“At the end of the day I’m not the president of the United States.”
/Designated Survivor
Right… Or actually; WRONG!
Category Archives: Creativity and Recreation
Posts on creativity and recreation, creative writing, photography, film, TV and books.
Neighbors
– Neighbors, can’t live with them, can’t blow them up…
– Why not?
– Because they live next doors, how would you like it if someone set off a bomb where you lived?
Header image from Pixabay
Colors and Color Dictionaries
http://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/Color/ is a page about different types of computer generated color schemes. There is also a page with Color Name Dictionaries. Great tools for creating applications or web pages using colors that look good together and/or are distinct enough for tag-colors and the same.
The right thing
The right thing is not necessarily a good thing, sometimes it’s just the least bad alternative, and when you find yourself resorting to a lot of least bad alternatives you might want to stop and think about where you life is heading.
Homeland
Homeland: Depressed Spy Porn
Orphan Black, TV-tip
Orphan Black is a science fiction TV-show. It features Sarah Manning, a street-wise Orphan from England, who witnesses a woman looking exactly like her committing suicide by jumping in front of a train.
Being a survivor-type, and perhaps also driven by curiosity, Sarah picks up the dead woman’s bag, abandoned at the platform, and concoct a plan to take over her identity in order to steal money from her.
Sarah needs the money to get away with her daughter, Kira, whom she has not seen in almost a year, and her step-brother, Felix.
Taking over the dead woman’s life proves to present more problems than solutions and soon Sarah finds herself in the middle of a complex plot involving murderers, clones and dirty cops.
Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah, and Allison, and Cosima and…
It soon turns out that the woman Sarah witnessed committing suicide is far from the only one looking like her. In fact, the plot is full of Sarah-Manning-look-a-like clones, from the home making soccer mom Allison, to the smart scientist Cosima, to the outright crazy Helena.
All these characters are played by one actor, Tatiana Maslany. Since most every scene of the show features at least one clone, Maslany is pulling the show in the most literary sense!
From a technical point of view it gets extra interesting when there’s more than one clone in front of the camera, especially when they interact by touch.
If you check the above film you might pick up that there’s no green screen thing going on here. Instead the camera is programmed so that it will make the exact same moves repeatedly and Tatiana can play the scene as one clone, then the other, and finally the shots are merged digitally.
When clones are touching a recording of the scene with no actors is used to create a background that can be used to block out Tatianas double, Catherine. Then a scene where Tatiana plays the clone is superimposed on the blocked out area.
It’s pretty much subtraction and addition … but with moving pictures… 😀
When? Where? How?
Orphan Black has just finished season two and will, hopefully, be back for season three in 2015. So if you’re new to the show you have two nice seasons to catch up, and I really recommend you do!
Part from being a technical masterpiece and a proof that there are some really sharp actors out there, Orphan Black is also a mesmerizing story dipping into themes like identity and nature versus nurture.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you check out Orphan Black!
Being a hero sucks
Being a hero sucks; wherever I go there’s conflict and drama and whatever I try to do there’s always complications! And it’s all because of these pompous authors! I hate them!
Hard to explain…
Things worth explaining are seldom that easy to explain.
Improvisation Freeze Stuns Grand Central Station
When working with theater there are a number of different improvisation or acting exercises you can perform. The freeze is especially useful in improvised drama exercises.
I was once part of an exercise where half the group was parents and the other half was children. The whole exercise went on for a while and there was once sequence where we got to see the kids’ teacher being a nazi. As a group we decided to storm the classroom and … well I guess we weren’t going to lynch the teacher but before that situation came to its edge the exercise leader yelled FREEZE!!!
And we did. Although, not for as long as these guys does it.
Watch as improvised drama stuns Grand Central Station!
The perfect melody
I can’t really put my finger on it, but I’ve noticed in the songs I like there is something in the melody that just has to be right. Some form of melodic conclusion that has to be reached or the music will likely leave me feeling like you feel when you’re about the sneeze and the it just never happens. I guess the word I’m looking for is “unfulfilled.”
Alihan Samedov’s Sen Gelmez Oldun is one such song. In fact the oboe like instrument does exactly the kind of melodic trip it has to do in order to become just perfect! I simply love that melody!
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJQE0xdYw80