Lifeboat Foundation

With tech giants around the world dipping their toes in the foldable display game, a flexible, rollable, and foldable smartphone was inevitable. And it looks like Samsung has the upper hand at this point, having recently filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a slick new design.

Dubbed Project Valley, the product features a foldable display that could roll and fold in a number of different ways, according to the patent application. But Samsung will likely take advantage of the fact that a foldable screen gives you many different surfaces on which to display things, so we could see screens on the outside, inside, and flanks of the new device.

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Some film directors are famous for demanding that scenes be shot and re-shot repeatedly until actors express just the right emotion at the right time, but directors will be able to fine-tune performances in post-production, rather than on the film set, with a new system developed by Disney Research and the University of Surrey.

Called FaceDirector, the system enables a director to seamlessly blend facial images from a couple of video takes to achieve the desired effect.

“It’s not unheard of for a director to re-shoot a crucial scene dozens of times, even 100 or more times, until satisfied,” said Markus Gross, vice president of research at Disney Research. “That not only takes a lot of time — it also can be quite expensive. Now our research team has shown that a director can exert control over an actor’s performance after the shoot with just a few takes, saving both time and money.”

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View the 10 Sci-Fi Films To Watch In 2016 photo gallery on Yahoo News. Find more news related pictures in our photo galleries.

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Spike is finally getting into the scripted series game and is beginning with a full season order for an adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars.

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Osmo, the handheld shakefree camera.

This camera is pretty awesome! Time to make your next selfie vid look like a Spielberg movie.

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Check out the trailer for The Shaman, a new short film debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival. As with a lot of short films we’ve seen lately, this has top-notch visual effects — but more than that, it looks like a thing of pure beauty. And it has an original story, with a concept I haven’t come across before.

Basically, in The Shaman, it’s 2204, and the world has been at war for 73 years. And the main character isn’t a soldier — he’s a Shaman, one of a group of people who used to be healers. But now, instead, he uses his supernatural powers to “heal” the souls of the enemy, basically helping them cross over into the afterlife. That’s what I get from the trailer, in any case. This is the work of writer/director Marco Kalantari (Ainoa).

Continue reading “This Short Movie About An Endless Future War Looks Unspeakably Great” »

We were really impressed with the trailer for The Shaman when it came out in March. And now, after a successful run at film festivals, you can finally see it for yourself.

At seventeen minutes, The Shaman is a bit longer than many other shorts, but that’s not to its detriment. It just contributes to the overall sense that what you’re actually seeing is a full cinematic feature film—which makes sense, since it was originally conceived as one. Marco Kalantari (Ainoa) uses every second he has to full effect. We have would-building, effective exposition, action scenes, and a confrontation that’s all about willpower.

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Check out this short film Directed by the talented Vladimir Vlasenko, about a lonely robot who just tries to attract attention to himself. For more information, please see the details and links below:

Director & CG — Vladimir Vlasenko.
Director of photography — Igor Guryev.
Sound & music — Nikita Troepolskiy, Igor Smirnov, Danil Varakuta.
Rotoskopy — Maxim Artemenko.
Actors — Nadya Vecherya, Nastya Borsh, Alexandr Sheweiko, Alexandr Koval.

Continue reading “CGI VFX Shorts HD: ‘Story of R32’” »

A little bit of smile inducing, starry eyed optimism to balance out the post-apocalyptic horror-show version of the Singularity depicted in the other shot film I posted.

‘PROTO’ is a short film, produced by Eye Candy Film as an international co-production between Screen South based in the UK and Film Fyn based in Denmark.

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