Letters Remain

Category: film

  • Prediction Markets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, and More

    Each year I get caught up in the big film and television awards, trying to watch as many as possible and speculating on the various winners. I just discovered Gold Derby, a fun site for following and predicting the Hollywood ‘races’ yourself. Gold Derby takes predictions on everything from the Oscars to RuPaul’s Drag Race,…

  • A Visual Technique Library for Film Shots

    From the common to the lesser-seen cinematographic techniques, Eyecandy is a “visual technique library” for film shots. A database of over 5,000 GIFs, organised into around 100 different techniques, you select the technique and you get a short description and a wall of example clips. While I love movies, I’m certainly a cinematography neophyte, so…

  • Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms

    If there’s one person I can think of who is qualified to produce a movie glossary, it has to be Roger Ebert. And you know what? He did, it was published, and I had no idea until just now. Inspiring frequent light giggles and the occasional guffaw, Ebert’s glossary appears to have originated as an…

  • Cosmic View to The Know Universe

    In 1957, the Dutch educator Kees Boeke wrote Cosmic View, a essay exploring “many levels of size and structure, from the astronomically vast to the atomically tiny”. Boeke’s essay went on to inspire the 1968 animated short, Cosmic Zoom. Cosmic View and Zoom then inspired the more famous Charles and Ray Eames documentary, Powers of Ten,…

  • Writing to Subvert Audience Expectations

    Suggesting that “Audiences always think they know how a story will go”, Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel dissects Kathryn Bigelow‘s award-winning The Hurt Locker (spoilers galore) to see why a film that “[sets] up several conventional situations – and uses our expectations to pull us up short” made such an impact with audiences. Readers…

  • How an Entertainment Medium Succeeds

    While looking at how piracy and online content has changed ‘traditional media’ (and is continuing to do so), Barrett Garese succinctly points out his vision for the direction online content needs to go to really differentiate itself and, thus, succeed (or any entertainment medium, in fact). Each medium has unique advantages and disadvantages, and the…

  • Forever’s Not So Long

    Forever’s Not So Long is a touching short film (13 mins.) chronicling how two people decide to see out the end of their lives. via Link Banana

  • Love–It or Hate–It Films, and the Miss Congeniality Problem

    An addendum to my previous post on the Netflix Prize: When someone noticed that the top five most frequently rated movies on Netflix were neither particularly popular nor critically acclaimed (Miss Congeniality, Independence Day, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow and Pirates of the Caribbean), another competitor mused: Seeing Miss Congeniality on the list of…

  • The Napoleon Dynamite Problem

    Or maybe, “The One Million Dollar Algorithm”. A competition to improve the recommendation engine of the online DVD rental company, Netflix, has been running in to problems. As the contestants edge toward an improvement rate of 10% (the point at which the $1,000,000 prize will be awarded), their progress grinds to a halt thanks to…

  • Powers of Ten

    Powers of Ten is a 1977 IBM-commissioned film taking us on a journey out to the edge of the observable universe before returning to an atom’s nucleus in the hand of a man picnicing in a Chicago park… all within 9 minutes. Depicting the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten, the film…