Impressive unedited fight sequence

Thought this was pretty impressive, has a videogame kinda feel.

From the video description:

The director calls this “the most dangerous long take scene ever.” A 4 minute stedicam shot featuring a variety of martial arts.

The crew spent over 1 month preparing and choreographing before they were able to get a perfect shot. When it came time to shoot, they could only do 2 takes per day because of the set repairing and prop replacement that needed to be done. It took 5 takes to get it right. A foreign cameraman was needed because the stedicam mount was built for american / european operators who are typically much larger than asian operators.

The foreign operator they hired could only do two flights of stairs at a time and simply gave up. They decided to use a Thai stedicam operator who physically prepared for a month for this job.

The reason the shot is 4 minutes is because reels of 35mm film are only about 4 min in length.

They shot the first take which had a number of problems with stuntmen cues, and even a stuntman bumping into the stedicam operator. After choreographing more dynamic action, an increase of extras and improving the set, the next take they did was 17 days after the first take.

The second take was better but when the stuntman was supposed to be thrown from the 3rd story, the safety mattress was not completely in place yet so Tony Jaa stopped the shot and saved the stuntman’s life.

The third take was just about perfect but just before Tony Jaa was supposed to bust through the last doorway, the film ran out. The director finally decided that instead of simply cutting there, they would try again for perfection.

They thought the fourth take was perfect but after review there were some parts that weren’t as good as the pervious takes. They decided on one more try.

On the fifth try, it was almost perfect. But there were 2 miscues. On the 2nd floor, Tony Jaa slams a door into the head of a stuntman and the small glass window on the door was supposed to break. It failed to do so, so they used CGI to fix this. The 2nd issue was the fight just before the sink gets thrown. The timing was off as planned but the end result looked natural so they decided this was the take to use in the final film. Simply amazing.

Jason Lee

We all know Jason Lee for his somewhat funny voice and from the show “My name is Earl”, but did you know he was a professional skateboarder in his younger years?

Btw did he get a nose job?

FedEx Planes Dodging a Storm

Now, here’s a funny image, these are mapped FedEx planes trying to deviate a thunderstorm.

Live TV

He’s thinking what I’m thinking..

Beavis mugshot

I guess Beavis never recovered after Butthead got shot and Mtv took their show off the air.

Vista and some thoughts

I know I haven’t been posting too often lately, but I’ve been busy playing around with Windows Vista. Yeah, I installed it a few weeks back on a separate partition to see what it does and now I completely switched over.

I didn’t install Vista because it’s newer and possibly better, but since I’m a power user I think I can benefit and work more efficiently with features like on-the-fly disk searches or file tagging.

I must say my first impression was very good. I’ve got a Dell pc and on XP I had to install tons of drivers to get everything functioning properly (Hyper-Threading and stuff) and on Vista I had to do squad, everything worked right out of the box, the installation was done within 30 minutes.

Off course every feature they implemented already exists and might be taken from other operating systems like OSX or Ubuntu, but all in all I think it’s a big step in the right direction for Microsoft.
It’s a very clean UI, I’m not a fan of the Aero Glass eye candy but it isn’t distracting either. I’m not gonna talk about the other features cause I haven’t had time to explore them thoroughly.

Together with Vista I installed the new Office 2007 suite which has a very cool and intuitive user interface.

As you can see I’m speak highly of the new Microsoft products, maybe it’s a first impression, maybe not. I hope I don’t change my mind.

Swiss newspaper fell for fake Gucci ad

This guy created a fake ad for Gucci using a photo of himself, and asked the Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung to run it, which it did. He also told the paper to send the $50,000 bill to Gucci, which it did. Now the paper is trying to find the guy, which it can’t.

Thought this story was extremely funny, just look at this dude posing as a Gucci model.

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