Jerry Maguire

Jerry Maguire is a film released in 1996 staring Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire, a 35 year old sports agent. Suffering from stress and a guilty conscience he writes a mission statement which prompts the management to fire Jerry Maguire. He tried frantically to secure all his clients but a long talk with Rod Tidwell, one of his clients, hampers his chance of doing so. Upon leaving the company for the last time he says that he is going to start his own company and urges people to join him but only Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) agrees to join him. From this point on the film takes a whole new turn, but you will have to watch it to know how.

This film was different to what we are used to seeing because such film will not make a hit at the box office and therefore are not produced. Although I had a hard time following the story line it was still very enjoyable to watch and I would watch it again if I had to chance to better understand the story.

Rating 5/10

Super Commercials 2011

While I was searching for some adverts for an assignments, I can across some adverts which are part of the adverts broadcast during the Super Bowl, a championship games of the National Football League (NFL), these are some of the best advert release in the year and Americans even get to vote which one they likes best.

I will post some of the best adverts...

Jack

Jack is quite an old film now, in fact it was released in 1996. This movie stars Robin Williams as Jack Powell a 10 year old kid who looks 40 because he suffered from an exaggerated form of Werner syndrome, an aging disease. We follow Jack as he goes about living the life of a 10 year old.

This was a very touching movie. Although not director, Francis Ford Coppola's best work this movie still uses excellent camera techniques to tell a story and after all the message of the movie was clear and inspiring.

Rating 6.5/10

Advert Composition

Different techniques are used in adverts in order to bring out a certain characteristic!

In this case they used a comedic situation to go along with the celebrity endorsement in order to interest the viewer, and leaving the main message hidden at all time until the last moment!

In this advert there are some elements of product placement, in this case the "acer" netbook used in this advert.

Then finally the main message/focus of this advert is reviled...

T-Mobile

The Fighter

The Fighter is a biographical dram film staring Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg as Dicky and Micky respectively. This film also stars Amy Adams as Charlene Flaming and Melissa Leo who portrayed Alice Ward, the mother of Dicky and Micky, she manages to leave a chill by her performance and shows how far an actor or actress can take a role.

This film is based of a true story, and upon meeting with the real life version of who the actors and actresses were going portray they were all motivated and give the performance they did. Although this movie was nominated for several awards I feel it was a little over hyped, but still deserving of the awards won. I would recommend watching this film just to watch Melissa Leo's stunning performance the story is also a very inspiring and unfortunately these kinds of films are few and far between.

Rating 7.5/10

Infographic

Vector graphics
These use geometrical objects such as points, lines, curves, and polygons to form an image. Vector graphic files store the lines, shapes and colours that make up an image as a mathematical formulae.

Raster graphics
This uses a rectangular grid of pixels or points of colour, viewable via a monitor, paper or other display medium, unlike vector graphics there is a maximum amount of resolution a raster graphic can reach before it still start to pixelate.

A pixel is the smallest addressable screen element in  raster graphics.

Colour space is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colours can be represented as tuples of numbers (typically as three or four values). When defining a colour space the usual reference standard is the CIELAB colour spaces, which was specifically designed to encompass all colours the average human can see.

Bit depth is the number of bits used to represent the colour of a single pixel in a bitmapped image. High colour depth gives a broader range of distinct colours.

Optimizing is a process of optimizing pictures to balance between file size and picture quality. Saving in JPEG vs GIF will get you a better looking picture but will also make the file size bigger. This is why GIF is the preferred format for the web. Image will load quicker since the file size is smaller but a little photo quality is sacrificed.

Image capture is not possible without the use of a digital camera or a film camera. The technology behind a digital camera is a light sensor and a program which is embedded right into the circuit board of the camera. A Charged Coupled Device or CCD for short takes light energy and converts it to electrical energy. The firmware knows what each specific charge means and translates it to information that includes the colour and other qualities of the light that can ccd picked up. It does this using pixels. Each pixel comprised of three basic colours that can be produced is amazing indeed. This is known as a Bayer filter. Without this technology digital camera would never have existed and film cameras would still be common practice to date. Film cameras use similar principle to the human eye but exposes it to photographic film which stores the image. Without these two methods of capturing images, we would not be able to capture the beautiful pictures we do today.

Black Swan

Black Swan is a film released at the end of 2010. It revolves around Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet. Nina Sayers, portrayed by Natalie Portman, is a ballerina dancing with a prestigious New York Ballet company. She lives with her overbearing mother Erica, a failed dancer turned amateur artist, who tries to control much of Nina's life.

This is one of few films I've watched in my life that embodies the thriller part of a psychological thriller. It is amazing that by just adding hallucinations to the story line the film was made a hundred times better. I hope to see more of these kind of films throughout the year.

Rating 9/10