Category: Life

TORONTO (Hollywood Reporter) – In a pre-emptive strike against movie piracy originating from Canada, Warner Bros. Pictures said Monday it will cancel preview screenings of its movies north of the border.

Frustrated with unauthorized camcording of its new releases in Canadian cinemas, the studio said it will immediately halt all “promotional and word-of-mouth screenings” of upcoming releases.

Source. While drastic, let’s see who is hurt by this:

Canadian Movie Critics: They don’t get to preview films in advance, in order to release reviews in time for the movie’s actual theatrical release.

Film’s Financial Interests: In this I include the cast, the director, the crew, etc. Simply said: films with no [positive] reviews make less money than films with positive reviews. They are in essence being used as pawns to armtwist the Canadian government to enact legislation it allegedly already has.

Consumer: Well, they don’t get reviews from the papers. At which point some will turn to the Internet. So there’s little consumer collateral, but the message sent is clear: enact legislation.

It’s a drastic move. Do I think it will work? To enact legislation: yes. To curb camcording in Canada: no. Nevertheless, if it’s already illegal, I don’t see anything wrong with making it illegal again. After all, what is there to lose by enacting such legislation?

I will, however, raise hell if they try to push through a DMCA equivalent along with this anti-camcording bill.

I’m sure the directors will appreciate their films being sacrificed as tools to armtwist the government into enacting [arguably] ineffective legislation.

It’s interesting how the digital world forces questions time and time again of what constitutes free speech. Take the following:

02 F9 1C 02 9D 75 E3 52 D7 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Suffice to say that that string of text has sparked take-down notices across the Internet. Threats of lawsuits are everywhere over this, and yet, it isn’t hate speech. It isn’t the reproduction of a copyrighted work. It’s not even really a trade secret. It is, however, an important piece of the puzzle in decrypting the new high-definition DVD discs. There’s one of these strings in every high-def player out there, but no one is supposed to be able to identify it, much less publicly disclose it.

What do you think? Should it be permissible to utter that string on the Internet? Does it have to do with context?

June Callwood was one of the great Canadians of the twentieth century. She passed away April 14th, 2007. She was a journalist by trade, and a wonderful donor of her time, having co-founded over 50 organizations dedicated to helping those in need.  In 2002, she gave a lecture on journalism and ethics, and I very much recommend that you give it a listen.

It applies not just to journalists, but anyone who reads papers, and writes their own ideas to share to people. You can listen to it here:

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070423_2085.mp3

Contrary to what this may lead you to think, the title of this 2006 film is not about the supernatural. It’s about the ghosts in our society, those we rely upon for hard labour, and yet whose necessity and existence we’d rather deny.

This film is a fictitious backstory to a real-world tragedy: the drowning of 23 illegal Chinese workers, who were cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay in the UK. The story follows one particular illegal immigrant – Ai Quin – from her start in China, to her difficulties in the British system.

The film is for the most part in Chinese. There are no subtitles – and yet the direction and emotion is such that you never become lost in the story. The performance by the lead actress – herself an illegal immigrant in real life – is extremely well done. Never is there this feeling that this is acted.

None of the characters seem out of place, nor do the hostile environments under which they work seem unfamiliar. Along with the camera-shooting style, this imbues the film with a documentary-like quality, which makes it’s message all the more powerful. Through covering the human-angle of this story, and a few statistics, the film promotes a highly critical view of the great hypocrisy towards the modern treatment of illegal workers in the UK. With three million illegal immigrant workers across Great Britain, there is no doubt that they have a large role to play in sustaining the manual-labour intensive sector of the economy. Yet there is a denial about both their relevance and need, as is highlighted through the way they are treated by the system.

All in all, I very much recommend that you watch this film. Politics aside, it is a riveting and beautifully-acted story.

Official Website.

Texturing in Google Sketch-Up has been an interesting process. In case you don’t know, I’m co-leading a team that aims to render the University of Ottawa campus in 3D for Google Earth.

Modeling a building is surprisingly easy. I use building outlines based from the Google Earth imagery to start it off. Then, using photographs, I model the building up. The real pain, however, is texturing.

In the majority of the cases, you can’t get a shot of the entire facade of the building from straight ahead. Obstructions in the form of other buildings prevent you from getting far enough to achieve such a thing. What I do is take a shot from the side:

[Image 1]

I then use Photoshop to correct the perspective:

[Image 2]

Finally, I make it all tilleable:

[Image 3]

Still, the results aren’t that great. Like I said, modeling is easy. Takes an hour, tops. Texturing? It took me five hours to make this building: