Movies and Hollywood in general are a pretty bad source for that kind of material.
Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#22Pentagon Wars, which is about the nature of how products become ludicrously elaborate when political pressure is wielded… and about how testing is affected.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was $7,500. $5,000 of that was the camera hire, $1,400 was the single paid actor (the rest were friends and family). The used expired film stock that a film company donated to the production. It was all edited in Premier Pro on a home PC. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, edited, composed, acted, produced, everything. My favourite fact is that they only had ~80 mins of film donated to them. This meant they couldn't a…
Is that 10:1 ratio post or pre-digital films? Because in my experience as a young PA film cameras didn't have live viewfinders. Film was maybe 2:1 or 3:1 because you didn't have unlimited film and unlimited film processing budget. Digital and reality TV has made it normal to film everything in multiple takes and clean it in post. But old school DPs, who were used to film, would get the whole thing done in one take wi…
I heard the 10:1 ratio a while ago, and for "Hollywood films". So I'm guessing on-film, but where film/processing budget isn't much of a limiting factor. Primer was released in 2004 so at that time most things would have been on film.
That said, I'm not in the industry, this is just what I've read about the production of Primer, so if your experience was of 2-3:1 that may be more accurate!
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#24Moneyball - Taking a data driven approach to a problem and trusting in the process.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#25October Sky - story of a coal miner’s son becoming a Nasa engineer. It was a big inspiration in my high school.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#26I just watched "Generation Startup" it's a really cool story around the struggles of young tech entrepreneurs.
It's a documentary. Worth the time.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#27I've enjoyed Suits. It's about lawyers, but with an intertwined hacker ethic (one of the lead characters is a college dropout practicing law without a license). There's a bit of cheese that spoils it for me sometimes, but for the most part the emotional drama is pretty engaging, and it definitely inspires a determined, gritty attitude.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#28General Magic (2018) absolutely captures the essence of running & working at a startup doing innovative work on products that were well ahead of their time. Marc Porat is an incredible speaker, and he sheds a ton of light on what struggles they went through ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RaTIF6st4c ), and the thought process behind bringing Magic Cap to market. The soundtrack alone (done by Benji Merrison) makes…
Do you know if it's possible to buy a DRM-free version of it?
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#29I found October sky movie to be pretty motivating.
Re: Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?
#30Pretty much any space-related documentaries. Rosetta probe's trajectory alone is one heck of a motivation. However it's also beneficial to have a dollop of reality on top of Iron Man fantasies. I think that docs like Indie Game and Startup.com must be on the first year CS cirriculum and a required viewing after Social Network. For many, it would help setting expectations a bit more straight.
I see what you're saying, and will check them out, but I would argue setting expectations straight would be demotivational. As long as you know a given idea is not delusional, I think there might be a benefit in keeping your expectations unmanaged, something psychological that says the more you entertain the idea of things going wrong, the more likely they are to. I may be wrong but I intuitively feel like success for a given goal is to a large extent about being stubborn and headstrong in the pursuit of it.