Author Topic: good Videos [short films] here :) (Read 316253 times)

tomos · « **Reply #325 on:** December 06, 2017, 05:29 PM »

Here's a series of short movies made with the Unity game engine:
ADAM: Episode 1:
-Deozaan (December 06, 2017, 02:36 PM)

they were great

got very dramatic...

IainB · « **Reply #326 on:** December 07, 2017, 03:39 PM »

@Deozaan: Adam series - thanks. Annoyingly too brief. Rather good.

MilesAhead · « **Reply #327 on:** December 07, 2017, 05:15 PM »

Kung Faux

I do not know where to watch them. Amazon Prime has them listed but marked unavailable in my area. If you have not seen them it is worth the time. Especially if you like Shaw Brothers classic kung fu flicks.

panzer · « **Reply #328 on:** December 13, 2017, 05:37 AM »

IN-SHADOW - A Modern Odyseey:

panzer · « **Reply #329 on:** January 25, 2018, 04:21 AM »

Ex-Illuminati Banker Exposes The Elite:

Deozaan · « **Reply #330 on:** March 02, 2018, 09:58 PM »

Here's a series of short movies made with the Unity game engine:
-Deozaan (December 06, 2017, 02:36 PM)

Here's the latest Unity demo: Book of the Dead

ConstanceJill · « **Reply #331 on:** March 03, 2018, 02:18 AM »

Man those are impressive graphics o_O

IainB · « **Reply #332 on:** March 17, 2018, 11:46 AM »

The 'Most Elusive' Man in North America:

IainB · « **Reply #333 on:** April 08, 2018, 07:32 AM »

Documentary ‘Do You Trust This Computer?’ free to stream courtesy of Elon Musk

Streaming here: http://doyoutrustthiscomputer.org/watch

Apparently available free for just this weekend.
I'm watching/(listening to) it at the moment. The narration/voiceover is sufficient by itself - quite good - and the dramatised video is arguably somewhat superfluous, with music to "tell us" how to think - like a lot of American documentaries that I have come across. It's a bit "once over lightly". It could make a decent radio/.mp3 documentary - shorter too - but everything seems to have to be video nowadays...

EDIT: Having tired of watching the video, I was sufficiently interested to continue listening to it as I browsed the feeds in my excellent BazQux feed aggregator. The video is about 1hr 18mins long. Some of the music is quite good and my ears picked up what sounded distinctly like some musical styles/riffs borrowed from others - e.g., Beatles orchestrated rhythms/music and Jean Michel Jarré's Oxygene.

As a documentary, I'd give it 3 stars out of a 5-star rating.

It was definitely a bit "once over lightly", seeming to be neither objective enough nor well-researched enough to qualify as a sufficiently rigorous documentary to do justice to the central theme of "Where is AI likely to take us?" - e.g., including the title - even making some seemingly covert and ridiculous politically biased assertions/statements/non-sequiturs (largely American politics). But then it does seem to be an American-made documentary, so that could be messaging that was par for the course and for its intended audience.

Overall, it neither told me anything particularly "new", nor did it really suggest other avenues of new thought. However, that may be because I am an SF addict and, having played about with some real-life applications of Operations Research, mathematical modelling, linear programming and (experimental) AI programming, I was probably already familiar with the general issues about AI that were raised in the video. The thing is that, pragmatically, there's probably nowhere else to go but forwards, or get trampled in the rush.

IainB · « **Reply #334 on:** August 18, 2018, 12:02 PM »

Pandora's Box, E1: The Engineers' Plot

An old BBC documentary re the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism in the USSR.

Fascinating documentary - this one traces the history of the evolution of Gosplan - the USSR State Plan.
In the name of "Science", the USSR applied their economic theory to planning, to drive a command and control economy that seemed to succeed at first, but then failed progressively through the '60's and took the economy into crisis and collapse in the mid to late '70s.
A major limitation in the approach was that cost-efficiency and efficient resource utilisation were not imperatives and thus mindless production and ritual ensued as the planners gave up on the impossible/absurd task. There were food and other shortages, rationing ensued.
They had sought to model and plan the entire economy on an absurd basis, but it was too complex for them to understand.

"Why weren't we able to transform our dreams into reality?
Why didn't we succeed in creating a society where everyone could be free and fulfilled?
Who is to blame?
Not science itself, but the men who mistook what science was."
- Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuck, USSR Academy of Sciences.

Video: Pandora's Box, E1: The Engineers' Plot.
https://www.youtube..../watch?v=h3gwyHNo7MI
_________________________________________________________

YouTube Published on 28 Apr 2012
Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a six part (episode) 1992 BBC documentary television series written and produced by Adam Curtis, which examines the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism.

The episodes deal, in order, with communism in The Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s and the history of nuclear power.

The series was awarded a BAFTA in the category of "Best Factual Series" in 1993.

The Engineers' Plot
This episode details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialize and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational. Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labour (TsIT), Soviet think tank dedicated to the improvement of industrial efficiency.

But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said: "The communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the party only limited training in engineering, to minimize their potential political influence. Industrialized America was used as a template to develop the Soviet Union. Magnitogorsk was built to closely replicate the steel mill city Gary, Indiana. A former worker describes how they went so far as to create metal trees since trees could not grow on the steppe.

By the late 1930s, Stalin faithful engineers like Leonid Brezhnev, Alexei Kosygin and Nikita Khrushchev grew in influence, due to Stalin eliminating many earlier Bolshevik engineers. They aimed to use engineering in line with Stalin's policies to plan the entire country. At Gosplan, the head institution of central planning, engineers predicted future rational needs. Vitalii Semyonovich Lelchuk, from the USSR Academy of Sciences, describes the level of detail as absurd: "Even the KGB was told the quota of arrests to be made and the prisons to be used. The demand for coffins, novels and movies was all planned." The seemingly rational benchmarks began to have unexpected results. When the plan measured tonnes carried per kilometers, trains went long distances just to meet the quota. Sofas and chandeliers increased in size to meet measurements of material usage.

When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin he tried to make improvements, including considering prices in the plan. The head of the USSR State Committee for Organization and Methodology of Price Creation is shown with a tall stack of price logbooks declaring that "This shows quite clearly that the system is rational." Academician Victor Glushkov proposed the use of cybernetics to control people as a remedy for the problems of planning. In the 60s computers began being used to process economic data. Consumer demand was calculated by computers from data gathered by surveys. But the time delay in the system meant that items were no longer in demand by the time they had been produced.

When Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin took over in the mid 60s, the economy of the Soviet Union was stagnating. By 1978 the country was in full economic crisis. Production had devolved to "pointless, elaborate ritual" and endeavours to improve the plan had been abandoned. Quote the narrator: "What had begun as a grand moral attempt to build a rational society ended by creating a bizarre, bewildering existence for millions of Soviet people".

IainB · « **Reply #335 on:** August 28, 2018, 07:19 PM »

Very interesting and beautifully done: Primitive technology: searching for groundwater and water filter (water well and tank) full

mouser · « **Reply #336 on:** August 28, 2018, 09:01 PM »

Very nice.

And now for something completely different. A game where you play a mischievous goose:

Deozaan · « **Reply #337 on:** March 18, 2019, 10:00 PM »

Another year, another Unity demo.

The Heretic

panzer · « **Reply #338 on:** April 19, 2019, 02:20 AM »

Alien: Specimen:

holt · « **Reply #339 on:** April 19, 2019, 10:43 PM »

skateboard locked car rescue
woman begs teen skateboarder to smash her almost unbreakable locked car window.

tomos · « **Reply #340 on:** May 25, 2019, 01:18 PM »

Very early film usually plays at a very high speed (I'm not sure why) and is silent...
Here, the uploader corrected the speed and added sound to 1890's footage from Paris, France.
Makes it much more real for me:

Late 1890s - A Trip Through Paris, France (speed corrected w/ added sound)

tomos · « **Reply #341 on:** July 06, 2019, 04:21 PM »

There's something very meditative about these videos:
below is #18 in a series about an aquarium without filter/CO2/fertilizer.
Occasional moments of drama (Loomster, who you see in this video -- his parents started fighting and had to be put in separate tanks in the previous video...)

made with smartphone + macro lens attachment

Deozaan · « **Reply #342 on:** July 07, 2019, 12:18 AM »

Very early film usually plays at a very high speed (I'm not sure why) and is silent...
-tomos (May 25, 2019, 01:18 PM)

I think it's because the person filming had to manually spin the reel, and they didn't spin it while recording as fast as it plays back on the projector machine.

There's something very meditative about these videos:
below is #18 in a series about an aquarium without filter/CO2/fertilizer.

made with smartphone + macro lens attachment
-tomos (July 06, 2019, 04:21 PM)

Very clean looking water for no filters. Also very high quality image for a smartphone. I enjoyed it! Thanks for sharing.

Edvard · « **Reply #343 on:** July 14, 2019, 04:19 PM »

Very early film usually plays at a very high speed (I'm not sure why) and is silent...
Here, the uploader corrected the speed and added sound to 1890's footage from Paris, France.
Makes it much more real for me:

Late 1890s - A Trip Through Paris, France (speed corrected w/ added sound)
-tomos (May 25, 2019, 01:18 PM)

Very enjoyable, and testimony to the effect that a good Foley artist^w can have on an otherwise boring scene, sound-wise. I have a few critiques about how it could have been filled-out a bit better, but I'll keep those to myself.

Deozaan · « **Reply #344 on:** August 26, 2019, 12:52 AM »

"To Scale: The Solar System"
-tomos (March 20, 2017, 06:20 PM)

I came across this again today from another source and thought "this seems interesting." Then as I got a minute or so into it I thought "I should post about this in the Short Films thread on DC!" And then it started feeling very familiar and I'd realized I'd already seen it. Sure enough, this is where I'd seen it.

Well worth another watch, IMO.

Deozaan · « **Reply #345 on:** August 27, 2019, 04:17 PM »

This doesn't quite belong in this thread, as it's more of a "documentary" of a very niche subject. That is, it's about trying to find an Easter egg in a video game.

The Decade-Long Quest For Shadow of the Colossus' Last Secret

It was summarized pretty well in the comments: "When you leave a game unfinished and accidentally start a religion."

holt · « **Reply #346 on:** September 20, 2019, 12:33 PM »

TEAHUPOO - Biggest and Craziest
Like a super Hawaii's Banzai Pipeline, only in Tahiti; set to rock music.

mouser · « **Reply #347 on:** September 20, 2019, 12:42 PM »

Just watched "The Decade-Long Quest For Shadow of the Colossus' Last Secret" -- Love it.

holt · « **Reply #348 on:** September 20, 2019, 01:53 PM »

"To Scale: The Solar System"
-tomos (March 20, 2017, 06:20 PM)

I came across this again today from another source and thought "this seems interesting." Then as I got a minute or so into it I thought "I should post about this in the Short Films thread on DC!" And then it started feeling very familiar and I'd realized I'd already seen it. Sure enough, this is where I'd seen it.

Well worth another watch, IMO.
-Deozaan (August 26, 2019, 12:52 AM)

This doesn't quite belong in this thread, as it's more of a "documentary" of a very niche subject. That is, it's about trying to find an Easter egg in a video game.

The Decade-Long Quest For Shadow of the Colossus' Last Secret

It was summarized pretty well in the comments: "When you leave a game unfinished and accidentally start a religion."
-Deozaan (August 27, 2019, 04:17 PM)

Re: ^ & ^^; Alright, this just hit me like a ton of bricks. In the "To Scale: The Solar System" vid, they left out Pluto (I speak collectively of Pluto's multiple worlds).
While reflecting on this, I watched "The Decade-Long Quest For Shadow of the Colossus' Last Secret" vid.
Then it dawned on me; in their attempt to eliminate Pluto and -what- be politically correct?; to be in step with the times?; they've changed little to nothing. I looked for Pluto but could not find it. Yet Pluto is still there. You just have to 'quest' for it.

I give you: PLUTO, THE ULTIMATE EASTER EGG.

mouser · « **Reply #349 on:** September 20, 2019, 03:22 PM »