JSTN
Hello, I live in New York and work at Tumblr.
High Res / Muxtape / Chromogenic / Radarmatic / The Shit To Get / Screen Caps / IHKH / Sharps / Ambient Recordings
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The Winklevoss twins in The Social Network were played by two actors with the face of one digitally stitched onto the body of the other.
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WOW what a bad looking print. Who the heck was in charge of this Blu-Ray transfer??? Does the ‘Ray’ stand for Ray Charles?
Amazon review by Robert Owsley (Chicago) -
nicklas asked:Have you seen the long assembly cut of Alien 3? It's.. still got big flaws due to the work environment but damn, it's not a bad movie and one can tell it's a Fincher movie. I want to look forward to Prometheus but I just can't — Ridley Scott hasn't made a decent movie in ages.
I haven’t seen that, but I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Ridley Scott is not without flaws, but I thought American Gangster, Matchstick Men, and even Gladiator were all pretty good.
I’m choosing to be inappropriately optimistic and expect Prometheus to be his best movie since Blade Runner.
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I don’t care how far technology progresses, I want the inside of my spaceship to look exactly like this.
(Source: screencaps)
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It’s hard to believe Prometheus will only be Ridley Scott’s third science fiction movie. His record so far (Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982) is unimpeachable, and to say I’m excited is a gross understatement.
I watch Blade Runner at least a couple times a year because I’m obsessed, but before a few days ago I hadn’t seen Alien since the era of VHS tapes. Watching it as an adult (remastered in 1080p) was mindblowing, like seeing a completely new film. It shares more atmospheric DNA with Blade Runner than I ever realized, it’s incredibly beautiful for being so gloomy and claustrophobic. Every shot is amazing. I’m posting some of them to Screen Caps over the next week or so and resisting the urge to just grab every shot.
It’s too bad the sequels got progressively worse. After seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (also great) I was reading about David Fincher and very surprised to find that Alien 3 was his first movie, if only because it was so terrible. I’d love to see what he’d do with it now.
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Here’s a video with a great explanation of the Hexagon’s film transport, including some cutaway views of it actually operating. From the narration:
The length of the film path from each supply assembly through each camera system and into the first recovery vehicle is almost 100 feet. Each supply assembly provides 150,000 feet of film to each camera at controlled constant velocities of up to 70 inches per second under specified tension.
The looper assembly in each film path serves as the interface between the coarse and fine film transport systems and allows the total length of the film stored in it to be constant. This enables the fine film transport system to supply film at the speeds up to 200 inches per second required at the camera’s focal plane.
Each camera system contains active steerers and passive articulators to center the film on supporting rollers at critical points in the film path. Dual take-up assemblies in each of the four reentry vehicles have a film capacity of one fourth of the supply film load. Prior to Hexagon, no other satellite camera system had been called upon to transport very large quantities of ultra-thin base film at speeds of over 200 inches per second and be able to reverse direction both at the take-up and supply spools.
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The KH-9 Hexagon was an extremely badass spy satellite used extensively by the U.S. during the Cold War, and kept more or less a secret from 1966 until just this September when it was declassified by the National Reconnaissance Office and put on display to the public for one day only.
It was bigger than a school bus, bigger than the Hubble space telescope (with optics by the same company, Perkin-Elmer), and designed entirely on paper with slide rulers. It had a pair of panoramic “optical bar” mirror cameras in its belly (1500mm, f/3.0) that could operate individually or stereoscopically, sweeping an area 80x360 miles on a piece of film 6 inches wide. Periodically, the film would be fed into one of the pods below and launched back to Earth over the Pacific Ocean, where they would deploy parachutes and wait to be grabbed out of mid-air by C-130 transport planes equipped with grappling hooks. If they landed in the ocean, each capsule had a plug made of compacted salt designed to dissolve in 24 hours so it would flood and sink (and presumably be rendered unrecoverable by the enemy). Nevertheless, the Navy successfully mounted a massive operation in 1972 to recover a sunken film bucket three miles underwater using the bathyscape Trieste II. Later missions added a mapping camera to the front section, which had its own reentry vehicle and shot 9-inch frames covering 1,300 square miles.
The optical and aerospace technology is incredible of course, but the thing that really astounds me about the Hexagon is the massively complex, massively inefficient film transport system it must have required. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much written about it (The Space Review is the best source I’ve found overall). It doesn’t surprise me that one detail that hasn’t been declassified is the total cost of the program.
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