guttervomit

6

Source Code Movie Review (with Spoilers)

7 Apr 2011

There’s a scene towards the end of Source Code that might be the finest 30 seconds of celluloid I’ve seen so far this year. In it, Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his newfound love (Michelle Monaghan) share a last kiss, right before he dies. The moment is frozen and the camera does a great slow pan around their train car, the music swelling as we say goodbye to all of the other characters he’s spent the movie interacting with. It’s an impossible sequence, but it’s so cleanly put together that you think it’s just a regular tracking shot, and it’s the perfect way to end this frenetic sci-fi.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t end there. Instead, we find out that he actually survives, now free to live his life inside the body of some poor schmuck that just happened to have similar synapse mappings, or however the heck it all works.

But perhaps a quick review of recent events is in order:

Capt. Stevens is an unwilling participant in an experimental protocol nonsensically called “Source Code,” that allows its subjects to temporarily inhabit another person’s mind during the eight minutes prior to that person’s death. In this case, he inhabits one of the victims of a train bombing, in an effort to find out who the culprit was. Calling this movie “Source Code” makes about as much sense as calling your pet chihuahua “Giraffe,” unless you’re doing so ironically. (And I doubt that director Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, is a hipster.)

But that odd title is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. How any of this technology is even possible is explained away by some ridiculous analogy involving lightbulbs, because well, no explanation on Earth could make sense of a premise like that. There’s no explanation for the rather arbitrary 8-minute window, or how they are able to capture the brain waves of a person who was blown to smithereens many hours ago. Or, for that matter, how they can totally rip off Quantum Leap and not even give poor Scott Bakula a cameo. This kind of lazy writing bothers me, but the movie is paced so well that you put off arguing with it until it makes more sense.

Unfortunately, again, it never does. This part does bother me. Capt. Stevens is told many times that he cannot actually change what’s already happened; all he can do is learn from it and try to prevent a second bomb from going off. Nonetheless, he does try to change things, by placing a call to Project Source Code’s lead scientist (Jeffrey Wright) while he’s on the ill-fated train. When asked about it later, the scientist waves away the possibility by saying that the call would’ve gone through to “another me,” in a different reality.

We’re familiar with this parallel-universe concept from decades of X-Men comics. Each decision you have to make causes the universe to fork, with each branch containing the results of your choices. In this manner, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, each one differing from the others in small or vast ways. This ensures that no one can rewrite history; jumping backwards in time to kill Hitler just causes another universe to spring forth in which Hitler is dead, while the branch you are originally from remains unchanged. The parallel-universe style of time-travel is the opposite of what happens in movies like The Terminator, in which a future John Connor famously sends back a foot soldier to protect the woman who would eventually give birth to him. If she dies, future John Connor ceases to exist. This woman is played by Linda Hamilton, so naturally the soldier ends up sleeping with her, and the product of their impromptu love affair turns out to be none other than Connor himself. In this set of time-travel rules, time is a single stream and changing things in the past irrevocably have repercussions in the future.

The big twist at the end of Source Code is a real mind-bender, and not in a good way. It spends 95% of its running time making you think that it adheres to the parallel-universes principle, and then turns the tables on you at the very end. Oops, time is actually a single stream! Who knew? Clearly not the writers, who not only allow Capt. Stevens to rewrite history, but also let him continue inhabiting the body of the (ex-)victim after the danger has passed. And after he’s been unplugged from the Source Code, no less. So although he may have saved a train full of people, he’s extinguished the life of the man his new squeeze is really in love with. Not exactly the most selfless way to end a movie, but I think you were supposed to feel that he somehow deserved it.

I first noticed Duncan Jones’ work in the Sam Rockwell feature “Moon,” which was quite possibly the most impressive sci-fi debut since “Primer.” With “Source Code,” you can see improvements all around. The pacing moves at bullet-train speed, the dialogue is sharp, and there’s nary a scene wasted on fluff. This is perhaps what makes the saccharine ending so disappointing. Not only does it undo all of the rules it had spent so much time setting up, but it does so unnecessarily. The perfect ending was already there; you just needed to jump backwards 8 minutes from the credits.

Posted in Randomness | 6 Comments »
5

Sucker-Punched by Zack Snyder (With Spoilers!)

28 Mar 2011

Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is named for that infamous blow that comes without warning, catching the recipient off-guard and unprepared. I would say, coming out of the theater last night, that I was sucker-punched by this film, but only in the sense that I was unprepared for how much I hated it.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve been watching Snyder since Dawn of the Dead (2004), which I always felt was the best of the Dead remakes. It had a great sense of pacing and really knew how to develop the impending sense of doom that the zombie genre trades on. Prior to that, he was a commercial director for over a decade, which explains his over-emphasis on visuals in all of his features. (Another example of a commercial-gone-feature director is Michael Bay, who made a name for himself directing car spots for quite some time. Go figure.)

Snyder followed Dawn up with an adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 in 2006, a movie that really solidified the visual techniques that he would become known for: high-contrast, low-saturation imagery combined with an excessive use of slow-motion. He uses so much slow-motion in 300 that he makes John Woo films seem like they’re playing in 2x by comparison. I personally disliked this movie, although I appreciated that he was bringing indie comic book properties to the silverscreen. It was successful enough that it spawned a parody movie as well as a very similar TV show on the Starz network, so clearly I am in the minority here.

When his Watchmen remake was announced, I remember being terrified. This was my favorite comic story of all-time, in the hands of a guy who couldn’t even introduce a character without making an action set-piece out of it. It didn’t help that Watchmen was an incredibly complex story to be telling; it has the kind of plot that would have been better suited for a three-part tv movie like Hallmark’s Dune, not a single 2-hour feature. My actual experience seeing Watchmen was anticlimactic: I enjoyed myself throughout most of it, happy that the narrative mostly held together and the Hollywoodized characters all seemed to work. And then the whole production kind of fell apart for me because of its nonsensical ending. I would posit that anyone who thought that that ending actually worked may have been partially stupefied by Dr. Manhattan’s Cherenkov radiation, the director himself included.

It was largely because of my dissatisfaction with Watchmen that I skipped Snyder’s 2009 foray into animation, the clumsily-titled Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Personally, I think that the fact they got Owl City to perform the theme song for this film (OMFG! Get it?) is more than enough to give you an idea of its creative sensibilities. When I first started reading about Sucker Punch, I regarded it with some hesitation. Snyder is at the point in his career where he can start spreading his proverbial wings. He’s helming the upcoming Superman remake, with Chris Nolan producing. I knew that Sucker Punch was almost certainly a vanity project; the visually-rich story (written by Snyder himself) plays to all of the director’s strengths. And since most of the film occurs within the lead character’s head, you could tell a totally irrational story and justify it by saying that it was all a fever dream. I suppose what surprised me was the extent to which I was correct about these preconceptions, and how far Snyder chose to take his signature stylings.

Sucker Punch is a truly bizarre piece of work. It begins with not one but two song-length montages, in which Emily Browning’s character (Baby Doll) is introduced, and hurried through the death of her mother, her ensuing conflict with her step-father, her accidental shooting of her younger sister, and her subsequent admission in to the Lennox House asylum. These two montages are not badly made; in fact, if you interspersed them with clips of Emily Browning singing (she contributes a number of songs to the soundtrack), you’d have an award-winning music video on your hands. But from a narrative standpoint, it misses an important piece of information. When we arrive at the asylum, we are led to believe that Baby Doll is being wrongly committed, i.e., she’s actually not crazy. But we are flung into her delusions almost immediately upon arrival … so is she crazy or not?

In , Snyder explains that Sucker Punch‘s main schtick is an attempt to explore how our minds deal with hardship, and how we create these worlds for ourselves to help us cope. It’s roughly the same theme as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, but that movie conveys its message (much more successfully, I might add) by firmly grounding the rest of the tale in reality. Sucker Punch has no such machinations. Instead, Snyder decides to go all Inception on our collective asses, by then introducing a daydream within the daydream. Four of them, in fact, with each one set in a slightly different sci-fi/fantasy universe. Why this happens is completely unexplained. It’s also largely unnecessary, save for the fact that it awarded the visual effects house Animal Logic a substantial chunk of the film’s US$82-million budget.

The visual effects work is impressive, to be sure. It overuses slow-motion again, as always (if you played all of the slow-motion sequences in this movie at normal speed, the whole thing would be 30 minutes shorter), but overall the production and creature design is meticulous and really top-notch. If I didn’t have to watch the movie itself, I would have really enjoyed the various set-pieces as standalone Youtube clips. But the ambiguity of the storyline does these FX sequences a disservice: I actually felt bored watching them. There was never any context, so there was no sense of urgency or danger at any point in the story. When the movie introduces its supporting characters, it does so within the daydream, so it isn’t clear if they’re “real” people or just figments of Baby Doll’s imagination. So even when they start dying, you’re not really sure if you should care. By the time Baby Doll awakens from the base daydream, we realize that some of that stuff did indeed happen – those characters actually died – but at that point it’s too late to feel emotional about it.

As it draws to a close, the movie explains everything that happened in its previous 100 minutes with a two-sentence exchange between some supporting characters. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be one of those big reveals, ala Usual Suspects or Sixth Sense, but it’s carried out so offhandedly that you’ll miss it if you’re not paying attention. And then it ends the whole sorry affair with a hilariously written voiceover about finding ourselves, or some other bullshit.

Zack Snyder’s directorial career has been an interesting one to follow. In many ways, he’s like Guillermo del Toro in that he alternates between adapting comic book properties and developing personal projects. Unlike del Toro though, I don’t see him steadily improving with each new picture. He probably enjoyed himself tremendously while making this film, but it isn’t clear whether audiences are enjoying themselves along with him. What’s clear though is this: Sucker Punch is one hell of a demo reel.

Posted in Media, Movies | 5 Comments »
1

Panasonic Lumix GH2 Review

28 Feb 2011

About a month ago, I decided to try out the micro four-thirds format as a possible replacement for my bulky DSLR. The model I settled on was the Panasonic Lumix GH2, a second-generation camera with distinctly serious stylings. I wrote a full-length review over at Technogra.ph, along with some samples of my favorite images from the past month’s worth of shooting. Check it out!

Posted in Hardware, Photography, Technology | 1 Comment »
3

On Switching from DSLRs to Micro Four-Thirds

6 Jan 2011

I’ve been a little obsessed with weight recently. Not so much in terms of my body weight (although to be fair, I’ve been adjusting my diet as well over the past weeks), but in terms of the weight of the things I carry around with me. Over the past year or so I’ve been slowly “downgrading” my primary laptop from a 15” 2.8GhZ, 6-lb Macbook Pro to a 13” 2.66Ghz, 4.5-lb Macbook Pro to (finally) a 13” 2.1Ghz, 3-lb Macbook Air. And although the Air is significantly slower in CPU speed than any of the current generation MBPs in the same price range, the technology has progressed to the point where it’s “fast enough,” in my opinion.

I’m doing the same thing with my camera. I’ve found that I’ve been lugging around my Nikon D90 less and less recently, due to the fact that my neck just isn’t friends with the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. The whole package weighs 2.2 kilos for crying out loud, and that doesn’t even include the frickin’ speedlight. And so it was that I’ve started reading up on Micro Four-Thirds format cameras, and seriously considering another “downgrade.”

My strategy is similar to how I finally embraced the Air as my main portable: was it good enough? For the MBA, it definitely was. The combination of the reasonable CPU and the super-speedy SSD makes for some very responsive computing. And likewise, Micro 4/3s cameras have had 3 years to work out their early flaws and initial missteps, so my fingers are firmly crossed that this experiment won’t be a total wash.

The particular model I’ve been looking at is Panasonic’s GH2, which is at the very top of the four-thirds line. Unlike its younger siblings, the GF and the Gx series, the GH line yearns to be a DSLR. It’s got a pronounced grip on its left side and a proper viewfinder in the back. I’m not a purist by any means, but any camera that you hold at arm’s length to take pictures with, I simply cannot take seriously. The viewfinder, electronic as it may be, was a must for me.

The GH2 also sports a healthy amount of buttons and dials on the body where the rest of the Pana line has opted for all-touchscreen controls. Now, I love touch interfaces as much as the next guy (I was one of the first in line for the iPad after all), but not for devices that you need to be able to operate without looking. Also, since I spend most of the time peering through the viewfinder, I hardly think I’d be able to use a touchscreen menu much, if at all.

Early reviews of the GH2 have been largely positive, with quality rivaling that of mid-range DSLRs like Canon’s 60D and Nikon’s D7000. It’s not cheap, and certainly wouldn’t be something I’d recommend to beginners, but for enthusiasts and people like me who are obsessed with frivolous issues such as weight and volume, it seems like a very promising choice.

I ordered mine earlier today, coupled with the very standard 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens. (Don’t let that focal range and aperture fool you, by the way; that’s a $300 piece of glass.) I was debating whether I should go with the $800 14-140mm f/4.0-5.8, but in the end I decided to stick with a walkaround, and just work my way up.

Oh, and did I mention that the GH2 and its kit lens weigh a grand total of 650 grams?

Posted in Media, Photography, Technology | 3 Comments »
0

Infographics Love

19 Aug 2010

I’ve recently gotten into designing infographics as a way to bookend my days weaving Javascript and evenings getting my ass handed to me by Starcraft 2’s AI. I’ve so far churned out two, one of them featured on ChartPorn and the other mentioned on the Fast Co Design blog.

They’re both on my Flickr stream (and lord knows I really need to start updating that with actual photos soon), but I’m reproducing them here to try to get this damn blog active again.

Posted in Artwork, Games, Media, Movies, Technology | No Comments »
7

Six Years of Lost

27 May 2010
It’s a Little Hard to Let Go
6 Years of Lost

To say that Lost was the best show on television for its six-season run is fairly debatable. With the JJ Abrams-produced series sharing nights with such heavy-hitters as The Wire and The Shield, that’s a tough sell even for the most devoted of fans. But what isn’t arguable is that Lost was easily the most ambitious show of its time. Nowhere else would you find this particular brew of cliffhangers, reboots and indulgent character development mixing it up with time travel, weird science and the logistics of island living. As far as ensemble dramas go, Lost was on a level all its own.

Its unique approach to storytelling was ironically the same thing that turned off a lot of potential fans early on. Instead of telling you what you wanted to know, Lost drew out a complex mind maze, leaving tantalizing clues that often led to simply more questions. For the devoted fans, this was the show’s biggest draw. Lost was about never getting what you expected, and constantly being surprised by the direction the show was taking. This was no small feat when you consider that the entire run was over a hundred episodes long. Like a good Radiohead album, the show was a constant rejection of the status quo … sometimes even the status quo that the show itself had propagated.

As someone who has watched Lost since it first debuted in 2004, I’ve gone through the stomach-butterflies pain of waiting for each new episode to break on a weekly basis. These are some of my favorites (obviously, there will be spoilers).
1. Walkabout (Season 1, Episode 4)
  
  In which we are introduced to John Locke, and the Lost writers show M. Night Shyamalan how to write a twist ending. This was the episode that made me a fan, and is on my list of single best TV episodes of all-time. (Others on this list: Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Making a Stand and The Culling.)
2. Orientation (Season 2, Episode 3)
  
  In which the hitherto-unknown Eko lays the beatdown on Jin, Sawyer and Michael, and the infamous numbers become central to the show’s mythology as Desmond passes on his button-pressing duties to Locke and Jack.
3. The Long Con (Season 2, Episode 13)
  
  There’s a new sheriff in town, boys. This was the episode that triggered the popular quip amongst fans: “Once you go Sawyer, you never go Jack.”
4. The Man Behind the Curtain (Season 3, Episode 20)
  
  In which we meet the young Benjamin Linus as he is fostered into the island’s leadership position. Ben is my favorite Lost character and the way this episode tracks his growth into a masterful manipulator/insecure whelp is mesmerizing. It’s widely agreed that Lost … well, lost its way during its third season (hey, Nikki and Paulo)), but they certainly got it together in time for the finale.
5. Through the Looking Glass (Season 3, Episode 23)
  
  Meta twist episode! Lost pulls a long con on its viewers by showing us what we believed to be a confusing flashback, but what turned out to be a flash-forward instead. (Years later, ABC would attempt to do a whole show based solely on this concept.) Meanwhile, they kill off a main character while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the final half of the show. Possibly the best season finale of any show ever produced.
6. The Constant (Season 4, Episode 5)
  
  The fan-favorite time travel episode, in which the Lost writers pull a Slaughterhouse Five quasi-tribute that would’ve made Vonnegut proud. Mindbendingly paced and emotionally powerful, this episode along with Season 1’s “Walkabout” represented Lost at its absolute best.
7. The Shape of Things to Come (Season 4, Episode 9)
  
  In terms of plot advancement, it’s hard to beat this episode. Ben Linus teleports to Tunisia, flash-forward-style. Mercenaries kill Alex. The rivalry between Ben and Charles Widmore is fleshed out wonderfully as a decades-long struggle for control of the Island.
8. Happily Ever After (Season 6, Episode 11)
  
  Season 6 was, in many ways, a very long epilogue to a show that was constantly screwing with its fans’ perceptions and expectations. Episode 11 was the turning point that hinted at Desmond Hume’s final contribution to the show and its characters, as being the only person apparently impervious to the effects of … well, even death itself.
And That Final Episode

Lost’s series finale was quite possibly the most divisive episode ever aired on network television, in that fans were either severely disappointed or tearfully emotional. The explanations for season six have been widely written up at this point so I won’t go into the details here, but I will say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It wasn’t a perfect episode – it didn’t hit the creative highs of “Walkabout” or “The Constant” – but I felt that it was very much like the show producers were writing a protracted love letter to the characters that they were leaving behind. I particularly loved how the dialogue was so sharp at this point that they managed to explain the entire season in just four lines exchanged between Jack and his estranged father.

Lost has never been an easy show to watch; it alternately tests your patience and confuses the crap out of you. Occasionally, it leaves your jaw on the floor, right before smash-cutting to the end titles. It’s hard to imagine another show ever being quite like it (although people are certainly trying), and maybe there shouldn’t be. It took Jack Shephard a whole season before he was ready to let go; I might take even longer.
Posted in Media, TV | 7 Comments »
5

That iPad

14 Apr 2010

This is my second attempt at writing a review of the iPad today. I had gotten through a full thousand-word opus earlier this morning and was just about to publish it, when my text editor – the creatively-named Text Editor – decided to replace the entire article with the word “null.” It didn’t help that the essay had been written purely on the iPad either, which in and of itself was already a bit of a feat.

But here we are again, anyway. I’ve resorted to using the built-in Notes app for the rest of this piece, which I had originally rejected because I didn’t especially like the comic-sans-esque font. At this point I’ll be happy with anything that can save my work properly though.

My writing position (and seriously, when was the last time you read anyone describing their posture as they wrote, and it was actually relevant information?) is, in a word, folded. I began this morning sitting on the edge of my bed, the iPad balanced on my lap, and hunched over. My workflow has all the cadence of a funeral march – I poke out three or four sentences, sit up and stretch emphatically, sigh expansively, then fold myself over again, looking for all the world like someone who rings Gothic church bells for a living.

Given these rather torturous working conditions, it may be a surprise that I am experiencing a perverse sense of fun as I do this. There are only a handful of people in the Philippines with iPads right now, and I’m probably the only one who would be willing to go through this seemingly pointless exercise. There is a reason though: I wanted to see if the iPad could work as a decent mobile productivity tool, and the only way to do that is if you actually use it to produce something.

Most of the iPad’s virtues have been espoused at length by other writers, with far better words than mine, so suffice to say that all the good stuff is true. Reading ebooks is a marvelous experience (I’m using the Kindle app), and digital comics via the Marvel app are even more so. (I’ve spent over $50 on digital comics just this week alone.) Touch-centric games like Harbor Master HD took up most of my free time over the weekend, and watching video or viewing websites are, in some ways, superior to their full-sized laptop counterparts. Browsing the web, in particular, has been a really engaging experience. The surprising part is that a lot of common sites look and feel better on the vertically-oriented iPad than in the more traditional landscape orientation. Meanwhile, mainstays such as Tweetdeck and GoodReader look really slick and work very well in their spiffy new iPad guises.

But back to our experiment, and my writing position. At the dinner table, the iPad needs to be at an angle in order to be used properly. I don’t have the official keyboard stand, so I use whatever I can find to prop it up. In this particular instance, “whatever I can find” turns out to be a snoozing 15″ Macbook Pro, which I gingerly slip underneath the iPad to give it a small boost. My writing velocity increases slightly.

In many ways, I’ve been waiting for the iPad for the better part of a decade. I’ve been using various small touch devices for most of the 00’s (Palms, PocketPCs, etc) and in early 2005, I was an early adopter of Microsoft’s TabletPC initiative. This was in the form of the HP TC1100, a 1.1Ghz, 4-lb hybrid tablet that used pen and keyboard as its primary input methods. It was slow, buggy, and worst of all, ran a haphazardly modified version of Windows XP. Also, it cost US$2500. Possibly the only thing I liked about the TC1100 was that it included a tiny kickstand. To say that the market response to these half-baked devices was tepid is putting it mildly. Five years later, Apple (and in a few months, ) has decided to give the tablet concept another go, and the results are pretty astounding. The iPad soundly trounces the TC1100 in every way, shape and form, and it does so at one-fifth of the cost. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.

The mobile computing experience is forever a compromise between weight, performance, features and battery life, and whether you think the iPad has struck the right balance depends largely on how open you are to learning new things. There are new micro-paradigms to be learned here, and old ones that need to be un-learned. Some people will find that frustrating, others will find it exciting. As mentioned above, the virtual keyboard has a very real learning curve to it. If you write mostly in plain, formal English, it will catch and correct most of your errors as you make them, but other styles (or God forbid, Tagalog) is a real challenge. I’ve spent a total of three hours writing and rewriting this piece, and although I can feel my typing speed increasing with each new paragraph, I’m still nowhere near my speed with a physical keyboard. On the other hand, battery levels have dropped a mere 30% over that period — leaving with me with about 5 hours of usable power — so I’m finding it hard to complain too loudly.

Is it the perfect mobile computer? No, of course not, because there’s no such thing. It’s a damned good piece of machinery though, and if you’re thinking of getting one, my advice couldn’t be simpler. Just get one.

Posted in Books, Comics, Hardware, Technology | 5 Comments »
2

There Will Be Fireworks

22 Feb 2010

The Philippines’ love affair with fireworks reached its summit in late 2005 when the La Mancha group organized the first World Pyro Olympics at the then-unfinished Mall of Asia. Five days of evening performances from each of the eight participating countries, showcasing some of the fanciest fireworks you’ll likely ever see in these parts – how could you go wrong? And indeed the WPO has proven to be a popular diversion in its four iterations since. This year saw the debut of its very own spinoff: the International Pyromusical Competition, which was essentially the same thing, but with loud music accompanying the loud explosions.

(Not my picture.)

And so it was that I found myself facing the sea on a breezy Sunday evening, waiting for a solitary barge floating in the middle of the bay to light up the darkened sky. The event seemed well-organized and quite comfortable, although perhaps this initial impression was colored slightly by the fact that we were in the VIP section, and they were serving us dinner.

We arrived about an hour before the competition was scheduled to start, and sat ourselves down as close to the bayside as possible. The VIP section was a long rectangular strip of pavement along the outermost edge of the baywalk, with about 2 dozen large round dinner tables and a modest dinner buffet. The size of each table was such that you were most likely going to share with someone, unless you happened to bring a whole van full of friends along with you. For awhile, I allowed myself the small fantasy of actually having the table to ourselves – perhaps the VIP section wasn’t running at capacity? – but alas, this was not to be.

Half an hour before the United Kingdom performance began, a young man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me in Tagalog whether there were other people sharing the table with us. I admitted, “No,” and when he turned to wave his companions over, I wished I had lied. Their group consisted of three ladies suffering from varying degrees of obesity and looking like they sold hair elastics in Philcoa, and three squealing 5-year-olds that they were dragging along by the pigtails. They fell into their chairs, making the silverware dance and the wine glasses shudder. They chattered at each other while trying to get their respective bundles-of-joy to sit still for more than two seconds at a stretch. Behind us, a string quartet was playing, and I imagined the sinking Titanic.

One bundle-of-joy in particular was quite memorable. She didn’t like the sound of violins and so decided to play Paramore over her cellphone’s loud speaker. She placed the cellphone, of course, right beside me. Thus energized, she began to explore the subterranean world under our dinner table, crawling over our feet and seriously destroying my calm. Resurfacing from her excursions, she proceeded to smash her head against the underside of the table, and our glasses spilled their contents out on to the tablecloth in fright. I half-stood to see if she was alright, but her mother, mistaking my reaction for concern, waved me back down. “OK lang sya, OK lang sya,” she said. I was hoping she had knocked herself unconscious, and would have to be taken to the hospital.

Thankfully, the performance soon began, and apart from the occasional non-sequitur interjections of “Nasan yung dede nya? Yung dede nya?” from our tablemates, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The Brits were good, but the Chinese were better, and unfortunately there’s no way to properly describe the experience of either performance to someone who hadn’t been there, at that distance. We watched the spiraling, cascading fireworks cast triumphant reflections on the water, and I have to admit – for all my complaints about the mediocre food, and the presence of other people – I was enthralled.

Posted in Media, Randomness | 2 Comments »
4

An Unpopular Opinion about the Ipad

28 Jan 2010

I don’t usually write about technology much anymore these days, but the Internet is currently ablaze with opinions on Apple’s new iPad announcement several hours ago. A lot of these opinions are just echo-chamber drivel, i.e., but I wanted to share some thoughts on one of the foremost complaints about the iPad, i.e., the “glaring” lack of multitasking.

Wirth’s Law states that “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster,” and nowhere is this law more true than in the mobile space. The computing power that you can squeeze out of these smaller machines is severely restricted by physical limits such as size, heat output and power usage. The single most common source of computer frustration is the fact that our machines take too long to do what we ask of them, whether it is opening a Word document or loading up a desktop game. We know from Wirth’s Law that the software is the culprit here. In fact, no matter how advanced our hardware gets, our software will continue to overtax it. That’s just the way we write code, I suppose.

Are there any solutions? Well, Apple’s solution was to not allow third-party apps to multitask at all. This, at least, restricts the number of applications competing for your device’s limited resources. People have been whining about the lack of multitasking in the iPhone since its inception, and they continue to do so with the new iPad. But having used all manner of smartphones, pocketPCs, netbooks and tabletPCs over the past 6 years, I can say with much conviction that multitasking did not make these devices better. All it did was make them slower. Generally, you end up turning all of the other apps off anyway, because the foreground application needed as much computing power as your device could muster.

What people tend to misunderstand about these smaller mobile devices is that you cannot look at them the same way you look at a full-blown laptop or workstation. Even the manufacturers misunderstand this, which is primarily why the TabletPC initiative floundered during the mid-00’s, and why smartphones have such limited resonance with consumers. They just shoehorn traditional ideas into a form-factor that is fundamentally different, and people just end up getting confused about what it’s for. And these machines are always, without fail, abysmally slow. This is ironic, because the primary use-case of a mobile device is that you are using it “when you’re on the go,” i.e., when time is most critical. Instead you find yourself rooting around the Task Manager killing various processes just so you’ll have enough memory to load up OneNote. The sledgehammer “single-tasking” solution that Apple took with the iPhone has largely been vindicated by the fact that it now boasts 17 million users around the world, and I think that doing the same thing with the iPad was a good idea. It keeps thing simple, and here’s the really important bit: reliable.

There’s this saying that, as a designer, you know your work is finished not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. It’s this exclusionist strategy that has served Apple so well with their consumer devices. By stripping their mobile products down to the essentials, and then polishing the heck out of those essentials, they’ve produced devices that people describe with words like “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking.” Me, I’m just glad it doesn’t multitask.

Posted in Hardware, Software, Technology | 4 Comments »
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Shooting Motion

14 Jan 2010

Capturing flash motion is a favorite photography subgenre of mine, probably because it’s notoriously easy to pull off once you’ve got your camera settings sorted. On my D90, I shoot with an 85mm lens open at f/2.5, ISO 200. I like the 85mm for this because it’s very light compared to any of my zooms, and this technique involves a lot of camping (i.e., holding the camera to your face for several minutes doing nothing, then blasting off 5 shots in quick succession).

Shutter speed should be in the non-handholdable* range of 1/5 to 1/8, depending on how much of the background I want to be able to resolve in the image. You have to make sure that your strobe syncs rear-curtain; every camera has a slightly different way of doing this. I believe compact cameras have these too, so theoretically you should be able to pull this off even if you’re not using a DSLR.

Right before the gig starts I usually take a few images of the stage area so I can see what kind of flash power I need to illuminate it appropriately. For Route196 last night, this was 1/4 to 1/8 on my smallish SB-600 flash (with an aperture of f/2.2 to f/3.2).

Then it’s just a matter of waiting for the right moment. These flash-motion portraits work best when the subject is about to make a quick move. Guitarists are super-easy because there’s a lot of repetition in their hand movements, so you’ll have a lot of chances to get something nice. Essentially, you open your shutter right as the move’s being executed. If you do it right, you’ll get a nice motion blur around the subject.

*Why non-handholdable? The rule of thumb when judging whether a particular shutter speed is "handholdable" is 1/focal-length. In other words, on my 85mm, I shouldn’t be able to handhold the camera at anything lower than 1/80-1/100. The reason is due to the fact that longer focal lengths magnify vibrations, so you are more likely to end up with blurry images. Conversely, if you had a very wide lens, like Canon’s 10-22mm, you could handhold that even at 1/10 or 1/15 and still get a decently sharp image.

Strobes allow us to cheat this law because the light coming from our flashes travels at around 1/1000 or faster. When you are making a flash-enabled exposure, the area illuminated by the strobe will be crystal-clear because it was lit at a speed much, much higher than your handhold minimum. Meanwhile, everything that wasn’t lit by the strobe (your background, usually) will still exhibit all the usual camera-shake. This is why you want to have your aperture open pretty wide when capturing flash-motion. Since your background will be pretty shaky, you want to bokeh it out as much as possible.

One of my first really decent flash-motion images from back in May 2009. (In photographer-years, I was 3 months old at the time.) Ironically, this is of Miggy Chavez of Chicosci, but let’s not judge. This was pretty textbook stuff: 50mm lens at f/2.5, 1/20 shutter speed. (I didn’t own an 85mm back then. And oh, I was still shooting Canon.)

Although my recent flash-motion images have been taken with on-camera flash, I occasionally have the luxury of setting up colored, off-camera strobes. The image above was taken in Magnet High Street with a green-gelled flash clamped to a ladder about 4 feet away from the subject. I guess I must’ve been feeling cocky that night coz my settings were all over the place: 2 second exposure handheld, f/8 opening and 17mm focal length.

This fire-dancer image pushes the limit of the flash-motion technique. In order to track the flames as they moved around the subject, I had to shoot a 4-second exposure, which is impossible to handhold, no matter what you do. So I tripoded it - the sane solution. The flash hardly did anything in this instance because the light from the fire was already more than enough to expose the dancer in its center. This actually speaks to an important caveat in shooting flash-motion: if the subject is throwing off a lot of its own light, your flash is unnecessary, unless you want to try to overpower the subject’s light with your own.

The rest of my flash-motion portraits can be found here.

Posted in Media, Photography, Tutorials | 1 Comment »