Saturday, March 19, 2016

How we almost flooded the house with dry ice during filming of the final scene of The Aztec Box

We filmed the movie largely consecutively, in order of how things happened. One of the final scenes (that was eventually edited out), involved the professor coming to the house after the finale, as the cops were sorting out the evidence. While the cops were in the other room, the box was supposed to open on its own with fog coming out of it. So we went and got a bunch of dry ice from the supermarket.

The way dry ice works is that it creates fog by adding hot water to it. So we loaded up 3-4 packets of dry ice inside a large container and put it inside the sarcophagus prop. Then we got a big jug of hot water. We didn't have that much ice so we decided to roll on the first try,

So everyone got into positions, a PA poured a bunch of hot water on the dry ice, I yelled "ACTION" and we started rolling. Well, apparently, we put WAY too much dry ice in that thing, because the stuff started coming out like out of a chimney. The room, and then literally the whole house FILLED with fog, and a bunch of water spilled inside the prop as well. Everyone had to leave the room until it all cleared up.

We learned our lesson on the next take and reduced the amount of dry ice by like 5 times to achieve the desired effect. All in all, it was a fun little incident.

Link to Movie on Youtube
Link to Facebook Page

My IMDB Page





Thursday, March 17, 2016

Facebook is Overvalued [FB Downgrade]

The recent crash of LinkedIn and Twitter stock highlights the volatility of the social media sector. Facebook could very well be the next to go.

It's P/E is way beyond the average of about 20 for the tech sector: it's currently at around 86.

FB has made some very risky acquisitions lately:  WhatsApp, purchased for 19(!) billion has not made any profits and is currently eclipsed by Telegraph and other apps.

Oculus experiences heavy competition in the VR sector from Viva and other players. It's not clear if it will every be profitable.

Facebook's core advertising business is in jeopardy as well, since a lot of Likes and Clicks are robotic and fake by nature, and advertisers are slowly beginning to realize this.