Archive for the 'Cinema' category

Merci à Pierrick.

If you want to know more, you can even buy those horse legs.

…but I couldn’t fly.

Jose Luis Ortiz has changed it all. He installed a small video camera on one of his royal eagles.

And now, you and me can fly, really fly. Breath-taking! Boarding a plane became so down-to-Earth. I now want to have wings, I want to fly like an eagle…

This is so nice: A Stop-motion video that is very well done, funny.

…up to the point of creating a chocolate-inspired video?

…or up to the point of sacrificing chocolate for the sake of pure art?

No fish for 1st of April!
These are bunnies.

After billions of years of simulated galactic video, here is the simulation of a balck hole while it swallows a full star. Huge jets, huge amounts of matter removed from sight.

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

If you want to meet dinosaurs, not only paintings or sculptures, go to the USA, fly to Los Angeles, California. There, in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, there are free-roaming dinosaurs in the corridors. Not only are these automatons sized impressively, but they intereact with people and kids around them.

Woah! Stunning!

I recently met a couple of fine underwater movies. One shows a dive to find a nautilus at great depths; The second shows a phosphorescent amalgam of abyss animals. Always a source of great surprises.

You loved the Grand Canyon sky walk, and the previously available video of the El Camino del Rey Walkway. So, you proved that you aren’t susceptible to vertigo.

Will you love this old suspension bridge from Japan? It’s old, derelict. The wind is pushing it.

This Hungarian short movie is in English. I recommend waiting for the end (after 11 minutes).

For sure, YouTube has always been crouded with rip-offs of the Monty Python sketches. Unfortunately, these were both illegal and -in general- of poor quality. The guys from Monty Python decided that enough is enough, and there is now a Monty Python channel/group on YouTube where you can see excellent quality videos of their Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This is easy to reduce a color photo to a B&W image (any photo software or any B&W photocopier can do it). But the reverse operation seems difficult at best, impossible in most cases. However, a team of French scientists from the French INRIA (Guillaume Charpiat, Matthias Hofmann et Bernhard Schölkopf) presented recently an algorithm that succeeds to rebuild the color information from a B&W photo. And with some success.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

Link to YouTube

Sometimes a fight outcome is difficult to forecast. Now, if you take an old lady and a (too) fast car. Guess who will be leaving the spot unharmed?

Link to YouTube

When a dSLR like the Sony Alpha 900 is presented as if it was a Hollywood movie, we get this result :