LotR RotK Premiere Today In New Zealand 279
donnz writes "Things are getting a little out of hand in Wellington today. For those of you who have not spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk CityLink have been wiring up webcams all over the place. Keep up with all the news and links on Stuff.co.nz. Just to show we are twice blessed, the sun is shining."
Using Linux and KDE (Score:3, Informative)
Perfect day for it (Score:1, Informative)
Premier for the Stars (Score:5, Informative)
Player? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:This can't end well... (Score:4, Informative)
I think, and I may well be wrong, that there is no description of multicasting on the server. Certainly most of NZ's Internet infrastructure isn't multicast capable, and I never did see how they were going to manage to stream this.
There was a brief effort to get Akamai involved. But
Dave
Re:WHAT!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Some more webcams (Score:2, Informative)
Some more webcams (Score:5, Informative)
These don't seem to be
-
Downtow Courtenay Place [citylink.co.nz]
- Uptown Courtenay Palace [citylink.co.nz]
- The red carpet (live 12noon NZ time)
Camera 1 [citylink.co.nz] and Camera 2 [citylink.co.nz]
Unfortunately there aren't any cams running from *inside* the cinema as yet.If you live in NZ, you can get some visit live streaming cams from the link above [wellingtonnz.com].
Re:Using Linux and KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Linux is a pretty popular platform in the industry. Maya seems to be a little slower on Linux than Windows (don't flame me: talk to Alias). And expect to find tens or hundreds of nodes of Linux-based renderfarm all over the place. All our shots for Matrix III were rendered on Athlons running RedHat.
Jackson Says Best of the Series (Score:5, Informative)
Here's hoping he's right. November's been a bit of a let down. Matrix Revolutions blew chunks (but nice CGI), Cat in the Hat is outright stupid and Timeline was underwhelming. Kill Bill Vol 1, however, was very cool and I'm looking forward to Feb. 20 to see Vol 2. (Did anyone else think of Sergio Leone's work while watching Kill Bill?)
Re:Good for NZers (Score:3, Informative)
If you're from Europe or North America you'll get a tourist visa at point of entry.
Re:Good for NZers (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but given that most of the film crew were New Zealanders that's not that surprising. A lot of people dont seem to realise, this is largely a New Zealand film. The production money is from New Line, and that's US, but the director (Jackson
), screenplay writers (Jackson, Walsh, Boyens), casting, film crew, locations, costume design, and even the special effects (Weta Workshops, and Weta Digital) etc. are all New Zealand based. Even a large number of the actors are New Zealand actors - the leads, are, of course, big names from overseas, but many of the minor roles, Haldir, Celeborn, Denethor, Eomer etc. are all New Zealanders.
And what's the easiest way to get a large army of orcs for battle scenes? Yes, that's right, they used the New Zealand Army!
New Zealand provided far more than the landscapes - these films are (except for the money) New Zealand films.
Jedidiah.
Re:Using Linux and KDE (Score:4, Informative)
Acording to snopes [snopes.com], the core of this story actually happened, but the story has been elaborated extensively. The programmers did re-use the "infantry" models in the simulation for kangaroos. As a bit of fun early in the project they intentionally left the ability of the kangaroos the kangaroos to fiure back intact, but the kangaroos did not fire stinger missiles. They fired beach balls at the helicopters.
Re:WHAT!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Because it is a New Zealand film, and Peter wants to have the first screening in his home town? Seems pretty fair to me. I remember when this decision was made - it was at the New Zealand Two Towers Premiere with Peter making a speech to the crowd (and there was a huge crowd). He got Mark Ordesky (high level New Line exec) up on the platform with him and put him on the spot with "And the Return of the King world premiere will be here in Wellington, wont it Mark". Ordesky, faced with the possibility of pissing of the 10,000 or so gathered people sheepishly said yes. After that Jackson just used that as New Line, saying on public record, that the premiere was going to be in Wellington so New Line couldn't work their way out of it.
This is a huge thing for New Zealand. Pretty much everyone I know from Wellington (even me) was involved in making the film in one way or another. The whole country collectively got behind the production of this film - they deserve a little something in return.
Jedidiah.
Re:Windows only web streams? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WHAT!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Only in the zoo.
Despite the fact that our countries (Australia and NZ) are geographically close we have vastly different flora and fauna. Additionally our indigenous people only share the same skin colour.
Re:Good for NZers (Score:2, Informative)
Primer from the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov]:
- New Zealand Military branches
- New Zealand Army
- Royal New Zealand Navy
- Royal New Zealand Air Force
- Military manpower - military age
- 20 years of age (2003 est.)
- Military manpower - availability
- males age 15-49: 1,021,770 (2003 est.)
- Military manpower - fit for military service:
- males age 15-49: 859,505 (2003 est.)
- Military manpower - reaching military age annually
- males: 26,803 (2003 est.)
- Military expenditures - dollar figure
- $605.7 million (FY02)
- Military expenditures - percent of GDP
- 1% (FY02)
/partly because thinking of the NZ army is silly, and parly because I love nested <UL>'sReview that's not really a review... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good for NZers (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, but they normally truck in senior people from overseas for direction, production, cinematography, senior camera techs etc. and have all the set and costume design done back home. They usually ship all the film stock back to wherever their from for post prodiuction, special effects, and editing.
All of these things were done in NZ.
As I said, the only thing not from New Zeland was pretty much the raw cash from New Line.
Stop and think for a moment. People are happily calling Weta Digital's work on par with ILM. Weta Digital is a little wee New Zealand company. That alone is a pretty significant achievement for a country as small as NZ.
At the end of it all, when you watch the opening credits for the film, you'll see "A Wingnut Films presents" - and Wingnut films is Peter Jackson's NZ film company. You'll see the very same words on the intro to "Bad Taste".
Jedidiah
Re:Good for NZers (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, that 20 minute drive can be a real pain in the ass...
The only hard part is the flight to get there, after that it's pretty easy. The impressive part is that you can go from the beach, to snowcapped mountains, to a rainforest in a day. In fact, if you're a real masochist you can compete in the Speights Coast to Coast, a race from one side of the country, over the Southern Alps, to the other, and see some very impressive scenery on the way. Serious competeors complete the race without stopping. Normal people do the race as a 2 day event.
Jedidiah.
CityLink's webcams: Anycast (Score:5, Informative)
They've got servers in Wellington and Auckland, plugged into both of the (CityLink-run) peering exchanges there, and they've got a box in the US advertising the same prefix (202.7.4.0/24) - so if you're in NZ, and your ISP isn't crap, you'll get the local servers: everyone else will get the box(es?) in the US.
There are more details here. [waikato.ac.nz]
Anycast is also used for other stuff: the F (IIRC) DNS root server is anycasted for redundancy, and one of the IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms uses anycast to locate a nearby hop-on point to the IPv6 network.
If you don't understand this joke... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:pathetic waste of time (Score:2, Informative)
You either haven't read the book or haven't seen the films.
TWW