Tag: film

Watch the ‘Perseverance’ rover land on Mars in this just-released video

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Since we began sending probes to the surface of Mars, our experience of their landings was a nail-biting silence, punctured only by a NASA Mission Control engineer announcing milestones in the spacecraft progress. That all changed with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover filming its February 18 landing . Six of the 23 onboard commercial cameras shot high-definition footage of the supersonic descent—dubbed the “ 7 minutes of terror “—and first surface movements. Three cameras trained on the parachute, while another three videoed the descent stage, rover, and approaching ground. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Pasadena, California, facility that built the rover and manages the $2.7 billion mission, premiered its high-resolution video during today’s briefing . This marks the first time we’re able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet. “These images and videos are the stuff of our dreams,” said Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) lead engineer Allen Chen. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes; the images were better than I could have imagined,” JPL’s Adam Nelessen told Fast Company about his initial reaction to the footage. An EDL lead systems engineer, Nelessen focused on the EDL camera technology. “There is a lot that we can learn from the imagery. One of the best engineering outcomes is going to be recording the inflation of the parachute at a high frame rate. We’re going to learn just how well this thin piece of fabric is actually performing.” This is also the first time EDL engineers have seen the landing process unfurl in its entirety, as they were only able to run tests in separate stages on Earth. The footage revealed that the EDL navigation system came to within 16 feet of its landing target. The video also gave a better sense of the debris that kicks up during landing, particularly as NASA looks to land increasingly heavier items on Mars. “We worry about dust and sand confounding radar sensors and making our landing more difficult,” he adds. “So seeing what the dust environment and hazards are like in the area have really good engineering uses for us.” Plus, observing the landing site on approach offers a head start on how to best navigate the area to achieve the science objectives. More raw images of Mars can be found here . High-resolution photo from the descent stage camera of Perseverance being lowered to the Martian surface via the sky-crane mechanism Read More …

How this Russian director’s Screenlife films went from gimmick to gold in Hollywood

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When Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov was producing the 2014 horror film Unfriended , a movie told entirely on Skype screens in which a group of high school kids are haunted by a friend who’d been bullied and—they thought—committed suicide, he was constantly asked the same question: Why didn’t any of the characters, who, one by one, are freakishly tortured by the former friend, shut down their computers and go into each other’s homes?   Back then, of course, the question was a natural one. Now, Bekmambetov says, “No one asks that.”   Thanks to COVID-19, leaving your house and going to visit someone else, even to save their life, is a potentially fatal risk. Indeed, today no one would ever wonder why characters in a film never physically interact with one another. After all, that’s essentially what life has looked like for almost a year now. But while the pandemic has been devastating to Hollywood—shutting down productions and causing major studios to shift many of their tentpole releases to digital distribution or punt them into the future—it has been a boon for Bekmambetov and his production company, Bazelevs Studio. The company, whose primary hubs are in Moscow and Los Angeles, pioneered and specializes in so-called Screenlife films that take place exclusively on computer and mobile screens and are shot using GoPros and other nontraditional cameras, often with actors and filmmakers in separate locations Read More …

How WarnerMedia just killed the Hollywood way of doing business

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“It’s holy shit time.”   So proclaimed one Hollywood manager just minutes after WarnerMedia announced on December 3 that it will be releasing its entire 2021 slate of movies on HBO Max, the company’s fledgling streaming platform. The lineup of films, which includes major tentpole releases such as Suicide Squad 2 , Godzilla vs. Kong , Dune, and The Matrix 4 , will simultaneously be released in theaters.   The move marks the most significant milestone yet in the streaming-versus-theatrical debate that has been roiling for years now, growing more agitated and desperate in recent months due to COVID-19, which has all but decimated the theatrical moviegoing business. Yet even as COVID-19 has shuttered movie theaters around the world and caused movie studios to make historically unheard-of decisions—for instance, moving would-be theatrical films such as Hamilton and Mulan over to their streaming services (both of those were released on Disney Plus) or selling off otherwise worthy films to Netflix or another tech giant (such as Enola Holmes and Greyhound, which bowed on Netflix and Apple TV Plus respectively)—studios have nonetheless clung mightily to the belief that when it comes to big-budget films, there is simply no upside in releasing them on streaming. The reason? The box-office revenue for those films is simply too vast to justify a streaming release. This explains why, up until now, studios have been feverishly punting their most valuable gems into 2021 and beyond, praying that by the time their movies are set to debut in theaters, we’ll all be vaccinated and chomping on popcorn in close proximity to other humans again. (With Mulan , which cost a reported $200 million to make, Disney tried to insulate itself by charging subscribers $30 to see the movie during its first month in release.) But WarnerMedia’s move throws down the gauntlet on what has largely been an almost academic debate. One year from now, there will be actual data showing just how much money the company made or lost on its audacious bet. It won’t be a matter of hypotheticals; there will be actual numbers showing how movies like The Matrix 4 fared on streaming, at least in terms of how many new subscribers it attracted to HBO Max in the quarter it was released, if not actual viewing metrics. Nor is this a toe-dipping experiment, as the company has teed up for this Christmas with Wonder Woman 1984 , the first tentpole to be sacrificed to a combined HBO Max and theatrical release, a move prompted by the most recent surge in COVID-19 cases. This is a company going all in. Granted, WarnerMedia is being very clear that this is a one-year thing, driven wholly by the pandemic and (not that its executives are saying this) what was learned from the disastrous rollout of Tenet in theaters back on Labor Day weekend. But putting all of its planned 2021 movies on HBO Max at the same time as debuting them theatrically remains the biggest, most declarative statement yet in terms of the future of streaming.   As for the logistics of how this will work, the movies that WarnerMedia is releasing on HBO Max will be made available to subscribers for 31 days Read More …

As psychedelics enter a new era, Errol Morris’s new doc explores their original evangelist

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While the U.S. has been seized by both a pandemic and an epic undermining of its democratic processes, psychedelics are undergoing their own revolution. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that drugs associated with existential awakening should accompany movements like Black Lives Matter, which oppose systemic inequity. It’s in this moment that filmmaker Errol Morris has decided to fix his camera lens on Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the onetime girlfriend of psychedelics evangelist Timothy Leary, called “the most dangerous man in America” by President Richard Nixon. Timothy Leary was a Harvard lecturer and psychology researcher who, alongside assistant professor Richard Albert, created the Harvard Psilocybin Project between 1960 and 1962. The project sought to understand how the human mind interacted with hallucinatory drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, which were both legal at the time. Leary was later dismissed from Harvard for proselytizing the virtues of using LSD and for his lax if not unscientific approach to experimentation. After leaving Harvard, Leary was propelled into pop culture fame. His numerous run-ins with the law and the loud condemnation from Nixon helped seal his status as an icon of the counterculture revolution. The film, called My Psychedelic Love Story , follows the five year relationship of Harcourt-Smith and Leary as they tripped from country to country evading U.S. law enforcement and meeting new friends. Premiering on Showtime on November 29, the film is a high drama story that is rendered absurd in the light of 2020 drug legislation. Joanna Harcourt-Smith in My Psycehdelic Love Story . [Photo: Nafis Azad/Courtesy of SHOWTIME] “It’s certainly ironic that this whole thing was propelled forward by drugs laws that we now see as insane,” says Morris. “But the war on drugs has always been nonsense.” When Harcourt-Smith and Leary met, he was on the run from U.S Read More …