Shige San is one of the truest examples of a public servant and personal savior. The video below tell the story of a retired police detective that now dedicates his life to preventing deaths at Japan’s suicide cliffs, providing emergency assistance and counseling even as tourists flock to the site, attracted by its notoriety as a popular suicide destination. This is a wonderful short film, that tells an extraordinary story and worth taking 40 minutes to watch it.
I suggest if you have an AppleTV or a smart TV with Vimeo available you watch it on the big screen. The experience is so much better than on your computer monitor or tablet.
Modern film making is less than 100 years old. Think about this, the first movie with synced sound is 89 years old. The first feature length color motion picture dates to 1914. In 102 years the industry has seen massive changes in technology and the way film making is created. Looking to the future you have to think about how gaming works, realistic images get rendered on screen in real-time with real world dynamics.
Recently Unity showed a demo of what the future might hold for the film industry. Not all of it, but definitely some of it. Using just $3000.00 of hardware, running Unity’s gaming engine, they rendered out the video below to a live audience in real-time. The quality is pretty damn amazing especially when you think back to what gaming was like just ten years ago.
Unity’s film The is ADAM, and it’s a multi-part series to be released over the course of the next few months. Each segment is being developed to test each beta release of the Unity gaming engine and additional features, quality, and improved render capabilities. It is all part of a way to demo the new Unity 5.4 and the cinematic sequencer currently being developed, along with an experiments in implementing of real-time believable volumetric area lighting. The Unity demo shows off the physics simulation tool CaronteFX and the quality of the natural physics it produces.
Pretty impressive stuff. The full length short will be shown at Unite Europe 2016 in Amsterdam.
This put a smile on my face for a number of reasons. First off it is a really nice documentary short. Beautiful cinematography and editing. Solid story line and an interesting character. An insight into the wisdom that one gets from years of creativity. And then there is the portion of the film, where Mr. William Amer comes full circle to rediscover his passion and spread it to others. Love this little film. Great work from • of two lands •
Over the last ten years, the New York Times has been transitioning from an online news paper, to a dynamic media powerhouse, featuring some of the best short films on the internet. In the last couple of years, the production value of their shorts has reached the same level as the journalism it supports. The video below is a prime example of what I am talking about. Part of a series of five films commissioned by the New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” issue, which commemorates people who died this year this film focuses on Johnny “Spider” Footman who was New York’s oldest taxi driver. Spider tells a great story, and has a great message for a Monday morning. The film by Joshua Z Weinstein that this short is based on can be found here. The trailer for it is below.
Modular 4 