The environment the coffee is served in is a significant part of the business.

Isn't film photography verifiable with a physical negative? i.e. you could verify a digital reproduction of the analog photo by comparing the digital image with the negative. Tedious, but sound?

You can expose a negative with whatever the fuck you want. It doesn't have to be a real scene.

Transferring electronic images to film is a long-solved problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_recorder

Does that prove you didn't photograph a display showing the digital image?

Heads should be rolling at Ray-Ban, they've permanently tarnished an iconic American brand by aligning themselves with big tech.

Ray Ban has been an Italian brand for decades. They got bought by Luxottica in 1999.

That doesn't change the fact that its an iconic American brand, directly associated with American culture and design.

The majority of artists abhor AI, this is a particularly bad example.

Says who?

> I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall.

That's decoration, not art.

> Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.

No one should be celebrating the theft of music from artists. Everyone can participate in making music today just as they always have throughout human history - learn to sing or play an instrument.

Greek mythology is full of sex, and the Odyssey is no exception.

The Odyssey is full of worrying about who might bang who, rather than actual sex.

Yes, but the film was made for modern audiences using the modern translation. Isn't it somewhat ridiculous to criticize a film for exactly following the cultural conventions it is supposed to follow?

> "The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality".

A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.

I would say that Nolan is no more grandiose and superficial than Kubrick. Their films aren't about characters and plot, they're about images and sound.

Not at all. Most Kubrick's movies are illustrations of specific, well defined theses (for example about human ambition and violence) and the plots are tightly fit to that purpose. Nolan makes adventure movies where the plot is a succession of action scenes- any other sequence or choice of situations would work the same.

Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.

The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.

I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.

I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".

Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.

As someone who enjoys (especially when I was younger) lucid dreaming, I found Inception well researched, and definitely dove into themes like consciousness, agency, and the reality (or unreality) of cause+effect in human behavior (but even more just the raw experience of lucid dreaming). These are universal themes but quite difficult to explore concretely without resort to contrivance like lucid dreaming (Inception), time reversal (Tenet) or amnesia & reverse narration (Memento). Memento was much more focused on the mental state of both the protagonist and audience, and in that sense was a better dramatic film. Tenet and Inception were much focused on the universe model. Interstellar seemed to be an attempt by Nolan to put human connection and emotion at the center, specifically the transcendence of love, but that approach wasn't a good fit for Nolan's personality or his technical and artistic skills.

Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.

I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.

Without having seen Odyssey, I assume it follows his same formula, except the core technical theme follows some obscure question (even to scholars) of culture or storytelling, a thread much more difficult to identify and follow because it more easily blends into the background (and foreground?), both for average viewers and Odyssey buffs alike.

I found a lot of Nolan's films overrated, but just got out The Odyssey and would say it was quite good. But, yes, "grandiosity" is true - in IMAX, it was loud and intense.

When I was a kid I loved Inception. As an adult I prefer Prestige.

I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think

I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.

Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.

I think Tenet was an absolute garbage movie, and Interstellar was mediocre at best. Honestly, I'm not planning to watch Odyssey because those two movies were so underwhelming.

It's a pity that Apple neglects its creative apps. I've been working on a video project using Motion recently, and while not as capable as After Effects, it's pretty serviceable and with some love could be excellent.

Very impressive. How are you managing to produce such a clean model without artifacts?

I spent a lot of time hand-masking out inconsistencies between shoots. I waited too long between sessions and they actually built out an entirely new section of ceiling. PPISP guidance in splatting also helps a lot in solving sensor inconsistencies between the many different cameras and lighting conditions that went into the source dataset.

Do you see potential for automation based on what you learned from your hand tuning?

Nonsense. Ray Harryhausen's work today is still incredible, by any standard.