Weekend Update

This is a big Weekend for Movies. Both "Year One", and "The Proposal" are finally hitting theaters.
I am excited for both of these movies. This weekend doesn't permit time to get out to the movies, but if I had the time I am not sure which one I would go see. I honestly would probably go see them both, or wait for them to come out on DVD.

Also this weekend I am shooting for our first official "Virtual Business Card". The music company Haven is partnering up with us, and we are shooting a video for them. This is going to be good for both us and them. I am pretty excited for the shoot.

Sunday is Father's Day, so that should be fun. Food, relatives, and movies. It should be a good day. I am excited to spend the day with my dad.

New Direction in movies

June 18, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

3D means new rules for directors

by Rafe Needleman
The rise of 3D technology for movies and television will force a change in how directors tell stories. Say good-bye to gut-wrenching drops off cliffs and swoops through asteroid fields to call attention to 3D effects. Be prepared for directors to use slower pans, less cutting, and more deliberate camera moves to blend the technology into the story. These new 3D movies may look boring in 2D, but they'll end up feeling more engaging when seen in three dimensions.

"Unfortunately, the history of 3D is bad 3D," says Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality, a company that makes, as he calls it, "end-to-end technologies from image capture to processing" for three-dimensional entertainment. The technology hasn't been up to snuff until recently, he says. He claims his company's tech is leagues better, naturally. But the art hasn't advanced, either, and no amount of technology can fix that. Directors need new rules.

The film, 'Up,' was released in 3D as well as 2D.

(Credit: Pixar Animation Studios)

I talked with Climan about the changes coming to cinematography and television in the move to 3D, as well as to Didier Debons and Isabelle de Montagu, CEO and business development manager of 3DTV Solutions, which makes 3D video recording products, and Tuyen Pham, CEO of A-volute, a 3D audio encoding company. The short takeaway: if you're in the video or entertainment business, forget what you know about directing and editing. 3D changes everything.

Think 3D is a gimmick and that professional cinematographers and television directors don't take it seriously? Financials, Climan says, dispute this. 3D films in 3D theaters gross two to five times what the 2D versions of those films do. Commercials in 3D yield better recall rates. And it's not just the novelty factor, Climan says. If so, the trend would have faded. Grosses for 3D films are growing.

"The family movie business has largely moved to 3D," Climan continues, pointing to films like "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Coraline," and "Up"--the last two having being taken far more seriously than standard 3D matinee fare. On the grownup front, Climan says that for sports and concerts, there's nothing like the 3D movie or TV experience. The upcoming James Cameron film, "Avatar" is a 3D production and is expected to be a watershed for mainstream 3D entertainment.

For now, the growth of 3D looks inevitable. The next step for the medium, after family films and fantastic blockbusters, is for 3D to move into independent and artisan films. Climan thinks the technology is becoming straightforward enough to make that likely.

How do you zoom?

If you accept that 3D on-screen entertainment is a growth market, how do you create the content for it? Companies like 3ality and 3DTV Solutions will deliver camera systems for you, but they don't direct your shows. Using the technology effectively requires a new art.

3DTV's camera rig has eight lenses and sensors.

(Credit: 3DTV Solutions)

De Montagu of 3DTV told me, "If you are looking at 3D it is because you want to be as close to reality as possible." That means, she said, you need to write more realistic shooting scripts. Using 3D primarily for special effects is counterproductive. "The brain doesn't get it," de Montagu says.

The purpose of 3D has to be to render reality. You can push a viewer's willing suspension of disbelief quite far in a 2D show, since we've been trained to "read" movies and accept unreal conventions, like zooming and cutting. But in 3D, if you push it too far, you break the illusion. The viewer has to feel like they're in real life.

And that means no reliance on many standard cinematic methods, including zooming and cutting back and forth between people talking to each other. The viewer can get confused, even physically sick if you immerse them in a world that's constantly shifting. "You don't zoom in real life," A-Volute's Pham said. And if you do rapid-fire cuts and move the sound stage around the audience with the visuals, he says, plainly, "you will get sick."

Climan says, "In 2D, you move the camera to create a sense of motion. In 3D, you leave the camera since the audience is in the middle of things. You need to have many fewer camera moves. In sports, you just leave the camera in a low position, and you feel like you're on the field. You have a much more clear view of the players in 3D due to the dimensionality."

3ality is launching a service, "3DIQ," to train people in 3D video and cinematography, but it's clearly an emerging art form. As 3DTV's de Montagu says, "We are going back to the fundamentals of audio and vision."

Climan says that educating a film crew to shoot for 3D is not terribly difficult. To turn out an episode of "Chuck," in 3D, he says, it took about one and a half days to get "the 2D crew" adjusted to the new medium. "They didn't miss a beat."

However, while a film shot for 3D might play fine on 2D equipment, it clearly won't feel as engaging if displayed in 2D as a show shot for the old-fashioned flat medium, with its jump cuts and zooms and sweeping pans. So directors will have to make a choice of primary format or shoot things twice. In big sports events, Climan says, "there will be a director for 2D and a director for 3D."

(Personally, I hope no video, movie, or game ever gets released without a 2D version alongside it, since I'm one of the small percentage of people--about 7 percent, I'm told--whose eyes and brain don't process true 3D correctly. Every 3D demo I have ever seen either looks like double vision to me, makes me queasy, or both.)

Emerging technologies

Anyone who's watched 3D content knows that the technology to play it is evolving, to put it kindly.

"The good stuff requires glasses," Climan says, which makes the at-home experience troubling. Who wants to walk to the fridge wearing glass that make the real world look odd (which they do)? But there are technologies coming out that get us part of the way there without it.

The 3DTV team showed me a demo using another company's monitor with a lenticular grating on it ("It puts the glasses on the screen," Didier Debons said) that gave what appeared to me a decent 3D experience without requiring that I wear glasses. However, to support this and all the other 3D technologies, the company's camera system has eight lenses on a horizontal mount, not the usual two lenses most people think of when they imagine a steroscopic camera rig.

The 3D audio technology by A-Volute does not require any special equipment at the listener's location, and is quite remarkable. Using signal processing and a model of how the inner ear, outer ear, and a person's head changes the shape of the sound the ear hears and that the brain translates into positional information, it can play, over ordinary stereo speakers and without relying on bouncing sounds off walls, sounds that you will swear are coming from behind you or above you.

The demo I heard made my jaw drop. The technology can add positional cues to sounds in real-time, making it useful not just for movies and TV shows, but for games and for military and transportation applications as well. Bose has competitive technology.

3D is still seen as gimmick by most consumers, but it's becoming more mainstream. That means content producers and artists will be thinking about 3D content more in the near future: Not just how to have it call attention to itself, but rather how to have 3D fade, as it were, into the background of the storytelling.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.

I think this is a health matter

Alcohol goes to the head in six minutes, scientists say

Alcohol goes to your head in just six minutes, scientists revealed on Tuesday.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5549174/Alcohol-goes-to-the-head-in-six-minutes-scientists-say.html

Published: 1:06PM BST 16 Jun 2009

Photo: PA

Researchers have proved the rapid changes that drinking alcohol causes in human brain cells. For the first time, researchers have proved the rapid changes that drinking alcohol causes in human brain cells. Previous tests on how alcohol affects the brain have only been done on animals. Scientists set out to test the well-known saying that just one drink can quickly go to your head. Only six minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three glasses of beer or two glasses of wine, leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, changes had already taken place in brain cells.

The researchers from Heidelberg University Hospital in Germany said it is known the brain reacts quickly to alcohol, but wanted to find out how rapid the effect was. Eight male and seven female volunteers took part in an experiment where they drank a specified amount of alcohol through a 90cm-long straw while lying in a MRI brain scanner.

The goal was to reach a blood alcohol content of 0.05 to 0.06 percent - a level that impairs ability to drive, but does not induce severe intoxication. The scanner allowed the scientists to examine the tiny changes in brain cell tissue structure caused by the alcohol.

Dr Armin Biller, a neurologist at the hospital, said chemical substances which normally protect brain cells are reduced as the concentration of alcohol increases. Other components of brain cells were also cut as more alcohol was consumed. Perhaps surprisingly, the study found that men's and women's brains reacted to alcohol consumption the same way. The team found the harmful effects of alcohol on the brain may be shortlived, but over time cells took longer to repair themselves.

Dr Biller said: "Our follow-ups on the next day showed that the shifts in brain metabolites after moderate consumption of alcohol by healthy persons are completely reversible. "However, we assume that the brain's ability to recover from the effect of alcohol decreases or is eliminated as the consumption of alcohol increases. "The acute effects demonstrated in our study could possibly form the basis for the permanent brain damage that is known to occur in alcoholics. This should be clarified in future studies."

The research is published in the current issue of the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

CMT Awards

Tonight was the Country Music awards. I recorded it for my girlfriend, because she loves just about all Country Music. I knew that I would have to watch it, but the thing is I actually enjoyed it.

The two big winners of the night were Brad Paisley, and Taylor Swift. Brad won three different awards, and Taylor won two different awards. The show ended with a performance of "Pour some sugar on me" with Def Leopard, and Taylor Swift, which I will admit was pretty awesome.

All in all the show was pretty good. As I was told it was going to be performance based. I can say that after watching the performances life it game me a better appreciation for the music.

Movie Monday- The Proposal

I am super excited this is the first Movie Monday for my blog. I have been thinking about what to write about, and I decided that I am going to write about a movie that is coming out on Friday that I actually may go see.

The movie is "The Proposal", this is a movie staring Ryan Reynolds, and Sandra Bullock. It is a movie about a boss, Bullock who forces her employee, Reynolds to "marry her" so she doesn't get deported to Canada. This I find funny because Ryan is the one who is actually Canadian.

The movie was also produced by Sandra Bullock, and shot in Boston, Massachusetts.

Law & Order SVU

Law & Order SUV is a crazy show. Dick Wolf, the creator of the show comes up with some of the most disturbing story lines. I have been watching the show since I woke up today.

Now I realize that SVU is usually girls that have been abused, and children that have been abducted, but some of the twists have been out of control.

One I just finished watching was about a guy who kidnapped a girl whose avatar that reminded him of a girl he abducted 25 years earlier. The girl ended up being found and had stayed in the "love nest" for 25 years waiting for him. It was something I never saw coming. The twists and turns in this show are unmatched. I think that if you are someone that doesn't watch this show, you should start.

Stanley Cup

Image via Wikipedia

Last night NBC showed the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Finals. It is now official. The Pittsburgh Penguins didn't blow it, this time.

They did a lot more than just not blow it. In both the semi finals, and the finals this season they came back from being down 2 games to 0 to win the series. As earlier posted the Red Wings, and the Penguins played last year, and last year the cup slipped out Sid the Kid's hands, but not this time.

The game was awesome. Pittsburgh scored early in the second period. They followed that with another goal before the second intermission. However their fearless leader went down with an injury. Crosby was checked into the boards, and left the ice to go to the dressing room. He only came back in the third period with limited play.

The Penguins really didn't need him. They managed to diffuse the Red Wings. The Wings were unable to play there game, which I think led to the victory for the Pen's.