Sex is important! Through the act we perpetuate the species, our own genetic material, and of course, we have fun. Sex is one of the fundamental drives of the human mind; ask any advertiser or film maker whether or not sex sells. Sex is what I like to call a Sensual Energy eXchange. There are different uses for this energy just as there are different inclinations and preferences regarding this energy. Using the Destiny Number, also called the Life Path, we can learn how to best channel this energy to fulfill our sexual needs. The Destiny Number is your birth date reduced to a single digit. For example, if you were on January 1, 1980 you would proceed: 1+1+1+9+8+0 = 20 and 2 + 0 = 2.

NOTE: Sexual expression is often considered taboo and even those who are ’emancipated’ may have a number of repressions. In order to better illustrate the point we will focus upon the extremes. Do not be surprised if you find yourself experiencing a reaction of one form or another and keep an open mind, use these suggestions to embody your vibration sexually.

1 Destiny: You can be single minded in your pursuit of your lover. Taken to the extreme you can look at love as a contest and your partners as conquests. At times you focus too much upon your own satisfaction and be a little too dominant although, your partners find you exciting and willing to experiment. Sexual activities: You can channel your 1 energy be being on top. Make sure you experience the other end of the 1 spectrum by allowing your partner to ride. Ladies, try red lingerie for an exciting night.

2 Destiny: You are a caring lover who aims to please in any way that you can. You enjoy kissing, hugging, and cuddling. In fact, such things are necessary as you need to feel protected and nurtured. At the extreme end you may try to plan things out in advance and schedule love making. You can be a bit submissive and follow your partner’s energy very well. Sexual activities: Show your partner your willingness to please by displaying your body through dance and self-pleasure for their eyes only. On the other side, playfully refuse your lovers advances from time to time and learn to enjoy the power that comes with teasing. Ladies should consider shades of orange in lingerie and makeup.

3 Destiny: You are an exciting and playful lover with a lot of confidence. This gives you the ability to make your partner feel comfortable with your playful, light hearted attitude towards sex. You like different positions and are likely to have a copy of Kama Sutra on your shelf. You can be so uninhibited that you may make your lover blush! Sexual activities: Activities that allow for the sensual exploration of other parts of the body are ideal such as breast sex and foot or toe sex. Ladies can spice things up with shades of yellow.

4 Destiny: Fours can struggle with emotions, especially understanding the passions of their partner. You are slow and steady and may delay lovemaking to build up the steam. Relationships are very important and you are extremely loyal and faithful. Your sex life can become stagnant if you take an intellectual approach and rely only upon the tried and true methods of becoming turned on. Sexual activities: Turn off the lights and crawl under the covers with your lover. Slow, gentle, and long. On the flip side of the coin, go wild every once in a while. Try making love outdoors. Ladies, green is the color to pull out your sensual side to the max.

5 Destiny: The adventurous one! You enjoy variety and excitement. Spontaneity is a turn on as are new places, new positions and new people! You are attractive to the opposite sex and need mental as well as physical stimulation. You like the ups and downs of passion and stimulation. Sexual activities: You may want to eat from a larger menu that includes oral and anal fun, role playing, and other ‘non-standard’ activities like spanking. Ladies should wear blue underclothes and makeup.

6 Destiny: Sixes are quite devoted and need to maintain the balance and harmony in a relationship. When you find that special someone giving in to carnal desires is a joy. Music, candles, and lighting all help to create that air of romance. Long, very long sessions of foreplay including lots of kissing is to your liking. Sexual activities: Being kissed and licked all over your body as well as massages and digital exploration will suit you just fine. Ladies should wear indigo, dark blue, and black.

7 Destiny: Dreamy and romantic, you secretly desire a spiritual connection with your lover. You can be a little spacey and detached and your analytical nature can produce an almost clinical approach to sex. However, you can potentially reach levels of intimacy with your lover that are beyond conscious comprehension. Sexual activities: Explore such things as Tantra and techniques allowing for a more meditative sexual experience. Shed that ‘clinical’ disposition and use some dirty words! Ladies, violets and purples will bring out your inner beast.

8 Destiny: Ok, you’re a freak. Or frigid. Up or down you’re either almost totally active or passive. You can be a little too wrapped up in the politics of sexual power and wouldn’t mind having total control of your partner. Seduce or be seduced. This attitude can alienate others however, when you make a commitment you do so completely. Sexual activities: Games that allow you to safely explore power relationships such as Bondage and Discipline or Role Playing. Learn to enjoy gushy, overly romantic displays. Ladies, the color pink will help you balance out your sexual urges.

9 Destiny: You can be so empathetic that you become a doormat. But, you enjoy helping your lover and often put your own needs on the backburner. But when they finally build up, watch out! Your passion can be volcanic and you lover can unexpectedly find that your quiet nature has become quite demanding. And exciting. Sexual activities: Anything that allows for mutual selfless pleasure such as sixty-nine or mutual masturbation. Ladies should try brown, bronze and chocolate colors in makeup and lingerie.

Copyright Jakob Steele 2007

Source by Jakob Steele

How to use NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to manage your mind, empower your motivation, and deal with the negative effects of rejection in sales. Each day you face new challenging situations. To be successful you deal with rejection and sales objections. It’s all part of the job. But even the best sales people can start to feel the negative impacts of these experiences. How can you come out of a sales call, where you faced a multitude of stressful and negative situations, and walk into the next appointment on a motivational high?

There is a technique, adapted from NLP, that will help you do exactly that.

But first, what is NLP?

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) started as an alternative form of psychotherapy in the mid-seventies. The two co-founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, looked at human behaviour, and attempted to find the rules and programmes of actions and linguistic communication. Now NLP has been transformed into a valuable tool for all areas of personal development, and communication and interaction. It fits the sales world perfectly.

How to use NLP to change you mind

You’ve come out of the sales appointment from hell. Everything that could go wrong did. You made mistakes, we all do. The customer had been let down by your company and you didn’t know. They came up with objection after objection and you didn’t have the answers. There was no rapport built, you and the customer couldn’t find any common ground.

You have a little time before your next appointment, so how do you shake off the negatives, and get back to your most resourceful state? This is the NLP technique I use with my sales team, and my private clients.

Get into an internally focused quiet state

Find somewhere quiet where you won’t be disturbed. Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and start to see the end of the last sales appointment. Hold that final frame of the end of the meeting. Do it as if you had run a video of the situation and stopped it right at the final frame.

Re-frame the picture

As you look at the picture start to drain the colour from it. We all see internal pictures differently. Their will be something about the picture that gives it definition. Often this is in proportion to the bad feelings we get from the experience.

This is how to use NLP for making changes to your feelings about the past. Whatever stands out, such as colour, outlines, tones, tone it right down. Even if it’s already black and white, drain the colour so it becomes grey. Think of viewing a television and turning down the brightness and contrast.

Now make it funny

Rewind your internal video of the sales appointment at a faster than normal speed, and watch the whole thing in reverse. There is something funny about watching people going backwards on a film. See them eat their own words, hear the sounds at a fast speed and in reverse. Watch the funny walks as they go backwards at speed. You just can’t take the people in the pictures seriously anymore, including you.

When you’ve reached the start of the internal film, start playing it forwards. Still at a faster than normal speed. Now you’re the director, and you can make it as funny and ridiculous as you like. Dress up the people in the film, yes including you. Undress them if that makes you laugh more. Add some of your own colours. Red noses, clown shoes, wobbly legs, have some fun, play it forward, add some circus music, and try not to laugh as much as you can.

How do you feel now about that sales appointment now

If you have learned how to use NLP to deal with the negative effect of experiences, you should feel completely different about the sales appointment. You will have re-framed your viewpoint and scratched the past false feelings from your memory banks.

In sales you could be facing the same experiences many times each week. Rejection, problems, your boss, difficult customers, let down by other people. Now you can take the negative impact of these situations away. You understand the importance of motivation, and now you have a tool to delete the future effects of any situation.

Some people ask, why I don’t just erase the pictures of the negative sales appointment. The answer is, you can’t try and erase memories without focusing on them. It’s the same as trying to give something up. You can’t think of stopping smoking without thinking about smoking. This NLP technique changes the effects of the memory. It re-frames the experience.

Now make it wonderfully positive

The final step of how to use NLP to deal with negative sales appointments is let it work positively for you.

Start your internal pictures again. This time see yourself going into a similar situation in the future. Perhaps with the same customer, or how you see your next appointment. Run the film at normal speed. Use a slower speed if you want to highlight the great positives you feel. You are fully in control of the pictures and all aspects of viewpoint, lighting, sound, and script.

Make this the best sales appointment you have ever done. With everything that is positive in your film you get a massive burst of positive feeling. A wave of confidence, a glow of success. Take your time, make the scenes exactly as you want them to happen.

Put it into action

Now go to that next sales call with those same feelings of motivation and confidence running through your mind. You can’t win them all. But this motivation technique will put you in the best possible state to use your sales skills to their best effect.

Source by Stephen Craine

Everyone has heard a voiceover at one time or another. From the voice of Mickey Mouse, to the voice that sells you shampoo or insurance on the radio, voiceovers provide an effective way to evoke emotion or get important information across to an audience. In fact, without voiceover, media wouldn’t have the same impact and the entertainment industry would be at a great loss. The importance of voiceover can be seen every day in a variety of techniques.

What is Voiceover?

Voiceover is a production technique where a voice that is not part of the production is used to speak a particular part. Voiceovers are common in radio, television, film and even theatre. Often, voice actors are hired specifically to perform voiceovers and have no other role in the production.

Techniques

Character Voices

One of the more popular uses for voiceover is to give a voice or a personality to an animated character. Think about Shrek or any other popular Disney Movie. Each character is actually someone behind the scenes with a microphone making the voice come alive. As animated movies are growing in popularity, well known celebrities are looking for voiceover roles, hoping to add a bit of variety to their acting portfolio.

Movie Narration

Another popular use for voiceover is providing narration to a movie. This type of voiceover is so common in movies, you probably don’t even realize it’s happening. Generally, the narrator in a movie has intimate details about the characters on the screen and provides insight for the audience as to their thoughts or emotions. In this sense, voiceover is a critical part of many movies and is necessary for keeping the audience informed. Blockbuster hit movies like Fight Club and Shawshank Redemption use voiceover to provide context.

News Reporting and Non-Fiction Television

Often voiceover is used to report the news. In fact, most television news broadcasts use voiceover as much as live anchors to report news that was taped earlier or segments that were edited beforehand. Other non fiction television that relies on voiceover includes media like the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. Particularly where the focus is educational, voiceover provides a guide for viewers to understand what they are seeing. In addition, game shows have been using voiceover for decades to announce contestants and prizes. Almost everyone is familiar with the popular voiceover from the 1970’s who exclaimed “come on down, you’re the next contestant on the Price is Right!”.

Commercial Advertising

Advertising is another very common use for voiceover. In fact, radio is completely voiceover and actors are never seen. In fact, voiceover is so useful for radio advertisement that certain product manufacturers have signed long term contracts with voiceover actors to “brand” their products. When consumers hear the same, familiar voice representing a product, it builds instant trust and credibility. Even on television, where actors can be seen, it is more likely that a product is featured with voiceover and without an actor. Besides, a strong voiceover highlights the sale instead of the actor seen with the product.

Voiceover is an important part of our movie and television experience. In many cases, voiceover represents more than just information, but has become part of a product, building trust and credibility with consumers.

Source by Victoria Brighton

Classical Hollywood Cinema

Classical Hollywood Cinema is the time period of the film industry that began with the movie release of “The Birth of a Nation.” It incorporates both the Silent Era and Studio Era of filmmaking. Unique to Classical Cinema, the mode of production during this timeframe encouraged film directors to view their work from the perspective of an employee of the studios rather than as auteurists who exercised creative control over their works with an individual film style. The Classical Cinema time period ended in the 1960s when the motion picture industry ushered in a new Post-Classical film style by auteurist film directors with the release of “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) as well as other landmark films of that decade.

Silent Era

The Silent Era is commonly referred to as the “Age of the Silver Screen” from 1917 to 1928. During this time period, there was no sound or synchronized speech accompanying the character’s images being projected on the movie screen. To accommodate for the lack of sound, on-screen captions were utilized to emphasize important points and dialogue in the story. Oftentimes, the projection of silent films onto the big screen was accompanied by live instrumental music (pianist, organist, or even a large orchestra). The standard stylistic elements fundamental to classical Hollywood silent filmmaking were implemented through the Silent Era’s Director-Unit System. This system of filmmaking included a fully integrated work force with a set of employees that had precise areas of responsibility under the leadership of the film director.

Studio Era

The Studio Era was a period in film history that started after the end of the Silent Era (1927/1928) with the release of “Jazz Singer”, the first full length film that contained talking sequences in it. The advent of the Studio Era also marked the beginning of the “Golden Age of Hollywood.” The contribution of Irving Thalberg was significant in development of Hollywood’s Central Producer System during the Studio Era while he was Chief of Production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In fact, the successful transition of classical Hollywood film production style from the Silent Era’s Director-Unit System to the Studio Era’s Central Producer System at MGM took place under Thalberg’s leadership. His ability to produce a quality film with aesthetic value was demonstrated through his balanced view of budgetary controls, script and story development, and use of the “star system” in the successful movie “Grand Hotel.”

Intrinsic to the studio system, the marketing strategies for motion pictures utilized by the major Hollywood film studios was rather straightforward and uncomplicated because the studios obtained most of their money from theater box office ticket sales throughout America. At that time, there were five major studios that owned a production studio, distribution arm, contracts with actors and technical support personnel, as well as a theater chain. These studios were known as the “Big Five” and included Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox, Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), and Loew’s, Inc. (owner of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/MGM). Their revenues came from monies paid by the theaters for renting films from the studios. Since the “Big Five” studios controlled almost every theater throughout America, they received the majority of their money from box office ticket sales.

To further extend their power over the movie houses throughout America, these studios took steps to control almost all of the smaller independently owned theaters, as well. Through the contracting process of “block booking”, theater owners were required to show a block of films (typically in blocks of ten) at their movie house. If the independently owned theaters did not agree to purchase a block of films from a studio, they received no films from the studio at all. Thus, during the Studio Era, the Hollywood film industry was tightly controlled by the powerful studio moguls. However, in 1948, a federal court case outlawed block booking. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the vertical integration of the majors violated federal anti-trust laws and ordered the “Big Five” companies to divest themselves of their theaters over a five-year period. This decision basically brought the studio system era to a close by 1954.

Source by Adrian Robbe

My Big Fat Greek Wedding – 4 Stars (Excellent)

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is simply one of the best movies ever made about close families and their traditions.

This film is on par with Fiddler on the Roof (winner of 3 Oscars among 8 nominations) and A Christmas Story (winner of no major awards and no Oscar nominations), proving that the biggest award-winners are not the only great movies.

A Christmas Story and My Big Fat Greek Wedding were matched bookends in that both films were not thought to be worthy of financing by typical Hollywood backers and ended up as independent films with limited distribution before becoming huge successes.

A Christmas Story, a low budget film that was not expected to do well, was released just before Thanksgiving in 1983. By Christmas the film had been pulled from theaters because it was thought to have been “played out.” It was only because of complaints from moviegoers that it was brought back to life and has since developed a loyal following of fans that will not let it die.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding was filmed because a gutsy Greek girl named Nia Vardalos believed in herself and in her one-woman stage show to keep performing until Rita Wilson saw the play. She persuaded her husband Tom Hanks to produce a movie version.

Wilson, like Vardalos, is Greek. Wilson’s reward as one of the producers with her husband and Gary Goetzman was to see the project completed. The PGA Golden Laurel Awards remembered Rita Wilson by giving her the Visionary Award in 2003. The three producers also won the Golden Laurel Award for Producer of the Year.

So we have in My Big Fat Greek Wedding a low budget, independent film that was about to make Hollywood history.

To show you how dumb the Hollywood financial backers were and how smart Tom Hanks was the estimated $5 million budget for My Big Fat Greek Wedding generated worldwide revenue of $368 million.

The Hollywood backers thought America filmgoers would not accept an ethnic film. I wonder how many of the same backers recognized that Fiddler on the Roof, produced 31 years earlier in 1971, was an ethnic film about a Jewish family which broke with the tradition of arranged marriages.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) became the highest-grossing independent film of all time, surpassing The Blair Witch Project (1999). It also became the highest grossing movie never to have hit number one at the box office, surpassing Dances with Wolves (1990).

Incredibly , the film was still running in several theaters even after its initial video release.

This film is essentially the story of Toula (Nia Vardalos), a 30-year-old Greek woman who falls in love with John (Ian Miller), a non-Greek man, and struggles to get her family to accept him while both of them come to terms with their heritage, cultural identity and mutual compatibility.

As Toula says, “Nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life: marry Greek boys, make Greek babies, and feed everyone . . . until the day we die.”

Her father, Gus Portokalos (Michael Constantine) says: “You better get married soon. You’re starting to look old!” Gus also says, “There are only two kinds of people, Greeks and people who wish they were Greek.” He believes any ailment can be cured with Windex.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the Greek community at its most accurate and best, all of the suffocating love, demanded tradition, motivation by guilt, male ego, female influence, pride of race, sibling ties, extended family, romance and sacrifice for those we love.

This film is not heavy and dripping with drama, this is a romantic comedy mixed with strong family traditions that proves Shakespeare’s sage observation that “all’s well that ends well.”

The cast is not star-studded and proves that you do not need to be a headliner to deliver a headliner’s performance and then some. Joining Nia Vardalos, Michael Constantine and Ian Miller with significant and meaningful contributions were Lainie Kazan as Toula’s mother Maria, Louis Mandylor as Toula’s brother Nick, Andrea Martin as Aunt Voula, and Gia Carides as Cousin Nikki.

Vardalos, Constantine, Mandylor and Carides were the only true Greeks in the cast.

There is a point in the film when Toula feels she is losing the battle and laments that “the man is the head of the house.” Her mother Maria tells her that “the man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.” Maria does so in a confrontation with her husband that should make women proud.

This film will warm you heart, entertain your soul and cause you to walk away a better person for having seen this superb effort in moviemaking. Toula’s personal growth as a young woman freeing herself from forced expectations against insufferable odds is so precious that you want to take her home and adopt her.

I once went to a Polish funeral and was amazed that when the funeral was over and the reception began, the whiskey flowed and all of the immediate family and friends had a heck of great party drinking, dancing and singing.

I learned more about family traditions in different cultures at that Polish funeral. Some cultures celebrate the life of a loved one after the funeral.

Despite the complications presented in My Big Fat Greek Wedding you come away wanting to be Greek because you see the love and the fun that they have much more than any disagreements or disappointments.

The interaction between Toula and her brother Nick is really sweet, touching and funny.

At one point, Nick is impressed with Toula’s ability to break with tradition (he secretly wants to study art) and says, “Don’t let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become.” “Nick, that’s beautiful,” replies Toula, to which Nick adds, “Yeah that dear Abby really knows what she’s talking about.”

Nia Vardalos wrote the script and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay, was nominated for 6 other lesser screenwriting awards and won 2. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is directed by Joel Zwick who won two minor awards for his effort. I feel he deserved more recognition.

The film garnered little attention among the big award givers but did appropriately win the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Comedy. Almost as an afterthought, My Big Fat Greek Wedding won the Best Independent Comedy Film Award from the U. S. Comedy Arts Festival. It would be my pleasure if some of the Comedy Film Award judges were Greek.

There is Greek love throughout this film, from Rita Wilson’s vision to the thousands of Greek Americans who said, hey, this is Greek, this is good. The Greek community really made the film become a box office record-setter while we non-Greeks came on board later and enjoyed the film just as much.

When I left the theater, I went looking for ouzo, the Greek anise-flavored liqueur so celebrated in the film at Greek gatherings. They would down a shot of ouzo and shout “oumpa.”

I married a girl from a very traditional Italian Catholic family. Every Christmas my wife makes Italian cookies with anise-flavored frosting, no wonder I loved My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Anyone who wants a job watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding should be Greek, love ouzo and love having fun. Others need not apply unless, of course, they might want to be Greek, want to try ouzo and have fun!

Copyright © 2006 Ed Bagley

Source by Ed Bagley

Rotoscoping is basically a technique used in animation as the animators capture frame by frame live action so as to develop an animation film. Earlier the captured live actions were projected onto a frosted glass panel and were redrawn by the animator. This equipment used for projection is called “Rotoscope”. Nowadays this equipment has been replaced by computers.

Today’s visual effects industry explains rotoscoping as a technique used to create a matte for an element on a live action plate so as to merge over another background. The term rotoscoping usually abbreviated as “Roto” is used to is been used as a tool for visual effects in live action films. Rotoscoping mainly implies cutting an image from a background and then replacing it in another new background or Rotoscoping involves extracting a moving image from a video and replacing the background completely or partially with special effects. When using this technique, editors trace over live action film movement on each frame to use in a video.

Rotoscoping techniques used:

• Articulated Rotoscoping

• Garbage Matte Creation

• Matte Generation

• 2D Motion Tracking

• Rotosplining

• Paint Touch-up/Cloning

Rotoscoping

Silhouette FX is software used in visual effects industry so as to make the rotoscoping easier. This software is designed exclusively to perform rotoscoping. The main advantage for using this software is that it can be used as stand alone software or can also be used to support application with After Effects or Final Cut Pro. This software also helps one to check out all rotoscoping needs from one single point and hence reduces tedious work effort.

Mocha, software is dedicated entirely for rotoscoping. This software uses a planar tracker to help position, rotate, scale, shear and perspective-shift roto-splines. It has a number of spline tools, all intended to make rotoscoping a faster and easier task.

AE CS3 helps in producing innovative motion graphics and VFX for films as it provides needed speed, precision and powerful tools. AE is principally known for its powerful VFX arsenal. New AE comes to market with several rotoscoping tools which makes the process very easier.

Combustion is jam-packed with dominant artistic tools such as an in-context access to motion graphics, 3D compositing, color correction, image stabilization, vector paint and roto, text effects, short-form editing, expressions, Flash output, and much more. Combustion has very good set of rotoscoping tools. The simplicity in Combustion’s roto tools lie in its point tracking and character control ability.

Fusion is a synergy of 2d and 3d tools for definitive and hardcore compositing. Its rotoscoping tools areas great as its other compositing tools since it works in a node-based environment. Mask inputs on a tile are normally drawn as blue arrows, though other colors may be used for pre-masks and garbage mattes.

Source by Nilna Mohna

Shot framing, camera angle, camera movement, music, sound effects, lighting, color palette, costumes, sets and editing are elements of the theatrical and cinematic arts. They help tell the story of a movie and achieve the emotional impacts sought by filmmakers. The vast majority of students in any classroom will watch many more movies, video games, or television shows than they will read books. Thus, understanding the components of theatrical and cinematic technique is an important skill for any thinking individual in today’s society. English Language Arts teachers will do their students a great favor if they give them the tools with which to understand the screened stories that students will be watching all their lives.

Despite the fact that the recent edition of the Common Core State Standards require that students be taught how to analyze and appreciate media and screen presentations, most ELA teachers find it difficult to obtain effective resources to meet these standards. In fact, showing movies in class can often be a controversial educational technique. There have been too many instances when teachers have used movies to babysit classes. However, the study of screened presentations, the way that today’s students like to consume stories, deserves its place in today’s English Language Arts classroom.

But I’m not trained in cinema! How do I learn enough to teach this lesson? The answer is that there are many resources on the Internet or in the library that provides introductions to the theatrical and cinematic techniques used in movies. Some time with these will give you what you need.

As for the lesson plan, first, present students with a brief introduction to the information on cinematic and theatrical elements in film that you’ve learned from books, the Internet or from courses that you’ve taken. Then work through a movie that students will like but which also bears some relationship with the curriculum. This is easy in an ELA class because all movies utilize many of the devices and elements of fiction in their presentation of the story. The movie can be used to sum up or confirm learning literary elements or devices the class has studied.

The remainder of the unit can be organized in a number of ways. One idea is for teachers to start with a lecture and examples describing some of the more important theatrical and cinematic techniques. In addition, be sure to describe for students the important role of the literary devices and elements in the stories told through film. Almost all movies have a plot, character development, a climax and resolution. Many have motifs, symbols, flashbacks etc.

Then students can be given a cinematic and theatrical elements worksheet to fill out during breaks as the movie progresses. After the first half of the movie has been shown, hold a class discussion about the theatrical, cinematic and literary elements they have seen so far. Talk about how these factors contribute to the story being told by the film.

For the second half of the film, divide the class into groups of no larger than four individuals. Assign each group one of the common theatrical, cinematic or literary elements that is used in the second half of the movie. Ask each group to identify their element as it is used in the film and after the movie is over, to give the class a brief presentation about how the device contributes to the telling of the story.

This is just one of many ways that this important subject can be presented to a class. The point is that screened presentations are the literature of today’s youth. The stories that they love usually no longer come from books, but rather from movies, television, the computer, or video games. ELA teachers will be giving students skills that they can use frequently for the rest of their lives by teaching the devices and techniques of the theatrical and cinematic arts.

Source by James Frieden

Green screen technology is a method used widely in the films we see today, from action films like the 300 to romantic comedies like 500 Days of Summer. You may think the scenes were shot in location but in fact, they were simply computer generated and shot in a green screen studio. They look realistic huh?

Let me break that down for you, green screen or chroma-key involves merging two images together. Once the background color of first image is removed, the second image behind it will then serve as the final backdrop. This backdrop can be virtually anything, a beach setting or even something created in your imagination. There practically no boundaries with this.

Established video production companies integrate this into their system with the use of large green backdrops, expensive lighting equipment and experienced editors and producers but actually, if you have the right skills and knowledge regarding this process, you can certainly pull it off yourself.

Now, this article will guide you with the primary “don’ts” just to make sure you’ve got the basics right. If you fail with the A-B-C’s, trust me; you’ll get nowhere.

1. Lighting

One of the biggest concerns you will face in producing seamless videos is always lighting. The excess or the lack of it will dictate the success of your material. The placements of the light sources must be precise. Lighting must be evened out since you have to avoid any shadows on the green set.

Shadows will give of a dark cast over your final output. Remember, it takes more than good lighting to avoid your project from looking like some horror film.

2. Think Ahead

How do you imagine the final product background? You must envision the video as a whole. Think of the background as well as the artists who will participate. The more planning and vision you start with, the more cohesive your work will be in the end.

3. Distance

Have your actors stay at least 10 feet away from the background. This will lessen color spills.

4. Clothing

Alright, once we’ve got the background cleared. Let’s proceed with the on-screen talent. All greens, khaki’s and brown are no-no’s. They have a tendency to become transparent in the final picture. Patterns need to be avoided as well.

5. Props

Every video production needs props but steer clear from any reflective or shiny objects. These will reflect the green color and just like number 4, they may turn out transparent.

Alright, so those are only 5 tips but believe me, keep those things checked and you’ll be on your way to producing amazing videos.

Source by Andrew L James

Sarah Silverman takes a non patronizing approach to urging people on the fence about participating in the 2016 election to cross that line and make a decision regardless as to whether it  is in line with her views or not.

In a comic video released  today on her Facebook page she explains why Bernie Sanders is the candidate she is voting for.

While explaining that as a feminist woman, she was a proponent for Hilary Clinton except for the fact that she takes campaign money from big business corporations, she goes on to state that Bernie Sanders is the only candidate running on the type of rebellious platform that can cause real productive change in the country.

“This man is running for president on a platform that is just a giant fuck-you to the above-the-law billionaire class who have been controlling government policy with their money, and not paying a nickel in taxes through government loopholes they secure with said money,” Silverman said.

“It’s important that you treat your vote as something valuable, because it is. It’s so valuable,” Silverman said. “Candidates literally spend billions of dollars trying to get your vote.”

The video has already been shared over 40,000 times as of this post.