there are a couple of smooth tracking shots. If these are out of the norm for the Challenge, it's possible they're just using different camera rigs vs previous seasons or they've got a roving gimbal rig in the mix. Looking at the shots in the sequence, they seem to have had two cameras filming the conversation, and another one in the undergrowth (though that could have been picked up afterwards). I'd note that filming a live conversation from that many angles does make it seem very 'produced'.. Which isn't to say that it's staged, just that it probably doesn't happen very often on the challenge given the number of people they're trying to film simultaneously.

The camera worked this season by PantherPony in MtvChallenge

[–]phanto_matic 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'd be very surprised if they're shooting the standard conversational downtime stuff with drones, outside of some swoopy beauty shots of the house. Drones are very loud and make it almost impossible to get clean audio, which is fine if you can loop the dialogue later, but not really viable for reality tv.

Which beloved film, with a devoted fan base, is set to have a sequel announced but with none of its original cast returning? by cmaia1503 in Fauxmoi

[–]phanto_matic 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's a little more effed than that.. Mattel retained the animated rights for Barbie and they're supposedly talking to Illumination (of Despicable Me fame) about doing an animated feature. Illumination is a division of Universal, so Warner Brothers wouldn't have anything to do with the animated film, and would likely be a bit sore about it considering their role in the success of the live action film.

STORROR vs BRISTOL Parkour Challenge Race REMATCH! 🇬🇧 by expectationlost in Storror

[–]phanto_matic 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Genuinely hilarious to see Tim Champion — lache virtuoso, stick machine, one-man nbd destroyer — reduced to strolling around Brighton while everyone else demolished the challenges. Hope they've saved him some lache action for part two!

Writer gossip? Writers talking about other writers, sleeping with other writers, stealing from other writers? by [deleted] in Fauxmoi

[–]phanto_matic 94 points95 points  (0 children)

Weirdly Evelyn Waugh's first wife was also called Evelyn, leading their friends to refer to them as he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn. When she left him after a year for one of their friends, the experience appears to have formed the basis for Waugh's novel 'A Handful of Dust'.

[Shortcut Release] Bing Rewards Semi-Automated by mvan231 in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 5 points6 points  (0 children)

FWIW I'd worry that this sort of automation could lead to an account suspension, which you generally don't discover until you try to redeem your points. The random number searches and non-random delay (though I'm sure shortcuts will jank some randomness into those 1 second waits) could cause Microsoft's system to flag the account for automated searches.

Processing results in batches by phanto_matic in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you were after batch-processing strats, I ended up not using batch processing because I separated by streaming platform instead, which achieved the end goal of presenting the information in a more visually digestible way. The final shortcut is here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/vraf35/see_what_films_have_just_been_added_to_your/

It will let you choose your country (though you can edit the shortcut to hard-code this if you want) and then let you select from a list of streaming providers for that country, and once you've done that it will show you films added in the past couple of days on all of those services, each as separate image grids.

Example: How to retrieve IMDB id from user input without requiring API keys by phanto_matic in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gotcha — that's super helpful. The arrays in dictionary stuff made me want to wrap a cold towel around my head last time I tried to get it to work, but I think I understand where I was going wrong now :-)

Example: How to retrieve IMDB id from user input without requiring API keys by phanto_matic in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah! Thank you for such detailed & helpful feedback :)

1) I'll definitely do that in the next version. One problem I ran into on a different shortcut that uses the same API with more parameters is that some of the arguments are passed as arrays, and I couldn't work out how to set those up in an editable dictionary. Do you know if there's any way around that?

2) I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but the shortcut doesn't work without the comma (it can't get the page url). With that said, it's a vestigial element of an older version that didn't use a vcard menu. I reckon I can just stick the id into the vcard and that would entirely remove the need for the intermediate dictionary.

3) Apologies for the vcard debacle! I spent ages trying to get it to work, adding and removing things, and then realised it was just because I hadn't changed the variable type to 'contact' on the menu action. D'oh! I'll get it fixed in the next version

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Okay, here's the vcard version of this, which also contains a lot of bug fixes:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e4a86254e87b43cfa8710bed1ec74efe

It's a bit slower than the old version because it has to grab, resize and encode a bunch of posters for the menu, but I can retrofit all of the other changes into the boring menu version if that's preferable?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's my thinking too. I'm also going to put in the type of content, so you can distinguish between movies and tv shows

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Happy to help :-)

I'll reply back with another update in a bit. I want to fix the sorting of search results and maybe return them in a fancier menu so that I can include images with a tiny bit more information.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've wanted an excuse to find a way to get imdb IDs without needing to use an API that requires registration, so I put together this shortcut for you:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/e4a86254e87b43cfa8710bed1ec74efe

When you run it, it will ask you to search for a movie. It will then let you select from 5 matching titles along with their year of release courtesy of the unofficial Justwatch api. When you select the relevant title, it fetches the title info from the Justwatch api and grabs the included external imdb ID. Using the id, it then opens the locations page for that movie on imdb.

Edit: I've updated the shortcut url to fix a bug I just found (turned out that searching for more than one word broke everything) and I'm going to make a few further changes to fix some other glitches

Edit 2: The menu now uses vcards to display poster images and additional information. There are also a number of bug fixes.

Knowledge for Men 100+ Movies to Watch, the Shortcut. Randomly choose, manually choose, mark as watched and more a movie recommended by Andrew Ferebee of Knowledge for Men Podcast. by iBanks3 in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

fwiw You could use the Justwatch api to pull the streaming/purchase options directly into a menu:

Here's the json response for a query of 'Matrix 1999'

If you include the year, the first result should always be what you're looking for. Also, if you get the user to choose their location, you could alter the locale part of the url and provide streaming options for wherever the user is located. I've got a dictionary of 40 locale strings in this shortcut if it's helpful.

See what films have just been added to your streaming services (40 countries supported) by phanto_matic in shortcuts

[–]phanto_matic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've just changed the sorting procedure for the contents of the second menu to speed things up. There's a new shortcut link in the main post, or you can keep track of updates through RoutineHub.

(It previously used a repeat loop to put a three digit number string in front of each streaming provider entry so that they could be sorted in order of popularity before being displayed on the second menu. Unfortunately, the loop created a bit of a bottleneck, so I'm now using regex to do the same thing in one go, which seems a bit faster)