On the eve of the Ready Player One premiere, we recap all the VR experiences we saw at GDC, discuss Apple’s iPad for education event, hear about Kishore’s trip to the MARS conference, and get outraged by a Disney/Pixar twitter tournament. Plus, Norm’s trip the The Void’s Star Wars experience.
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
The word on the internets is the Millenium Falcon ride in Galaxy’s Edge is likely based on the Mission Space design at EPCOT based on construction photos. So each set of riders will be in their own “cockpit” attached to a centrifuge and there will be more than one centrifuge.
https://www.coaster101.com/2017/04/10/millennium-falcon-ride-mission-space-2-0/
Based on the AP Bracket:
The REAL bracket:
Kishore’s beard is GLORIOUS!!!! Regale in its splendor!
I hope the “Three Body Problem” doesn’t go about the way of the “Martian Chronicles” did back in the early 1980’s. It was good as a TV mini series, but it deviated from the Book in numerous ways.
My two fave Pixars are Nemo and Ratatouille, if I judge it from most-watched. And Disney is probably Lion King and Tangled. But I love almost every renaissance Disney movie, and a lot of the recent ones too.
Hi, Kishore ! Concerning your bit about JWST, I noted that you said it will be “out closer to the moon”. For added precision Kishore, the James Webb Space Telescope will be located at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point wich is around 930 000 miles from earth, the Moon orbit being at 238 000 miles. That’s four times farther 🙂
Quickly concerning your issue with the Logitech Crayon. Crayon is pencil in French, with Logitech being from Switzerland it’s not that far of.
Yup, people in the western part of switzerland speak and use french. That’s one of the three main languages spoke there. There’s also a lot of dialect.
Cixin Liu’s Three Body, Dark Forest, and Death’s End are, to me, almost unfilmable. It would be like doing all five of the HitchHiker’s Guide books, but multipled by 50 in scale and scope. . . because you dont just follow a few characters, you follow dozens. The complete trilogy covers, IIRC, thousands of years of history, including multiple settings that cover entire planets on massive scales.
For the effects.. Imagine the physics imagination of Interstellar plus the spectacle of every Marvel movie plus the world building of Star Wars. I don’t think this will spoil things to say that, at the very least, you need to depict 2 dimensional and 4 dimensional space-time on a scale that has probably never been attempted before in film history.
On top of that, a great deal of the book is describing people’s thoughts. Sort of like “We” by Zamyatin or “Parade’s End” by Ford Maddox Ford. You can’t easily make a visual story telling experience about a guy ruminating on his thoughts for 20 pages. Or a narrator describing hundreds of years of civilization in two paragraphs. Or listening to bureaucrats sit around a table and discuss technical issues for 45 minutes. The closest thing I could imagine is maybe War and Peace, but even that followed a single family, more or less. Liu’s novels follow threads of civilization itself for thousands of years. I don’t even think it’s quite like Foundation by Aasimov… Liu’s is like if Foundation criticized itself and then critiqued its own critique, and then kept going.
Minimum budget is probably a trillion dollars.
I saw some of the clips of the Chinese attempt to make this movie, they are on youtube. They looked really good, IMHO. Especially the Earth part of the story set in the 60s. I imagine the filmmakers simply ran out of pyschological energy and/or money.
There is also the political issue. The book starts out, as discussed here on Tested, with the Cultural Revolution, an epic failure of Communist Party leadership. The book depicts a future not only without a Communist party, but without strident nationalism. That is quite out of fashion in the halls of power, both in China and the US, thanks to the current presidents of each country being ultra-nationalist xenophobes with tyrannical tendencies. It may be complicated to do the cooperation necessary to do the film justice, and it may be impossible to get certain permits.
Fun fact, the translator of some of the three novels is Ken Liu, who has also written a Star Wars book.