Small steps to the Big Screen

Are you a movie buff? Do you love watching movies for more than just the entertainment? Do you dream of becoming an actor, director, film technician one day? Here is a group of special people who with only their limited resources, have created this little masterpiece. This is a very respectable piece or work and creativity but not the best, because I’m sure their best is yet to come!

Rochershake Productions presents “The Law”. The Law wasn’t planned under a scheduled meeting or taking ideas from experts. One day, this group of friends, all about the same age group of 22 years were hanging out with each other, playing poker and killing time during their vacation. It just occurred to them, that they could possibly make a movie, and from then on the idea just grew!

Were they worried about light setting, filming, editing? Naaa… they knew they had the talent and the will! What else do you need! As their game of poker carried on that evening, each of them were given a character casually, and slowly it began developing into into a story... and behold… The Law. Click on the following image to watch the entire film.

The Law was made was shot over a span of 3 days from 10pm to 4am every day and night. What’s amazing to me and I guess to everyone too is that they have used practically ‘nothing special’ to create this simple yet intricate film.  All what is used in this film is normal house lighting (tube lights, bulbs) and street lamps (for the road scenes). The total budget was 900 bucks, which was for the tripod they bought. For the video, a Cannon 8.1MP digital camera was used, without any expertise in acting, shooting or editing. All this… and Windows Movie Maker! Amazing isn’t it?

This is not uploaded on YouTube because then, the limit was just 10min, while the film is almost 15min. Currently Rochershake Productions are working on their next release “Citius, Fortius, Chronos – A boon or a curse”. I’m more impatient for this release than any other main stream movies like SALT or all the recent crappy Bollywood flicks! The minor problem they’re facing now is to condense the new film to 15 min which is the upload limit of YouTube. For now, watch the trailer of Citius, Fortius, Chronos and then I’m sure you’ll be awaiting the release too!

Aditya Aggarwal, Akanksha Shah, Daksh Bajoria, Karan Shah, Meghna Amin, Nishil Davawala, Parthiv Shah, Pulah Shah, Rushil Shah and Tulsa Bhatt constitute this amazing team. I applaud all of them for their amazing use of time in their vacation and for inspiring us. All the best to all their future creations and efforts!

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Google doesn't "look good"...

If you ask me, Google is one big brand which does not seem to care about looks. It gives a good gift, but not so much with a good gift-wrap! Be it Gmail, the Gtalk desktop-client, Google buzz, iGoogle or the "simple" Google search itself. The best example which has become a victim of Google's boring and "simple" UI is Orkut. Facebook has completely crushed Orkut and Orkut is practically on its way to extinction! But recently, after the revamp of the Google Image Search Engine, it made me happy to note that Google has taken some effort to dress well!

The "new look" of Google Images displays only the image thumbnails (which is what we want) ignoring the links, image size, etc which it used to display before. The hover of the cursor over any image will give us a quick (larger) view of the image. Not only that, in the first search page itself, we can get up to 300 or even more images without having to check them page by page (depending on image size), which wasn't the case before.


On clicking an image, we go to a next page where we get a bigger image, but still not the actual image size itself!!! Why was that needed??!!! There again, from the sidebar, we click a link which FINALLY gives the full and actual image size! Phew! Now when they had to revamp all this, why three clicks?? Couldn't they have stuck with just two?!!

Now if you have heard of or used the GreaseMonkey script "Greased Lightbox" (Joe Lencioni's Greased Lightbox is a user script that enhances browsing on websites that link to images) before... then you will agree with me, that the old Google interface was better since you could view the entire image in the first click after the search itself. Not only that, once a particular image was clicked, you could surf through the other images present on that page, by just pressing the Navigation Keys. So now that Google has changed the Image search format, GreasedLightbox also needs to adapt to that. Hope we get an update soon or rather Google should make the required changes themselves. I'm sure they can show the image details (site, size, etc) within two simple clicks, along with the full-size image!

If you want to check out Greased Lightbox, which can also be used to easily surf through other image sites like Flickr, etc... then you can get it from one of these: http://shiftingpixel.com/lightbox/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/12545

You will need GreaseMonkey addon first to install the script. Do post your comments about this and what do you think of Google's Image Search otherwise? Now if you also note the irony, that though Google's products don't "look good" enough... I'm sure you must have heard that Google's offices are the best looking workplaces in the world. If you want to see them... check it out on Google Image search :P I've just put one pic here.

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