John Threat

Jem -vs- The Spice Girls Teaser

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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]]> I watch any cartoon I can get my hands on, but I used to watch Jem, which shaped forever how I deal with women to this day. I used to have a crush for more substantial women more like Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats or Velma from Scooby Doo, who were both super smart and helped get their crews out of a jam, and voluptuous to boot! Valerie could escape a locked rocket cabin with a tampon and a paper clip and Velma always read books and newspaper clippings and ran surprisingly fast for a bookish stout girl - but then I realized that most of the women I met were more like Jem - who wanted to be famous at all cost regardless of their actual level of talent in order to satisfy some need to feel loved.

Ooh yeah - Okay i got distracted, from these pictures you can see why - Check it out Jem wasn't really a good cartoon per se - It was badly animated other than the intro which had some cool rotoscoped animated sequences. It also had the biggest crime of having *really* bad music. There are clapping animatronic monkey's with symbol toys that make better music. Only the original theme song was rocking.

What it did have that girls dug - was non-sexual love sequences betwixt Rio and Jem - but like most people - I found their nemesis the Misfits a lot more interesting (but just as unattractive.) - It also seemed like the other girls in the band were asexual and just liked enjoying Jem's unconsummated relationship with Rio. They would even put a flash over them kissing - because kissing after all leads to heavy petty - which leads to pregnancy from toilet seats.

So here is a teaser from the upcoming mashup between Jem vs The Spice Girls - who sing a lot better than Jem and the Holograms! Hopefully I'll finish this mashup sometime this month. I want to do a battle between The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan -vs- Josie and The PussyCats.

Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha at Tribeca Film Festival

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

]]> Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha at Tribeca Film Festival is at Tribeca Film Festival this year. It's the Premiere - first time shown anywhere. Took us two years to shoot and edit this film. Melvin and me are hanging around the festival partying a bit and talking about the film. In fact it is the first time I've ever set foot in the Apple Store! Check this link to see us at Variety.com sauced on gratis libation for the camera.

Come out and see it - Its a adventure that takes places all around the world. Come check it out at one of these two dates below. Melvin and Mario will be there as well as a bunch of other cats you want to catch up with - and of course - I'll get you into the Tribeca Parties :) More info at this link to buy tickets in advance: Tribeca Film Festival

World Premiere: Sunday April 27th 7:30 PM
Pace University (3 Spruce Street)
and
Thursday, May 01, 6:30PM
Directorâs Guild Theater (110 W 57th St )

I think May 1st at the DGA might be sold out - so hurry up.

Here are some inside sneak look at some scenes from the movie:

100 Grand Bar: The Bachelorette Party

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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]]> Check out this Commercial Spec I cobbled together for 100 Grand called: The Bachelorette Party.

It features Jonelle Ownes, Chantel, Aiesha Tong and Michelle Reynoso as girls who are partying with their favorite friend - the 100 Grand Nestle Bar, but unfortunately while dancing energetically the candy bar rips it's clothes and the girls see the raw naked power of a fully operational candy bar in all it's splendid glory which transports them to nirvana. Roslyn Tate also kicks in for the finale mouth eating scene and voice over.

P.S.: The Candy bar is a stripper. Girls just wanna have fun! :)

I shot this spec in my apartment and the girls screamed which almost made me legend in the building. My neighbors heard the commotion and saw the sign on the door and they thought I was giving a private show for some girls and I must have been delivering the goods, because the girls were really shouting loud and dancing hard to the music.

Later I hand animated with candy bar with a variety of methods, from hand to strings although you only see a few seconds of it - after all - less is usually more in these situations and it's only a 30 seconds spot. Women really seem to dig the spot,but undressing candy bars may be better suited to Europe.

Betty Crocker Warm Delights - Best Ingestible On The Planet.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

]]> I recently capped off a 10 day fast by going to the store ravenous. I came across this new product I had seen in the cake and confection aisle and began to stare at it. Enter: Betty Crocker's Warm Delights. Three minutes to a warm molten chocolate cake. Impossible, one thinks!. I purchased it for the nominal price of $2.00.

What a mistake that was.

Thirty something bowls of Warm Delight later - I haven't really gained that much weight from it, but man this thing is literally the best tasting confection on the planet. I'm no Orhan Yegen, when it comes to tasting food - but I have criss-crossed the the planet in search of gastronomic delights, and I have yet to come across something so tasty whose barrier to preparation and cost is so low. I was doing like 2 hits a day at one point. Microwavable crack, really.

I warn you, for god's sake man, do not buy this thing.

Slim Fast Viral Video

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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]]> I just wrapped shooting a Silm Fast Viral Video. It features 3 women (Hazel Dolphy, Rhonelle Bruder, and Lauren Munger ) who tell their stories about becoming comfortable with their own body image in an organic way and talk about a friend they have to help them count calories and reach their goals.

That friend of course for the video is an actual anatomically correct working milk chocolately flavored can of slim fast - that they can confide in, dance with, drink richly from, talk to, and cry with. The can is a metaphorical allusion to a whole group of products and services provided by Slim*Fast - from actual low-calorie great tasting snacks and meal replacements - to a community website for support and ideas and issues related to reaching your weight goals.

Here is a couple of pictures of the different phases of can creation - it wound up looking good on camera, although I admit when looking at it in person - it's a lot less impressive:

1) I picked the barrel up from a Carribean shipping company - and some spray paint from Home Depot - and laid down the white base.

2) Next I used some stencils to spray paint the main logo. I actually painted it the wrong way up in my haste to make the deadline! This robbed me of being able to keep the metal top for more realism. Instead I had to use the cardboard bottom for the top.

3) Next was the weird yellow area which spraypaint was good at laying down the fuzzy lines for it.

4) Last was the splash which unless I was Taki 231 or a Coney Island t-shirt airbrush expert I wasn't going to be able to nail 100%. - but I got the general feel of the splash and then I stenciled in the last of the text on the can with multi-coloured sharpies.

5) Rock out! Finished Slim-Fast Can - Shake Well My Friend.

Everex Cloudbook vs Macbook Air

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

]]> Looks like Apple has unleashed another amazing laptop that literally would get you a partner of your choice for intercourse just by showing up to Starbucks with it. However appealing that is, I wouldn't shell out over 2k for the Macbook Air. It's ultra thin design looks great and it looks like a super reduction in weight, but can you imagine the cost to fix this thing? This thing is going to be prone to breaking. The thinness of this laptop will cause issues with heat and kinetic damage. This thing is going to snap in half very easily - and the miniaturization of it's custom components will mean that it will be like fixing something simple like a air filter on a Lamborghini - prohibitively expensive. It's very Bang and Olufsen - esque - but this isn't a good solution for real road warrior and mobile computing.

Enter the Cloudbook- coming out on the 25th of this month finally. It's the real future of mobile computing. This sub-notebook only cost $399 - so if you lose or break it - no need to stand in line like a dummy at the apple store - you can just replace it with you pocket change. It's got a full keyboard , wifi, and tons of other toys. It's what you need on the road. You won't be editing your film on this thing, but you can write, surf, email, look at youtube videos and pipe video out for presentation with this baby. It's super tiny, can survive a fall, go with you when you climb a mountain - or my favorite sport - downhill mountain bike hunting. You ride downhill and chase wild boar and jump off the bike an wrestle the animal and try to capture it. Now I can take my laptop with me and know I can bang out a graph for a Hackateer script right after my hollow victory over swine!

If your self-esteem is married to the superficial and you care what other people think and you also wish to engage in empty dialog with strangers that could result in sexual activity at some point - get the Macbook Air - and a black turtleneck.

If you actually do work and create things and work hard to make the world a better place one battle at a time - you are an exemplary individual who values independent thought who would find against repressive totalitarian regimes - or you are just a cheapskate like me - then you'll go with the Cloudbook. Rock On!

The Science Of Captcha

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

]]> Well the world of Captcha has become almost a standard on the Internet thanks to spammers and automated scripts. They slow down the process of signing up and destroy the usability of sites everywhere.

After running several versions of self-programmed Captcha systems over the last year - I think I have several methods that work - of course this isn't a high traffic site - it's a vanity blog of a sporadic-posting director - which means the big brains of the spammers haven't had a chance to work their magic against my systems - but first let's look at how ridiculous Captcha images have become:

Here is an example of the cat scratch method of obfuscation - it looks like a mashup of a Marlyn Manson and AHA! music video - which is rather difficult to read.

This one tries a Barbarella style color warp , staggered system fonts in a LSD nightmare.

This Captcha graphic combines two random words together and then makes them look like like it laid with a porcupine - in the biblical sense. Difficult to read.

This one was on one of Google's sites. It tries a white border outline on the text over beautiful color hue shifts with random letters. Very readable and pretty - probably smells good too.

This one attempts to uses random line drawn over skewed randomly selected alphanumeric characters on a solid color background. this simplistic Captcha falls in the middle of readability - but do you really want to bother?

This is just desperation. Super sized letters on a seizure inducing background with a white grid. It's perhaps the largest Captcha image on the planet in use - probably hoping to fool the spambots that it's a regular picture.

This one goes the other was in desperation - let's make it infinitesimally small so that spambots will assume it's some sort of spacing graphic from a pre-css Adobe's GoLive, you'll need a electron microscope to decipher this.

Craigslist's standard - nonsensical words on a dotted and concentric circle pattern that obscures the outlines of letters making it hard to perform a proper exegesis on it. Prepare to reenter it multiple times to get anything done.

Some sites try to offset these unreadable images with audio files that you can listen to in case you can't read the image - but there is software out there that you can use to decode the audio clips to text so you can compare them in a spambot.

At the moment - what works for me is breaking the letters and numbers for the Captcha image into separate images. Random size images will throw off spam bots a lot - it would be difficult to know how to repatch the images into a single image for processing, but still be legible for the end-user.

I believe some people are starting to use flash, which is one way to also slow spambots as well, but not everyone has flash, especially on mobile.

What about a text message verification to your cellphone? Imagine combining this with OpenID where the site sends you a text message code that you use to verify your identity before you post would allow your cellphone not to get into the hands of every site.

This is something that can be easily done and adds a extra layer of security (it also peels a way a layer of anonymity and privacy which is bad ) - and this could be good for really closed, private, insular sites or specific intensive web applications. What do you think the future of Captcha is.

Deviants Of Reality - Mystikal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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]]> Here is the final on the Deviants Of Reality Music Video for their European hit "Mysitkal." The artist asked for a retro 80's feel to the video so we shot with warm saturated colors with a close intimate feel with the artist and the extras. For some reason, people seem to really like this throwback style video - it really appeals to women with it's non-threatening vibe and crystal clear simplistic lyrics and warm visuals.

We shot the video over a one day period in Red Bank, NJ, which I had never even heard of. The feature girl, Mounia was flown in from Europe for the occasion, a model who was a favorite of Dj Alex J. There are two effect shots in the music video, which were composited by Johnathan T. Winbush. They should be easy to spot.

There was a scrapped scene due to time constraints imposed by a restless bar owner where the feature girl, Mounia would have walked backlit by a glowing ring almost like a body halo toward the music artist. Hopefully that scene reappears in another video one day.

The original treatment I submitted for the video included a climatic scene where the feature girl ultimately lure DJ Alex J to the kitchen and cooked him on the grill and ate their innards as he still performed - now that would have been mystical!

In retrospect, maybe the whole cannibalism thing wasn't really right for them - but one day!

Comment Spam, Image Verification and the sweet spot in between.

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

]]> I recently had abandoned this blog for a while because I had become overwhelmed by comment spam. It had put me into a tail spin because I couldn't find the focus to write a script that would stop the comment spam. Of course, once I actually sat down to write it: it took 5 minutes.

However during the process of testing the code, I accidentally deleted all the frigging comments in MYSQL via a clumsily placed less than sign. The lowest of operators had felled my comment database. 700 Comments gone, just like that...

So the current battle goes something like this chronologically.

Phase 1. Comment Spammers appear with automated scripts that post on blogs repeatedly by filling out forms or using unprotected query strings. They had free reign and life was good for spammers.

Phase 2. Comment and Registration verification images appear, to psych out robots. Random words or number strings appear in regular text that need to be input in the form to complete the process known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test). The Robots add OCR to their toolbox and circumvent this.

Phase 3. Comment verification images now include dots, smudges. lines,wave distortion, grids, and mismatched letter sizes and fonts to fool OCR script spammers. The technique works for a while but the OCR got even more sophisticated and they got around that.

Phase 4. Now comment verification images now include everything from phase 3, but now include multiple color patterns so they now look like Technicolor yawns or good LSD trips in little portable network graphic boxes.

Phase 5. We'll need to order stereoscopic 3d glasses to read verification words like the robot stats on the back of the original transformer toys.

Hold everything! Let's not get to phase 5. Why is everyone using a single image for CAPTCHA? Why not use a series of images automatically generated but sliced up and put together? All their software is concentrated on finding a single image. If the slices happen across letters, and the image names are random, the OCR would have a devil of a time finding the images and then putting them together in the right order in order to scan them.

Just stitch them together and it will fool the robot spamming software for quite a while. You could even make the number of slices random, to further confound the process. They would have to do OCR on each individual image, if they can correctly source it out of the code. I've instituted it here, let's see if the theory bares fruit. So far so good! The harder part will be if people post on this site again after such a long hiatus. :)

Whats your idea?

Video Mashup: Beyonce -vs- Betty Boop

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

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]]> Downtime between directing gigs is no time for slacking. I cooked this up while waiting for film to get back from being transfered. It's part art, part social commentary, but mostly just fun.

Video mashups!

The first episode is a re-imagining of the music video for superstar Beyonce's (featuring Jay-Z) megahit "Crazy in Love." It combines that song with sexy moves of Betty Boop. Cut on FCP, this piece achieves sync from various editing tricks of the trade including but not limited to invisible speed ramps.

The real secret is that the origin of many things have a common starting point, but myopic thinking and limited world views sometimes obscures those origins. I'll expand upon that theory later. The truth is.. the kids love video mashups. It's the new form of communication. I plan to incorporate mashups into a new secret project I'm casting for even as we speak.

Check it out in:

Windows Media | Quicktime| Flash| PSP

PS: Cartoon Network or Boomerang has on a Betty Boop mashup that was, well, just ok. I wonder if it predates mine, or did someone see it and rip the idea off.

This post has been screenhead approved!