Not anymore.

I went to the Japanese Film Festival last year with my mates. I went in only knowing that I am going to watch a film entitled ‘Confessions’, about an hour before the film began at 9:00pm. My god it was the most incredible cinematic experience I have ever had. I knew nothing about the film, not even the log line. I was so blown away by the film that I could not keep thinking about it for months. I went on YouTube and watched all its trailer and teasers over and over again. I read lots of reviews about it, just so I could relive that experience in my head again. After all that, I started questioning. What if I read the reviews before I walked in the cinema? I suppose it is hard talk about a film without spoiling it (Speaking of which, don’t read up on Confessions, especially because a few reviewers gave the plot line, which is a spoiler in itself, away.). What if I watched the trailer before watching the film? Trailers are meant to get me all excited about the film, right? Would I still have that amazing cinematic experience? I am sure it would still be a great film, but it would drastically reduce the thrill of the ride by 75%. That is the way I want everyone to watch this film, not knowing what it is about. Although I suppose the hype is already a spoiler, at least I didn’t give away the storyline. Okay, maybe that is just one example, but lately I am noticing this more and more.

When I first watched the trailer of Never Let Me Go, the version I watched in the cinema actually did not give away what the school’s purpose was. I was intrigued and watched the movie, but when I went on the Internet afterwards to watch more trailers, one version of the trailer gave the purpose of the school away, and another version gave the entire film away, the plot line and even the ending and the one of the most important lines in the film that was supposed to be the twist. What was the maker of the trailer thinking? When I saw that version of the trailer, I breathed a sigh of relief, but shocked and the same time. “I don’t have to watch that movie again, I’ll just watch this trailer.”, I thought to myself. The trailer gave so much away that there was no purpose of watching the film at all.

THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS SPOILERS OF MEGAMIND
The other day, I was having lunch with my brother and I mentioned Megamind. I told him that I was very glad that Dreamworks finally stepped up their game and made an amazing and enjoyable animated movie. My brother said he was not as impressed, which I find odd. There is a lot of reason to like Megamind, considering that he is well aware of Dreamwork’s history of animations. He explained it could be because he watched it on the plane and the fatigue might have put him off the movie mood, or it could be because he did not like the facial design of the female character. He also said that it could have been because the acting he did when he said “Copper drains my power” was too fake. I don’t think that was the reason because during that scene I thought the acting was part of the joke, poking fun out of the cheesiness in the typical superhero vs villain moments. I explained that I loved the jokes and how the twist of Metroman turning out to be alive all along amazed me. He responded, “Eh, I saw that coming, mostly because I saw him with a beard in the trailer. I was expecting for him to make a come back.” There it is. The trailer ruined that layer of the story which made the film outstanding.

Why would films do this to themselves? Well, marketing, of course. The purpose of trailers is to make the movie look interesting and exciting, often using their ‘best’ punch line, which also ruins it. The problem is they try too hard. Most trailers use up all the most exciting elements to get people to watch the movie at least once. As a result, by the time the audience watch the movie, all they are really enjoying are the action sequences and guessing which character’s gonna die. Of course there are exceptions. I remember when American Pie 2′s trailer came out and they specifically stated in the trailer that they are not using the best jokes in it. Brilliant. Movie is like a battle. The best strategy is the element of surprise. The best joke, lines, plot twist are the ones that come by surprise, shock the viewers and making the movie memorable and praised as amazing. Great examples would be Million Dollar Baby and Changeling (movies that I can think of from the top of my head). But if you showed off your secret weapons to everyone before you went into battle, your enemies would anticipate it. If you knew that there’s going to be a surprise at your party, it would be bland. If you… Okay, I suppose I made my point.

Yes, not all trailers give their best bits or spoilers away but when it happens, it’s something that cannot be unseen. Well, there will always be studios who want put together trailers just for the sole purpose of selling the movie, without any consideration of how the audience will experience the movie itself. My solution? I guess I will just have to turn up to the movies 10 – 15 minutes late, so I don’t see any trailers.

So fast forward to today, I now have a 3DS by my side. A day before the launch date, KFC also launched their insane Double Down burger, so my mates and I organised a ‘Double Down, Beer and 3DS night’. I met up with my friends right after I received my 3DS and performed unboxing, risking getting greasy fingerprints. The first thought was: The 3D works

Hardware

The battery life is not bad. It lasts about a day of constant activity. I left it in sleep mode for about two days before I realised the battery had ran out.

It took me a while to find the power button, while my friend who already had a play with the demo 3DS in the store he’s working in laughed at me. After a minute I realised it was right in front of me the whole time. “Oh, alright. It’s just the matter of getting used to it. I was so used to the slide button on the side of the old DS Lite”, I thought.

My next challenge was to look for the stylus. This is the worst design decision ever. Whoever made this design decision is a moron. It is at the back of the console, next to the game card slot. I had to either turn the entire console, or reach around the top screen to get to it. It is a ridiculously awkward position no matter how many times I take it out of the console. What’s wrong with the old design? Seriously!

The Home, Select and Start buttons are underneath the touch screen. I am still trying to get used to it. Maybe it is because I am still not used to its position or it being a flat button (or whatever sort of button it is called), or maybe it’s because it is just below the touch screen and it’s not something that can be clicked with a stylus and it’s awkward to switch from using a stylus to finger. Anyway I am going to give it a chance and see if it’s just the matter of getting used to it. I just hope there aren’t any games that require me to press the Start or Select button quickly.

The 3D camera works just as advertised if your subject is at least 30cm or so away, or else you would see split images and make you dizzy. The quality of all three cameras are lacking. I will not be taking photos with them unless i want the photos to be in 3D or to use it in games. I am not particularly disappointed because I assume the cameras’ purpose was not to take high quality photos to capture priceless moments, but to use with games such as AR (Augmented Reality) games and Face Raiders.

Software

I am lucky enough that my 3DS came fully charged out of the box. Apparently some people did not have such luck. The softwares that came with the 3DS made the console incredibly fun on its own. I didn’t even put a game card in it for 3 days. It’s almost as if the built-in software were created for the sole purpose of showing off what the console can do, and they do so beautifully. Caution: These games require you to move your console and possibly yourself around so I strongly advice not to play any of these in public, especially on your own. You don’t want to look crazy or like you are trying to virtually shoot innocent passerby with your 3DS. I know I don’t.

Mii Creator

First thing I did was creating my Mii. It let me choose my skin tone, hair, and eye colour before taking my photo. I’m not sure if how well it worked since it gave me 8 results to choose from, and they all looked quite different from one another. At least I got to choose one that I liked and tweaked the features of my Mii. I tried out different eye, mouth and nose combination that I wondered if I needed the camera feature at all. Although in the end, I still based my Mii on my first choice so I suppose there are some purpose in it.

This is my Mii, by the way. They got the exact same pony tail, too.

AR Cards

AR stands for Augmented Reality. For those who don’t know, it’s basically the polar opposite of virtual reality. While virtual reality is a virtual environment with real interaction, augmented reality is virtual interaction in a real environment. This is one of the best games to show off to people. They’ll be blown away even without the 3D display, so you can go ahead to turn it off so your spectators can watch by your side.

The game require a variety of AR cards, with the “?” card being the most important and commonly used card (I suggest scanning these cards or make colour photocopies as a back-up just in case you lose them so you don’t have to buy them again). 3DS recognises where the card is with its camera and creates a stage around it using the card as a reference point (I remember this technique being research in University of Sydney back when i was doing my bachelor degree). The way  it warps the space around the card to create stages and the way creature pops out of it never cease to impress. In fact, it even makes skeptics exclaim in excitement. At times, I find myself having to move around the card to aim in certain directions, but I rotate the card itself so the stage rotates with it, which creates another “Holy crap this is amazing” moment. A friend of mine was so blown away he completely forgot to shoot the dragon.

It doesn’t look impressive in this photo but believe me, it’s amazing to in person.

Oh, and you can also have your Mii or other characters pose on the AR card as if it is on your table. Since I was at a bar the night I received my 3DS, I posed my Mii to virtually fulfill my dream.

Weeeeeee!

There are understandable flaws in this AR game. When you get too close or when the camera cannot see part of the card (which can happen a lot), it will start to freak out and say “Can’t find the AR card!” but once it is back in frame, the game resumes instantly like it never happened and I am impressed by that.

Face Raiders

Face Raiders also uses AR, but rather than just using the card, the stage is your entire surrounding. It requires you to take photos of your friends or yourself and match the eyes and the mouth to the template properly so it can create an animated 3D character to be your enemies in the game. It is a hell lot of fun and creates lots of laughs, especially when your friend’s face flies towards you to attack you by kissing you. The animated faces are amazing. It is as though your friends are actually making those funny faces as long as you had it lined up properly when you took the photo. If you didn’t line it up properly the first time, you can always edit it after the game is over.

One of the problems is that each Face Raider game requires you to capture a new set of faces. You cannot use the same faces you used in another game. Another problem is not with the game but generally with people. Almost no one want to volunteer their face for you to shoot at it, but don’t you worry, the developers of Face Raiders already thought of this social problem and came up with a solution. Just don’t tell your friends. When one of my friends was playing Face Raiders at the poker table, he missed the flying heads and shot at someone at the table instead. For a split second, it prompted “Face Captured” and created a new face from what it guessed was a face. Yes. Sneaky, but who on earth wants to keep shooting their own face over and over again when all your friends dodges the camera like it’s an AK-47?

Miscellaneous

There are also other softwares such as Mii Plaza, Street Pass, Spot Pass, Friend List, etc. that I haven’t played with much because I am not very interested in them. I had my 3DS on sleep mode while I walked around a busy district and I collected 3 other Mii’s but that was all I got since then so I haven’t been able to not do much with it. Apparently my friend got a lot of Street Pass interaction in uni. Sadly for me, I’m not in uni anymore.

Unofficial game card

There had been words that Nintendo is really cracking down on privacy and keeps track of which game card you have used with the 3DS. Some say it voids warranty and some even say Nintendo can brick it remotely once it detects the history when it is connected to the internet (which I don’t believe). For me personally, I don’t care much about this because privacy is wrong, of course. The reason for me to use a 3rd party game card is because of its capability to store so many games in one game card, eliminating the need to carry all these game cards around with me. Nintendo announced that there will be an eShop for consumers to buy DS and 3DS games online, which meets my need… once the online store actually launches in the future. If they have a system similar to the iTunes Music Store, I would gladly pay money for games. I applaud Nintendo for (finally) taking steps to catch up with the demand of downloading softwares online and there is no excuse for pirates anymore. I’m ready to buy games… as soon as they hurry up and launch the bloody store already!

To sum up…

The disappointing thing about the 3DS is that I can name at least 5 features that are still unavailable and can only be activated through an update. It was pretty annoying that there are so many features telling me that they are not ready when I click on it. They might as well leave them out because it just gives me the impression that this is a premature release (which it is), especially since there are not a lot of games out for it yet. I don’t feel I was suckered as an early adaptor though. To me, the purpose of this purchase is so I could play the old DS games again so I see this as a hardware update and what an update this is! Sure there aren’t many games out but there are already so much you can do with it to keep yourself occupied till Zelda’s released.

The glasses-less 3D and AR in 3DS are definitely its game changer just as Wii did with its motion sensors. They may be gimmicky but they both set new standards and challenge other game consoles to do the same and do it better.

I watched the Swedish version on DVD first. It was a captivating movie but left a lot of question unanswered, in a good way. I wanted to know more about Eli’s relationship with the old man and their past. I bought the book and, incredibly, not being much of a novel person, I read the whole thing.

I found the answers I was looking for, as well as enjoying the narrative from the perspectives of different characters in each chapter. As it is with all cases of book-film adaption, a lot of the book’s content and characters could not make it in the film, but that’s also because of the explicit contents, like pedophilia (and how uncomfortably detailed it was), that was just too much for the movie screen.

I will start with what I like about the Hollywood version. I like how they kept the supporting characters simple. In Let Me In, the relationships of the neighbours, who eventually fall victim, are simple enough to keep the audience focused on the more important characters, but left out the more important issue of how Virginia suffered with the infection and seek death. The scene where Hakkan spilled the blood by accident also made more sense than the original, where he just forgot the blood entirely. I also liked how the bullying scenes were a lot more intense than the original. Not that I enjoy watching kids getting bullied but it captured me and got me totally absorbed into the moment so I thought that was very well done.

Oh and I seriously love their poster. Love it!

Sadly, I also think there are many mistakes in Let Me In. First of all, I do not like the acting at all. They all seemed very grim throughout the entire movie. What I like about Let the Right One In is that both Oskar and Eli occasionally show child-like smiles (at time with a running nose), which reminds us that they are in fact still children (Eli is frozen in age both mentally and physically), while in Let Me In, the children seem to think they need to act incredibly serious to be a good actor. The way they delivered their lines and the way they cringe their face so much, I can’t help feeling like it was overacting.

Kid, your girlfriend just came back and saved you. It’s okay to show a little emotion and smile.

I felt there was something more powerful in the acting in Let the Right One In, especially if you compare the scenes when Oskar/Owen asks Eli/Abby if she’s a vampire. That scene had a lot of symbolism and the acting really allowed me to look further into the characters’ minds. In the same scene, Let Me In also revealed the back story of the Hakkan, the old man, showing that he grew old as Abby stayed young, which is not true to the book at all and left out the opportunity to open that to interpretation as the original did.

The psychology behind the characters are off as well, especially for Owen. At the beginning, it was clear that Owen was bullied at school and I started to feel sorry for him, but back in his apartment, he suddenly pulled out a mask and a knife, posing in front of the mirror and say “Are you afraid, little girl?”, which was completely creepy. Owen, or Oskar was supposed to only show hatred towards his bullies (which is where the knife comes in) but for some unknown reason, he starts to fantasise harming the innocent? That made no sense at all. At that point, I stop empathising with him.

Now you’re just freaking me out

When Oskar peeked at Eli changing, that scene actually had a meaning, which I will not mention here. In Let Me In, he just peaked and the director left out that meaning. I suppose it was intentional, but i reckon they should’ve left that peeking part out entirely because it just made him creepy again.

I suppose, in true Hollywood style, the director wanted to add the horror element to the movie by having the vampire’s face deform into something demonic to scare the audience. Not only did the effect looked horrible and fake, but it was completely unnecessary. Even though I am dedicating my career to 3D CGI, I still think this should be used in moderation, because excessive use of CGI can take audience out of the movie as Let Me In did. Every time the CGI comes in the movie, I either thought “Wow that was such a bad effect” or “Wow that is trying too hard”. Also in the scene where Abby murdered the first victim, they left out the moment from the original when Eli rest her head on the body in silence. I was disappointed because that was a very important moment in the movie where you get a glimpse into her character. The way she lowered her head to the body and breathing heavily after she killed him showed that she did not want to kill and still regrets it every time.

I was disappointed at the soundtrack but I suppose that was because I love the theme of the original so much. Nothing really stand out in Let Me In and they had music where silence would have worked better. Speaking of sound, they also left out the animal-like growling sounds when Abby needs to feed, which was extremely effective in showing that she’s not human without any deformation.

Finally, the pool scene.

Oskar was still holding his breath under the water throughout the rampage. That was one of my favourite scenes from the movie because the contrast of the calmness under water and body parts falling in the pool from the rampage above was very powerful.

Sadly, Let Me In allowed Owen out of the water gasping for breath while the rampage went on and well aware of what was happening. Although the rampage was happening off camera, the scene wasn’t as effective and memorable. If anything, it feels like we were missing out on the action.

Let Me In showed the aftermath of the bloodstained pool, but left out the part in the Swedish movie where Eli left one of the bullies (who had shown reluctance to bully Oskar throughout the entire film) alive sobbing. That shot tells that Eli was still able to tell good from evil and that she killed in that scene for a different purpose – to save Oskar, not for blood.

Some told me that the romance did not seem necessary and the movie would have worked without it anyway because it was more about the friendship than love. One even told me that the movie was sexualising children. I don’t agree with that but I do agree that the romance seemed unnecessary, which I don’t see as a big issue. It may be unnecessary but it did not ruin the films. I suppose some people pointed that out because it made the audience look forward to the proof of love then left empty handed in that department, but they’re just kids and I think it’s natural for kids their age to be curious about having a relationship or puppy love.

In conclusion, most people will tell you that both movies are very similar and that they’re just as good as each other. It’s true. They are similar, but many of the important essence are missing from the original and they were what made the Swedish version far more superior.

While most 3D printer carves out bits to make their 3D objects, Thing-O-Matic makes them by addition process. It’s ‘ink’ (as it would in an inkjet printer) are pounds of ABS plastic wire, which MakerBot also sells in many colours. The Thing-O-Matic heats the wire to its melting point and eject a drop at a time according to the coordinates given to make up its object. The 3D object modelled in various 3D programs such as Blender and Maya (FUCK YEAH!) is converted into coordinates by using a ‘slicer’ program like Skeingorge or SkeinFox. ReplicatorG can then control the Thing-O-Matic to print the 3D object using these coordinates. ReplicatorG, being open source, is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

From the comments section:

I estimate that it used 41 grams of ABS plastic. The natural colour is sold in 5 lbs. coils for $45, so if my math is right that’s about 81 cents worth of material.

Do want.

Try talking to Cleverbot, apparently one of the most advanced A.I.

Stay Tuned!