28 posts tagged “film”
2026
The Creative Spirit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (via) I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 movie by Robert Zemeckis. I haven't watched it in quite a few years, and Cypress Frankenfeld just pointed out this sequence from early in the movie:
It's a pelican riding a bicycle!
Look closely and you'll note that the pelican is animated while the bicycle is a real bicycle. Apparently they filled the wheels with water to add stability, then set it running and guided it with a cable.
Cypress gathered more details on the scene. What a delight.
2025
For [Natasha] Lyonne, the draw of AI isn’t speed or scale — it’s independence. “I’m not trying to run a tech company,” she told me. “It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium.” She imagines a future in which indie filmmakers can use AI tools to reclaim authorship from studios and avoid the compromises that come with chasing funding in a broken system.
“We need some sort of Dogme 95 for the AI era,” Lyonne said, referring to the stripped-down 1990s filmmaking movement started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which sought to liberate cinema from an overreliance on technology. “If we could just wrangle this artist-first idea before it becomes industry standard to not do it that way, that’s something I would be interested in working on. Almost like we are not going to go quietly into the night.”
— Lila Shapiro, Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It), New York Magazine
2024
Google search hallucinates Encanto 2. Jason Schreier on Bluesky:
I was excited to tell my kids that there's a sequel to Encanto, only to scroll down and learn that Google's AI just completely made this up
I just replicated the same result by searching Google for encanto 2. Here's what the "AI overview" at the top of the page looked like:
Only when I clicked the "Show more" link did it become clear what had happened:
The link in that first snippet was to the Encanto 2: A New Generation page on Idea Wiki:
This is a fanon wiki, and just like fan-fiction wikis, this one has a variety of fan created ideas on here! These include potential sequels and new series that have yet to exist.
Other cited links included this article about Instagram fan art and Encanto's Sequel Chances Addressed by Disney Director, a very thin article built around a short quote from Encanto's director at D23 Brazil.
And that August 2024 release date (which the AI summary weirdly lists as "scheduled for release" despite that date being five months in the past)? It's from the Idea Wiki imaginary info box for the film.
This is a particularly clear example of how badly wrong AI summarization can go. LLMs are gullible: they believe what you tell them, and the web is full of misleading information - some of which is completely innocent.
Update: I've had some pushback over my use of the term "hallucination" here, on the basis that the LLM itself is doing what it's meant to: summarizing the RAG content that has been provided to it by the host system.
That's fair: this is not a classic LLM hallucination, where the LLM produces incorrect data purely from knowledge partially encoded in its weights.
I classify this as a bug in Google's larger LLM-powered AI overview system. That system should be able to take the existence of invalid data sources into account - given how common searches for non-existent movie sequels (or TV seasons) are, I would hope that AI overviews could classify such searches and take extra steps to avoid serving misleading answers.
So think this is a "hallucination" bug in the AI overview system itself: it's making statements about the world that are not true.
[On Paddington 3] If this movie is anywhere near as good as the second one, we are going to need to have an extremely serious conversation about this being one of the greatest film trilogies ever made.
2023
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse | The Film Score with Daniel Pemberton | “Start a Band” (via) Fabulously nerdy 20 minute YouTube video where Spider-Verse composer Daniel Pemberton breaks down the last track on the film’s soundtrack in meticulous detail.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse screenplay (PDF) (via) Phil Lord shared this on Twitter yesterday—the final screenplay for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It’s a really fun read.
Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies. It’s awful. [...] I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers and they would all tell you the same thing. It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can get a hold of everybody all the time. It’s just not as fun as in the old days when the phone would ring and you didn’t know who was calling.
2022
I Resurrected “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion (via) “I trained an Ugly Sonic object concept on 5 image crops from the movie trailer, with 6,000 steps [...] (on a T4 GPU, this took about 1.5 hours and cost about $0.21 on a GCP Spot instance)”
2019
Story Structure 104: The Juicy Details. Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) wrote a fascinating series of essays on story structure for his Channel 101 film festival project. It’s worth reading the whole series, but this chapter is where things get really detailed.
My Twitter thread collecting behind the scenes content about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I absolutely loved Spider-Verse, and I’ve been delighted to discover that many of the artists who created the movie are active on Twitter and have been posting all kinds of fascinating material about their creative process. I’ve been collecting examples in this Twitter thread for a couple of months now. They definitely deserved that Oscar.
2018
The big thing I always get asked to find are dank dilapidated alleys, and New York City has, like, 5 alleys that look like that. Maybe four. You can’t film in three of them. So what it comes down to is there’s one alley left in New York, Cortlandt Alley, that everybody films in because it’s the last place. I try to stress to these directors in a polite way that New York is not a city of alleys. Boston is a city of alleys. Philadelphia has alleys. I don’t know anyone who uses the ‘old alleyway shortcut’ to go home. It doesn’t exist here. But that’s the movie you see.
2013
What are movie scenes where the hero hurtles from high-up to Earth and nearly dies, but is saved somehow?
You may find http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwik... relevant.
[... 31 words]Will people pay $25 to see a blockbuster-type movie?
Here in London my closest cinema is charging £17.45 for an adult ticket to see Man of Steel in 3D, which is equivalent to $27.55. I’ve paid the same to see Star Trek Into Darkness recently.
[... 51 words]2012
If I have not seen the recent James Bond movies Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace with Daniel Craig, should I see the upcoming SkyFall, or wait to view them in order?
There’s basically nothing in Skyfall that depends on the previous two movies, so you’re perfectly safe watching them out of order (don’t watch Quantum of Solace without watching Casino Royale first though).
[... 70 words]What are the major plot holes in Skyfall?
I find it hard to believe that MI6 could be that incompetent.
[... 172 words]How could Sherlock be improved?
Watson needs to be more competent. Jude Law’s Watson is significantly more useful than Martin Freeman’s—Watson is a military man and a doctor, and is hence useful for far more than just bumbling around with a quizzical expression and updating his blog.
[... 92 words]2010
What are some popular movies that are no longer plausible due to the ubiquity of cell phones & the internet?
“No Signal”
[... 36 words]2009
Oscars 2009: the interactive results | guardian.co.uk. My latest project for the Guardian, put together on very short notice. Updates live as the results are announced, and allows Twitter users to vote on their favourite for each category by sending a specially formatted message to @guardianfilm—jQuery and Ajax polling against S3 under the hood.
2008
Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk (via) The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.
Comic Sans, the Film. “A documentary film coming soon”
2007
Harry Potter and the Order of Typography. Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.
The movie that time forgot (via) The tragically unmade “Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls”.
2005
A movie about Trusted Computing (via) Beautifully animated.
A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road. Martin Belam continues his streak of fascinating posts about the BBC.
2004
Lights Up! (via) Lighting balloons for the film industry. These things look awesome!
2003
The Matrix Reloaded, Abridged
The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script, by Rod Hilton (via teeb!). Do NOT read this if you haven’t seen the film yet; you won’t get the jokes and it’s full of spoilers. It’s the best/funniest analysis of Reloaded I’ve seen yet.
Official film sites almost always suck
Why do official film sites almost always suck? www.x2-movie.com is a prime example: 100% Flash, ridiculous loading times (and I’m on broadband), totally unintuitive interface, tedious, unnecessary animations every time you click on anything and when you finally get to the content (all I could find was the “Mutant Database”) it gives you hardly any information above what you get by watching the film! It looks pretty (pretty expensive at any rate) but really is nothing more than a glorified trailer.
[... 347 words]The technology of the Matrix
Wired have a fascinating article on the technology being used for The Matrix Reloaded. They’ve apparently achieved photo-realistic CGI humans using a technique called “image-based rendering” based on taking a huge number of high resolution photos from different angles and using them to generate the 3D geometry of a scene.
[... 124 words]