Movie of the week: Slipstream

Anthony Hopkins directed it, hoping (at least what he says in the commentary) to provoke a reaction, to get some people to question the form of the movie itself, or at least step back and look at what they are doing, both with their lives and with the art of film. At least that's my impression of what he said.

Unless you are a Hopkins fanatic you probably did not see this movie in theatrical release -- even if you are it's unlikely you saw it in a theater, since its release was limited to a few film festivals, and a limited run before going to DVD. Which I find terribly sad, since it's one of the most inventive, interesting and risk-taking movies I've seen in years, especially if I limit that list to movies made in the Hollywood system, excluding European movies of the 60s and 70s. This is definitely not a typical Hollywood-style movie, and by Hollywood-stlye I mean the structure that tends to be imposed not just on cartoon adventure movies, but a great deal of the "indie" film making world as well, at this point in the adventure.

Still, I suppose this is to be expected, since the movie directly challenges in many ways the conventions of what a movie is and how it should operate. It's also one of those rare movies that doesn't feel obliged to offer an explicit road map to make the viewer more at ease with what transpires. It shocks, it confuses, and at the end you are left with many questions. Some of those questions can be answered by watching the movie closely again a second or a third time. I suspect a few may never be answerable, but when logic (or the human compulsion to impose "sense" on a random and unjust world) fails there is still the gorgeous camerawork to fall back on, as compensation for not getting all the answers in a simplistic little package -- if you actually think you need to be compensated for that, that is.

What struck me on watching Slipstream at first, without the amendments of explanation or intention, was the way in which it manages to represent, at least as well as something as mechanical and limited as a film can represent it: human consciousness. And perhaps that's where the negative reactions came from? From those who work hardest to avoid accepting how random and free of specific meanings or intentions our own stream of consciousness is?

I found it especially amusing to hear that critics had been upset about the color changes made in post-production to the Corvette that features in the introduction of the characters played by Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor. Apparently they'd been text messaging during the minutes that led up to that bit of signalling that, no, this is not your conventional narrative.

There's also a great deal here about the nature of conscience, and a commentary on the mostly American commonplace that we are somehow responsible for our fates, if not through dint of our personal will and good (or bad) deeds, then -- perhaps an even more pernicious notion -- through the workings of our subconscious. In other words, putting paid to the notion that if we "fail" it's somehow a product of our consciousness "creating" that failure.

This is put strongly, yet ambiguously, in an early scene where Hopkins' character is disoriented, while his gorgeous, yet mildly annoying young companion is going on about various New Age notions of past life regression, channeling and 12-step psychobabble, while the narrator's consciousness is flashing up images that counterpoint that sort of grandiose and ultimately egotistical claptrap -- images of the Holocaust, and mass evil from 20th century Nazism and Soviet terror, visited on people who are unlikely to have ever had the luxury to indulge in such fantasies of control.

I could discuss this movie at length, or I could encourage others to find a copy and experience it for themselves. I'm going with Option B.

After all, I can always write a follow-up piece. Unless I get hit by a bus.

Biocentrism and anthropocentric fallacies

Simply because our experience and mechanics may be central to how we experience the universe, does it follow that the universe itself takes any particular notice of us, this particular form of sentience?

Does it exclude or preclude other kinds of sentience, for instance, some sort of hive mind built up of much more diffuse operations in the universe at large. If they were going on around us, would we even recognize that they were happening?

I shouldn't post this, in particular because I have yet to give this article its due, or even begin to comprehend it in the ordinary human sense of that phrase. But the wording here is disquieting to me, to say the least. And so I am putting this out there, hoping for comments, hoping to understand, and also hoping to get across what I think probably needs to be a rather vague sense of description of some of those other forms of "consciousness" and other, possibly "transcendent" processes in the universe, both within and among organisms, structures and "clouds" of "stuff."

This came to me from a conversation Wednesday at the Psychoanalytical Round Table, in Second Life.

in reference to:

"Our science fails to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. This view of the world—biocentrism—revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. It is a vast mystery and one that I have pursued my entire life. The conclusions I have drawn place biology above the other sciences in the attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Such a theory would unite all known phenomena under one umbrella, furnishing science with an all-encompassing explanation of nature or reality.
We need a revolution in our understanding of science and of the world. Living in an age dominated by science, we have come more and more to believe in an objective, empirical reality and in the goal of reaching a complete understanding of that reality. Part of the thrill that came with the announcement that the human genome had been mapped or with the idea that we are close to understanding the big bang rests in our desire for completeness."
- A New Theory of the Universe: an article by Robert Lanza about biocentrism building on quantum physics by putting life into the equation | The American Scholar (view on Google Sidewiki)

I was minding my own business when this thing came along

It was almost a poem. In the mood I'm in today I'm tempted to use the text as lyrics for a song. 

For now, though, I think I'll just try to immortalize it here, in this least immortal of places.  Is my literary executor going to hate me or what?



Details on the Word Galaxy appear at:

http://oostendorp.net/wordgalaxy.html

Second Entry in Star Wars Uncut

This was a rush job. Back to school time seems to do that.

Star Wars Uncut - Sc 362 from B Unis on Vimeo.

Not much else to say about this, though some viewers elsewhere thought this was a political statement. It took me several days to see that. Yes, I seem to be slowing down.

Demonstrating a point.

This is just an attempt to explore some options that may exist with YouTube's embedded players. The following player has been defined as 560x200. But any other set of dimensions should also be possible.

This is an extension of the post made recently, speculating about the reasons for the appearance of the viewers on YouTube itself. I have to wonder... at least I have wondered for quite awhile, whether this isn't some subtle incentive for YouTube's users to focus on using embedded players, rather than sending them to YouTube pages more directly. It's a silly and overly complicated speculation, I know.

Oddly enough, this particular player embeds the video at its uploaded dimensions. In this case, the video was rendered at 1200x496 pixels... a 2.42:1 aspect ratio I mostly invented. The 560x200 player provides a 2.8:1 aspect ratio window... wider than the uploaded video. The result is the pillarboxing you see below.

Below the jump, I'll put up a 600x248 (+30px for the progress bar) player, which should be roughly a match to the video contained there... My apologies to any early readers of this post, which should probably not have been published before debugging everything. I'll try to follow this up with some more technical details on just how to determine the size of your embedded player, once I'm a bit more sure of what I'm doing here.

Below: Bringing widescreen options to YouTube. One crazy person at a time.

This player SHOULD be a half-size match to the original upload.




And here's another example... in this case the image and rendering were matched... this should show neither letterboxing nor pillarboxing.

YouTube does CinemaScope

This video is presented as an example of an odd, and possibly unsupported YouTube feature. Recently, in the past few days, an ultrawide player appeared on YouTube, at least for some types of videos. The aspect ratio was around 2.35:1, instead of the 16:9 aspect ratio introduced back in December 2008.

Hopefully this embedded video illustrates this new format, but what's really interesting is if you follow this video back to YouTube, and use the new large screen switcher. It's a button with arrows pointing left and right. The "mouseover" text reads "Change Player Size." The odd thing at the moment though is that this player is only available if you avoid rendering in a way that triggers HD encoding.  For example, an otherwise identical clip was rendered at 1440x608 and displays on YouTube in the now familiar 16:9 ratio player.  Perhaps that will be fixed in a future update?  (Don't bet actual money on that hopeful statement, though).

Please note: to get the 2.35:1 aspect ratio embedded player below, you will need to (at present) manually change the values (both at the beginning and end) of the embedded player code. In this case the height value was 262, width 560.  If you're not familiar with the method (clicking the YouTube watermark) to open a video on its own YouTube page, you can click this link to get to the video behind the embedded player below.





Here are the detailed specs for the file uploaded above:

General
Name : Patriots90920cVryShortSM2.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42
File size : 15.0 MiB
Duration : 30s 30ms
Overall bit rate : 4 195 Kbps
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

Video
ID : 2
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Baseline@L3.0
Format settings, CABAC : No
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Muxing mode : Container profile=Unknown@0.0
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 30s 30ms
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 999 Kbps
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 304 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.610
Stream size : 14.3 MiB (95%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

Audio
ID : 1
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format version : Version 4
Format profile : LC
Format settings, SBR : No
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 30s 16ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 192 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 704 KiB (5%)
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06
Tagged date : UTC 2009-09-21 04:12:06

One further point of interest, though. Even though video appears rather ugly on YouTube itself, the same trick used above, should work to conform embedded players to any non-standard aspect ratios you might want to use. See the example below:

Modest's JPEGs

Band season is beginning and I'm starting to slow down my updates to things like this blog. Here's an attempt to integrate the two. Rough cut material from the preview/rehearsal at the end of marching band camp. The program this year is adapted from Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Here's the first video shot from any kind of altitude above the field.

Modest's Pics - Take 3 from B Unis on Vimeo.

More to come.

I sometimes wish I had avoided adding this "jump" in the posts, since my comments are rarely that long, and it's hard to come up with more to say that doesn't seem most likely to bore someone, especially anyone coming to this blog with no particular background in the many things I tend to take for granted. Chalk it up to ambivalence about publicity and "being out there."

The video in this post is essentially a lens test, and also one in a series of rendering tests, this one being probably the most painstaking of those I've done so far. They amount to work product, and probably should just be kept restricted to those most directly involved in production and preparation of Montgomery High School Marching Band videos for the 2009-2010 season.