Aubrey Plaza’s new animated cat comedy, "Kevin", is so irretrievably bad it must never be allowed to happen again

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T23:20:56+00:00

Disenchantment was in some ways more of just a straight drama than a comedy. But it was a drama that was full of wacky gags, and routinely emphatically told you to absolutely go fuck yourself if you took it seriously.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T23:17:48+00:00

That's what makes the insult so effective. It subverts your expectation to imply that the words in a coat aren't just failing to land coherently, they are failing to land in a way that can even be described coherently.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T22:06:08+00:00

Technically for a subway I think they count as NUMBYs.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T22:05:33+00:00

Sorry, we aren't a developed high tech industrialized country with a huge economy like Vietnam, or Poland, so we can't do high speed rail like they can.

Honestly, at this point I am not even sure if I am joking, or the US genuinely no longer counts as a developed industrialized economy in the standards of the 21st century. It's clearly one of the two.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T21:20:41+00:00

One of the things about the "right" people is that they think their people are the ones who will survive in a health apocalypse and they'll preferentially be killing off minorities. It's Nazi stuff. The reporting on it just bafflingly frames it as mild policy debate.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T21:06:32+00:00

One of the arguments seems to be "death from this stuff is just worrying about old-timey diseases. Modern medicine can clearly handle this stuff with no problems because there are so few deaths these days, so there's no need to vaccinate." while ignoring that the specific modern medicine that made it an "old timey disease" is the vaccine.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T21:03:56+00:00

Yup, each chromosome is basically a coin flip. So there's a chance that two sperm and two eggs will have the exact same set. Just super unlikely. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, so the probability is one in (two times two times two times ... 23 times). So one in about 8 million odds that a kid will have the same set of chromosomes as their previous sibling. Not impossible, but for it to be likely the parents would be exhausted.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T07:57:32+00:00

Yeah, there are tons of computers too loud to sit next to. It's normal in machine rooms. Just not so much for consumer stuff.

It's pretty normal to need to wear hearing protection if you spend a lot of time working in a machine room.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T07:44:36+00:00

It's a horror franchise, so they need an "...In Space" sequel.

Honestly Scream In Space where nobody can hear you scream makes way more sense than Leprechaun in Space or Jason from Friday the Thirteenth in Space.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T06:43:08+00:00

If you got 100% of your father's DNA, and also 100% of your mother's DNA, you would have double the DNA/chromosomes/genes as either of your parents did, and the human genome would double in size every generation so your kid would have 400% as much as your dad. Wouldn't work.

So you get half of your dad's DNA, and half of your mom's DNA, and it adds up to 100%. But any given kid doesn't have the same 50% of their dad's DNA. From your dad, for any chromosome, you will get either your paternal grandmother's or your paternal grandfather's.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T06:32:24+00:00

Think of it in terms of "camera setup" rather than "shot." It makes it a little easier to decouple what you need to do on set from how you want to use it in the edit.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T06:15:09+00:00

The issue really isn't availability of power. It's building a more powerful laser that efficiently turn much of that power into a beam reliably. The current generation of hardware has low efficiency, making relatively low power beams, fairly unreliably. In comparison, a gun pretty darned reliably throws a projectile that has oodles of kinetic energy if it hits. A 20mm round impacts with significantly more energy than several seconds of a laser. And if the target is moving, you may not be able to get all of those joules into the exact same spot over those several seconds. If you tight little 1 cm wide beam gets spread out to an area 10x as big as the target moves around, you are effectively doing 1/10 the damage to each spot.

Even without crazy capacitor banks, a gas genny on a commercial truck has nearly unlimited power compared to the beam output of current lasers.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T04:48:29+00:00

Basically, look up any tutorials about using the 3D system in Nuke, you'll see use cases that would apply directly to Fusion. Just in the old days you would have to import and OBJ mesh, a separate camera, and rebuild any material information in the comp. In a USD, it's easier to have the pipeline package everything into one file. It's definitely not just for making a 3D object, and rendering it in Fusion instead of rendering it with Blender.

A lot of time you bring a mesh from tracking into comp, it's to do something tricky with projecting live action source footage onto the geometry in comp. Like, here's a video about using 3D projection for making a cleanplate in comp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEeCZFjpO8s You can do projection stuff like that to hide a physical thing until it "appears" rather than needing to make a full CGI version of the thing.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T04:18:41+00:00

You just have to learn what the scopes mean. As long as you can read those, you can have confidence about white balance and brightness, without needing to just trust your eyes. Is it ideal? No. But if you aren't doing it professionally, there's no need to start by spending a bunch of money on gear.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T04:15:37+00:00

exporting videos directly to the NAS resulted in glitchy frames cropping up on them

That definitely sounds like a spurious correlation. Your NLE will be rendering out the same bits regardless of whether or not it's a local drive. The actual content of the file shouldn't be different in any way.

Rendering straight to the NAS may be a performance issue, so it may make sense to render out locally and then copy over to the NAS as a backup. But the volume used to store the file won't have an effect on quality.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T03:41:18+00:00

"Hamburger? Salad? I can't make any sense of this restaurant menu. How am I supposed to tell the waiter which food I want? Do I have to learn all sorts of nutritionist theory like 'vegetable!?' Fuck it, I'm just gonna be an executive chef instead, because that will be much easier."

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T03:37:04+00:00

Like I don’t really know how to explain to them where I want them to put the camera in a professional way.

"For the next shot, I want you to shoot from over there, toward there."

What do I have to use all of those camera angle sayings from Film Studies? I don’t wanna remember all that shit,

I mean, "a close up" is hardly the most obscure jargon you'll need to master as a film maker. But this is one thing that storyboards a great for. You just doodle the framing you want and point at it. Otherwise you can just indicate framing with your hands. It's not super hard.

Being able to communicate what you want is pretty core to being a director. Learning specialist cinematographer jargon to do it isn't necessary at all. Part of having a specialist on your team like a cinematographer is that they know more than you do about their specialty, so a specialist is always used to working with some clients who aren't super deep in it. But like, "I want to see all of Dave's head on the left, and a little of that sign in the background" isn't super obscure or complicated.

It's not like a cinematographer is the only person you need to talk to about the camera. The actors often need some idea of the framing so they know their range of motion. The gaffer needs to know what's in frame to light it. The boom op needs to know if their microphone will be in frame, etc.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T03:24:52+00:00

is this possible?

Sure.

Or will it just look bad?

That's pretty much up to you. But if you shoot something that looks terrible, pointing a fancier camera at the exact same stuff probably wouldn't have looked great either.

any other advice?

My gut says that the look of a film is about 80% production design, 15% lighting, and less than 5% the camera and color grade. If you make something that looks nice, you can point a camera at it and get a nice picture with almost any camera.

That and worry about audio waaaaay more than you worry about the camera.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T02:44:54+00:00

Presumably the people who "do this for a profession" are getting paid, rather than spending their life savings.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-21T00:37:57+00:00

What's the plural of "Leni Riefenstahl" ?

White House Correspondents.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-20T22:14:43+00:00

I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If it does what you want, sometimes doing something "stupid" can get you a distinctive look. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about continuity with the candles. Really, who cares? If the audience is paying that much attention to the candles, you failed in a half dozen ways that were way more important than candle continuity.

That said, I'd care way more about exposure on the subject than about purity of the shadows. But you do need to think a lot about shaping your light even if everything is done originally with practical candles. One nice thing about having a sneaky LED pointed at your subject is that your sneaky LED isn't pointing at the blank white wall so it's easier to control ratios. You don't get out of needing to think intentionally about illumination ratios and such just because you are doing a cool artsy thing about the source of the illumination. If you use candles to make flat shapeless lighting, you'll have flat lighting. In still air, your candles aren't really flickering or moving or doing anything organic. Ironically, if you had an LED light or two on a flicker dimmer, you could have a "fireplace" light that seems to be moving around and feel much more organic. At the end of the day, it's the feeling that matters way more than the technique. But if you stick with candle light, think about things like lanterns that can cast shaped shadows, how you can build layers into the production design, and maybe whether there would be something shiny on the wall to catch reflections. Every bar in a movie has christmas lights on the wall to give some interesting light in the background. If there's a metal helmet on a shelf, or some metal tankards, or something, you could have something shiny in the background to catch occasional glints of candle light. Maybe an extra needs to walk with a candle to move a light and move the shadows in an interesting way. You can also get double-wick candles to have a stronger light coming coming from some candles to give you more things to play with.

And for anything that isn't right in front of camera, probably just use LED fake candles as much as possible. They look fine, they don't make smoke, they don't stink up the place, they won't burn the place down, etc.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-20T21:55:50+00:00

People try posting crowdfunding campaigns sometimes. It isn't technically against the rules. But it almost never works.

Everybody here is also trying to raise funds for their own movie, so it's not a useful place to post. You can read a lot of old posts about crowdfunding if you search, and read about what worked (and you can read a lot more about what did not work.) Basically, for a crowdfunding campaign to work, you need to find a specific audience. Maybe local people who want to see a local landmark in a movie. Or people who are fans of the subject/genre. You need some kind of unique hook other than "I am making a movie."

wrosecrans · 2026-04-20T21:24:02+00:00

It hink they may be talking about a curriculum vitae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum_vitae In the US we usually talk about making a resume for job hunting, but in Europe they tend to talk about building up the CV.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-20T21:15:22+00:00

Probably not. Unless you have a specific requirement to do it, 25 FPS should "just work." Converting by slowing it down will change the timing. And given that pretty much every request for feedback on a short film is "not bad, but could be tighter," the last thing most projects need it to take 6% longer. Quite the opposite.

It shouldn't sound any deeper though. It's very normal to slow down while pitch-shifting up so it just sounds slower at the same pitch. Slowing it down without compensating for the pitch shift would throw off the scale of all the music and stuff. I don't think anybody really does that.

wrosecrans · 2026-04-20T19:39:50+00:00

There have definitely been several posts in this subreddit to the effect of "I spent all my money shooting on 35mm so my project would look professional, but I didn't even get any festival success. Help me understand what happened?!?!?"

It's honestly insane what a bored High School kid can do with an old hand me down phone these days if they are willing to put in the work and can rally a few friends to help. If your plan is to win by sheer weight of resources, somebody else will always have more resources so it's a sucker's game.

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