Phasor Burn

Looks like the penultimate directors cut of Blade Runner has been completed. They re-edited it once again and did some digital processing to remove wires, clean the images up etc :

Wired: Part of your work in making the new version was eliminating visible wires. Given your legendary attention to detail, how did flaws like that get into the original print?

Scott:Because you can’t make a spinner fly without a crank. That’s why it was raining in the shot, to hide the cables. Today we assume it’s all digital. It’s not — it’s a 2-ton spinner being hoisted around the corner by a large crank that literally brought it down, landed it, and took it off again. Bloody good crane driver, right? You have four points on the cable that keep it steady. When I watched the movie, I always used to sit there staring at the cables. Then eventually one or two of the geeks spotted them. So we took them out.

Wired: Some might say that scrubbing out those wires was defacing a masterpiece.

Scott:I was tempted not to, because I thought it was quite charming that there were cables in the shot. And when Roy Batty came out of the phone booth, for some bizarre reason we never noticed that somebody’s thumb was in the bottom left-hand corner. The phone booth had an automatic door and I couldn’t de-automate it, and I was getting really beaten up ’cause we were up against the gun, so I just shot. And there was the bloody thumb in the frame. It’s little mistakes like that that you’re tempted to leave in. It’s a signature that says, yes, it is fiction, it is moviemaking.

Wired: Today it would all be done with computers.

Scott: Oh yeah, you wouldn’t even think about it.

Wired: And there would be no thumb on the door.

Scott: Oh, it’s become too easy.

Read the entire article here

Now to go put this on my xmas wish list.

Still waiting for my new Apple MacBook Pro to arrive. It’s been picked up in Shanghai and made a brief layover in Anchorage before continuing on to Memphis. Why would FedEx do that instead of stopping in Vancouver to shuffle packages for Canada off is beyond me.

I know the whole airport thing in the USA is hub-spoke based and I guess the package movers are either captive to that or are in part responsible for it, for efficiency or something.

Why Memphis? I have a feeling that Mojo Nixon was right, Elvis is everywhere. Elvis is piloting FedEx jumbojets and makes frequent stops in his old home town to visit the convenience stores there which are the only place you can easily buy freeze dried trail-jerky versions of fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches . . .

Update Monday Oct 1 : Elvis got off his fat ass and flew my MacBook Pro to Calgary last night. I should have it later today and …. unable to use it until I transfer my files and settings over, which will have to be tomorrow sometime as I have a photography class tonight Doh.

I don’t care how functional the software is . . . if the website is horribly unusable, hard to read, they get dismissed from consideration immediately.

Check out the orange with grey drop shadow text on the headers :

eGroupWare, you guys should leave your web design to someone with design usability experience… You can’t seriously call yourself enterprise class or enterprise anything other than “enterprise unreadability”, with pages that suck as badly as this. Just because you CAN do something like that with CSS, doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

… claims most of arctic ocean seabed is part of their continental shelf, and therefore all that nice seabed oil and gas is theirs for the exploitation.

More at the BBC

It’s a pandemic!