IsolatedTops

One year on, still in love & awe with @Utterback13's eye-popping shot of AP for his Foster parade. Happy horse!

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

@dreadnoxreviews Wow! Looks so great

Never post it but I do collect Star Wars

@CraigMilkowski 94!?!

Saw this Great Blue Heron on my walk today. Guess he was enjoying the record high 94 degree temps.

Faust(Ian) you say?

SPINNER SPOTLIGHT! It was a milestone day, TODAY, at THE SPINNER RACK, March 20, 1986. A day that changed comics forever! Frank Miller broke new ground with his seminal Batman saga, as transformational a work as anyone has done, changing how Batman was seen & perceived forever!

BENTORNATO easy galloping, José Rivera up for trainer @JFDAngelo ahead of his run next week in the G1 Dubai Golden Shaheen at @RacingDubai 🇦🇪 BENTORNATO de galope suave en Meydan, preparándose para su participación el próximo Sabado 28 Marzo en la Dubai Golden Shaheen G1 Video @engmohdrashid Agentes 305

@BeardedHandicpr @fairgroundsnola now that looks freaking delicious

The track kitchen @fairgroundsnola remains unmatched!

Pavlovian is ready to go for tomorrow’s G2 Louisiana Derby @fairgroundsnola

Jeff Ruby Steaks favorite Stark Contrast schooling in the @TurfwayPark paddock.

ＮＥＸＴsighting @TurfwayPark 👀🦄

Black Hornet not been missed by the dark side. 5/1 at the only spots up so far. Afraid we won’t be seeing anything close to his ML.

@JDBunkis I love curling but please finish the game first

@JDBunkis I also hate how they have 3 channels with basketball, and each of those channels is showing the exact same game while 3 or 4 other games are on

@BrickCenter_ One guy saw it, but it wasn't the ref.

That really brings home the trauma that ICE creates. Fuck them and Trump to hell.

@Capper_RMac I like Chaos Agent quite a bit too.

I didn't have time to record the next video yet. Why Chaos Agent? Just from a visual standpoint, he looks like a serious runner. The runner-up in his GP maiden win, Scope, is pretty good for a maiden. He was 4th in the Pilgrim Stakes last year, so there was substance to him.

I like Smash It, speed in a paceless turf sprint, Walsh has him moving in right direction and he ran huge on turf sprinting as a 2yo.

Nine Part will be tough for sure but if you wanted to pick holes…he’s got a lot of empty space on that page as a 5yo. Didn’t make the races at 2, not till midway through 3, then a 1/2 year to get back, then off for a year.

And the one at the very bottom will have the fave, possibly odds on, in a 2M race next weekend where he’s shipped half way round the world.

here's to Englishman running a hole in the wind...like something in the 105+ range...so he can bounce to the moon at 1/2 in the pat day mile.