Lifeboat Foundation

It’s not often you come across a real-life mad scientist. They’re usually just over-the-top antagonists in comic books, but Colin Furze is the real thing. He has a penchant for building things that often blow up—on purpose—like this impossibly dangerous-looking thermite cannon.

Not familiar with thermite? It’s an especially nasty chemical composition made of metal power and oxide that burns as hot as 2,500 degrees celsius. If it ignites, you don’t want to be anywhere near it, which is why a cannon that puts a lot of distance between you and a flaming thermite grenade isn’t the world’s worst idea.

Continue reading “A Wannabe Supervillain Built His Own Thermite Cannon” »

During suicide bombings.

Back in 2014, we told you about Rise, a film about a robot insurgency that was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. The result of the $38,000 raised is this proof of concept video, which definitely looks good enough to deserve a full feature.

Rise comes from director David Karlak and writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (Feast). It’s one of those classic robot revolution stories. Of course, in this case you find yourself in the awkward position of rooting for the failure of humans, but that’s sometimes how these things shake out. Plus, it’s always easier to side with Anton Yelchin than Rufus Sewell.

This is clearly a pitch for some studio to give them money to make a full thing, and it’s one of the most successful of that genre I’ve ever seen. There’s clearly a story in mind and Karlak’s vision looks great in these five minutes.

Continue reading “This Wonderful Short About a Robot War Deserves to Be a Full-Length Film” »

You know that scene in the classic film Bruce Almighty when Jim Carrey uses his God-like powers to mess with Steve Carrell’s character while he’s giving a live news broadcast? That’s what this video looks like (kind of), except replace Steve Carrell for George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Barack Obama, and Jim Carrey for a team of wily researchers.

The system was designed by researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Max-Planck-Institude for Informatics, and Stanford University. The same team worked on a similar facial expression transfer project last year, but that involved controlling the expressions of someone in the same room. This time they’re doing it with YouTube videos. First, the “target actor” (that’s Bush, Trump, Putin, and Obama) is rendered with a neutral expression. Then, the expressions of the source actor (that’s the other guy) are captured via webcam, and those expressions control the animation in the YouTube video.

Continue reading “Watch a man manipulate George Bush’s face in real time” »

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Code 8, a mysterious project from Robbie and Stephen Amell. Now, the project has been unveiled, and it looks like an intriguing film project.

We speculated that the project was going to be released On Demand, but it turns out that the short film was just a teaser for a much larger project, one that is currently being funded on IndieGoGo.

Continue reading “The Mysterious Code 8 Film Is An Intriguing Crowdfunding Teaser” »

There are some kernels of brilliance scattered amid the dead spaces of “Creative Control,” a microbudgeted techno-drama.

In a near-future Brooklyn, marketing consultant David (played by Benjamin Dickinson, the film’s director and co-writer) is assigned to create an ad campaign for Augmenta, a new form of augmented-reality glasses that will add a high-tech layer to the viewer’s reality. After deciding to give a pair to a hip artist — in this case, the musician/comedian Reggie Watts, here wittily sending up his own image — David starts noodling with a pair himself.

While he ignores his flighty yoga-instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), David starts to create a sexy avatar based on Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), the fashion-designer girlfriend of his best friend, Wim (Dan Gill), a philandering photographer. David and Sophie start crushing on each other, but it’s nothing to the sparks David feels with her simulated version.

Continue reading “Movie review: Virtual reality blurs the line in ‘Creative Control’” »

And soon you can download it: http://www.toonzpremium.com/#!news/aawrs

Have you ever wanted to mess with a video by making its cast say things they never would on camera? You might get that chance. Researchers have built a face detection system that lets you impose your facial expressions on people in videos. The software uses an off-the-shelf webcam to create a 3D model of your face in real time, and distorts it to fit the facial details in the target footage. The result, as you’ll see below, is eerily authentic-looking: you can have a dead-serious Vladimir Putin make funny faces, or Donald Trump blab when he’d otherwise stay silent.

This isn’t about to reach software you can buy, but the implications for video creation are big if it becomes more than a university project. You could use the tool to mess with your friends by having celebrities say audacious things, or have famous figures recite dialogue in movies without needing to painstakingly animate faces frame by frame. In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren’t safe from a little computer trickery.

Continue reading “Smart 3D modeling lets you mess with faces in videos” »

When we think of the future of technology, we often imagine gadgets that will make us go faster. But some of the truly exciting developments will be around gadgets that help us with the tricky aspects of our emotional lives. If you like our films take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/all/

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Continue reading “Emotional Technology” »