Simon Willison's Weblog: film

Quoting Lila Shapiro

2025-06-07T20:05:29+00:00

For [Natasha] Lyonne, the draw of AI isn’t speed or scale — it’s independence. “I’m not trying to run a tech company,” she told me. “It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium.” She imagines a future in which indie filmmakers can use AI tools to reclaim authorship from studios and avoid the compromises that come with chasing funding in a broken system.

“We need some sort of Dogme 95 for the AI era,” Lyonne said, referring to the stripped-down 1990s filmmaking movement started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which sought to liberate cinema from an overreliance on technology. “If we could just wrangle this artist-first idea before it becomes industry standard to not do it that way, that’s something I would be interested in working on. Almost like we are not going to go quietly into the night.”

— Lila Shapiro, Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It), New York Magazine

Tags: film, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Brian Grubb

2024-07-11T21:11:55+00:00

[On Paddington 3] If this movie is anywhere near as good as the second one, we are going to need to have an extremely serious conversation about this being one of the greatest film trilogies ever made.

— Brian Grubb

Tags: film, brian-grubb

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse | The Film Score with Daniel Pemberton | "Start a Band"

2023-12-23T05:59:23+00:00

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse | The Film Score with Daniel Pemberton | "Start a Band"

Fabulously nerdy 20 minute YouTube video where Spider-Verse composer Daniel Pemberton breaks down the last track on the film’s soundtrack in meticulous detail.

Via @danielpemberton

Tags: film, movies, spiderverse

Quoting Nick Carr

2018-05-21T00:04:22+00:00

The big thing I always get asked to find are dank dilapidated alleys, and New York City has, like, 5 alleys that look like that. Maybe four. You can’t film in three of them. So what it comes down to is there’s one alley left in New York, Cortlandt Alley, that everybody films in because it’s the last place. I try to stress to these directors in a polite way that New York is not a city of alleys. Boston is a city of alleys. Philadelphia has alleys. I don’t know anyone who uses the ‘old alleyway shortcut’ to go home. It doesn’t exist here. But that’s the movie you see.

— Nick Carr

Tags: film, new-york

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

2008-08-23T11:18:12+00:00

Film + Food & drink | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian’s publishing system supports tag intersections based on the URL; this page shows all film stories that also mention food. There’s even an RSS feed.

Via Behold: the Guardianwhack

Tags: feeds, film, guardian, intersection, rss, tagging

Comic Sans, the Film

2008-06-21T00:27:08+00:00

Comic Sans, the Film

“A documentary film coming soon”

Tags: comicsans, film, funny, typography

Harry Potter and the Order of Typography

2007-11-18T11:18:57+00:00

Harry Potter and the Order of Typography

Jon Hicks highlights some of the beautiful typography displayed by the latest Harry Potter film.

Tags: design, film, harrypotter, jon-hicks, typography

The movie that time forgot

2007-05-27T23:58:39+00:00

The movie that time forgot

The tragically unmade “Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls”.

Via MetaFilter

Tags: film, hammer, pterodactyls, tragedy, zeppelins

A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road

2005-04-08T09:20:56+00:00

A Tour of the BBC Film Archive at Windmill Road

Martin Belam continues his streak of fascinating posts about the BBC.

Tags: film

Lights Up!

2004-06-13T00:07:57+00:00

Lights Up!

Lighting balloons for the film industry. These things look awesome!

Via trainedmonkey

Tags: film

The Matrix Reloaded, Abridged

2003-06-18T00:24:35+00:00

The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script, by Rod Hilton (via teeb!). Do NOT read this if you haven't seen the film yet; you won't get the jokes and it's full of spoilers. It's the best/funniest analysis of Reloaded I've seen yet.

Tags: film

Official film sites almost always suck

2003-06-12T22:35:33+00:00

Why do official film sites almost always suck? www.x2-movie.com is a prime example: 100% Flash, ridiculous loading times (and I'm on broadband), totally unintuitive interface, tedious, unnecessary animations every time you click on anything and when you finally get to the content (all I could find was the "Mutant Database") it gives you hardly any information above what you get by watching the film! It looks pretty (pretty expensive at any rate) but really is nothing more than a glorified trailer.

I was going to cite starwars.com as an example of a film site done right, but then I discovered they've redesigned it to be more graphics heavy and less easy to navigate. The content is still a hundred times better than comparable sites though.

For a real laugh though, take a look at the official site for The Matrix. My attempt to view the "lite" version was met with "The Lite version of the site is not fully supported by Netscape 4.7 or other older browsers" (this is using the latest version of Firebird). Dodgy browser detection aside, the main navigation in both high and low bandwidth versions consists of a number of small TV monitors with a mouseover effect that results in the screen becoming blurry. A TV screen the other side of the screen indicates where each link will take you, but on my first visit to the site I struggled with the navigation for quite a while before resorting to trial and error, having missed the screen with the link information. Once you find the content it's pretty good (though generally quite out of date) but it's almost entirely obscured by the dreadful navigation system.

If these sites were being put together on a shoe string I could almost forgive the laughable browser support and terrible interfaces, but it's obvious from the scale of the films that these are not low budget projects. It's nice to know that there are some competent firms like Happy Cog involved in the industry, but they seem to be few and far between.

Tags: film

The technology of the Matrix

2003-04-14T11:26:35+00:00

Wired have a fascinating article on the technology being used for The Matrix Reloaded. They've apparently achieved photo-realistic CGI humans using a technique called "image-based rendering" based on taking a huge number of high resolution photos from different angles and using them to generate the 3D geometry of a scene.

The technique was first demonstrated in The Campanile Movie, where it was used to create a flyover of a University campus using still photos taken from a kite. It's worth downloading the film to get an idea of just how powerful the technique is.

The MetaFilter discussion about the Wired article has comments from the author of the article himself.

Tags: film