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How to download: http://pastebin.com/PYvJGkRE

This video and the "Despecialized Edition" fan edits of the Star Wars original trilogy were made by the user known as "Harmy" on the OriginalTrilogy.com forums. You may download this video featurette in its highest quality at the following link:

http://uloz.to/xg5L2HSA/sources-doc-n...

Subtitles for this video are now available in multiple languages! Use YouTube's closed captions ("cc") feature to turn them on!

"Star Wars: Despecialized Edition" is a fan edit project with the goal to reconstruct the original theatrical releases of the Star Wars original trilogy (Episodes IV, V, & VI) at a quality comparable to the high-definition medium of our time. To learn more about this project, search the web for "Star Wars Despecialized Edition" or click the link below to be taken to the primary thread for this project on the OriginalTrilogy.com forums:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD/topic/12713/

Star Wars: Despecialized Edition is a work in progress, and is distributed at no cost to legal owners of the Star Wars Blu-ray Disks.

DO NOT use the OriginalTrilogy.com forums to ask how to download the Despecialized Editions. If you need help or would like to learn more about this project, send an email to me, the uploader of this video, at HanDuet@gmail.com.

Finally, the legal stuff: "Star Wars" is copyrighted by Lucasfilms, which is now owned by Disney. This video featurette contains audio and short clips of copyrighted video footage from various versions of "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" with the explicit purpose of comparison of video sources for commentary and criticism. As the uploader of this video to YouTube, I am acting in good faith that use of such copyrighted footage in this manner is permitted and protected by the Copyright Disclaimer of the Copyright Act of 1976 of United States law.

Since the beginning of cinema, filmmakers have relied on cutting from one image to another in order to tell a visual story. The human brain naturally fills in the gaps between images, and the narrative proceeds smoothly despite the choppy visuals. Now one neuroscientist’s research may change all that. Sergei Gepshtein wants to eliminate the need for cuts—not with long-takes, but by using his research into human perception to create a brand new cinematic language. If Gepshtein’s work sounds confusing, that’s because we don’t really have the vocabulary to discuss it yet. Jennifer Ouellette, however, has done her best to detail his complex ideas in articles for Scientific American and Pacific Standard. As she explains, the best point of comparison may be optical illusions that allow viewers to see an image in two different ways depending on where they put their focus. Gepshtein hopes to harness the brain’s natural tendency to organize visual information so that directors can seamlessly blend scenes together without the use of cuts. “In effect, one scene may emerge in the middle of the other without cuts, and without the artificial tools of image morphing or dissolves,” he says. Essentially, Gepshtein is arguing that filmmakers have yet to unlock the potential of digital technology, because they are still using old-fashioned cinematic tools (like cuts). He argues that the quick-cutting style that is so popular with today’s blockbusters keeps the audience at a distance, rather than drawing them into the world of the film. He wants to take a ground-up approach and build a whole new cinematic method from “first principles,” not just evolve existing technology through trial and error. That technology wouldn’t just be limited to film; it could be used in all sorts of practical ways. For instance, information boards at airports could be constructed to reveal urgent information to viewers standing far away and more detailed information to those up close. Given that we at The A.V. Club are fans of weird technology, long-tak

Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his head to the right, and the scene immediately cuts to an image of an apple on a side table, our brain fills in the gap, and we understand that this man is looking at the apple. That’s because the brain has a natural propensity for smoothing over interruptions of stimuli. Whenever we blink, our eyes close for up to half a second, but we don’t notice the breaks. We also make rapid eye movements called saccades several times a second as we adjust to a constantly shifting environment, and we lose access to visual information until the eye movement settles down. This may why we generally don’t notice cuts in movies—they work like saccades. But neuroscientist Sergei Gepshtein dreams of a new visual vocabulary for cinema—one that relies much less on the cut, or perhaps even eliminates the cut altogether. “The film industry rests on a narrow selection of possibilities that got discovered early on and then got canonized by the force of inertia and entrenched by filmmaking technology and habit,” he says. Gepshtein sees some of the most disagreeable traits of entrenched movie technology in today’s blockbuster action movies. In these films, shots last only seconds, and there are regular barrages of rapid-fire cuts. Think Transformers, Battleship, the Bourne trilogy, or Pacific Rim. As Scott Derrickson, director of recent thrillers like Sinister and The Day the Earth Stood Still, laments, “The story is happening to you, but you are not interacting with the story.” But Gepshtein thinks he can offer an alternative to this trend—and it doesn’t necessarily involve long takes in the style of directors like Alfonso Cuarón, who recently snagged a directing Oscar for Gravity. Instead, it involves harnessing the modern science of vision. In December, I paid a visit to Gepshtein at his workplace, the Systems Neurobiology Laboratories of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, its sleek whi

Astronauts on a routine repair mission for the Hubble Space Telescope find themselves coping with more than they bargained for in the pulse-pounding opening sequence of Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning film, Gravity. Debris from the destruction of a defunct Russian satellite kills one colleague and detaches Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) from the repair shuttle, sending her tumbling in a freefall through space as veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) frantically shouts instructions over the comlink. Most astonishing is that Cuaron shot the scene as a seamless whole. The camera zooms in and around the screen, focusing first on one character, and then another, pulling back occasionally to capture the full jaw-dropping panoramic vista of near-earth orbit. “It is visual poetry,” marveled director Scott Derrickson (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sinister) when we chatted back in December, all the more noteworthy because Cuaron’s technique is in such sharp contrast to the visual style that dominates most blockbuster action movies these days, in which the average shot length is typically less than five seconds. Think Transformers, Battleship, the Bourne trilogy, or Pacific Rim, all of which feature long action sequences comprised of a series of short, rapid cuts – pure sensory stimulus. Yet Gravity’s action sequences run as long as 17 minutes without a single cut, giving the film a very different feel for audiences accustomed to a more frenetic visual pace. Small wonder the Director’s Guild of America awarded Cuaron its top prize for a feature film, and he just snagged the Oscar for Best Director this year. For instance, here’s the opening sequence from Quantum of Solace: Now compare the look and feel of that scene with this extended three-minute sequence from Gravity, without a single cut: Cuaron has flirted with this approach before: he used a method called stitching to create the illusion of seamless shots in key battle scenes in his 2006 film Children of Men; Gravity takes it to the next level, thanks to

[ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues of and methods pertaining to digital image dissemination, authorship and context should make an effort to purchase and read this chapbook. I cannot recommend it enough.]

"With new blogs springing up every day, beautiful images & words are springing up with them. I try to credit everything I put on this blog. I know sometimes I fail. Many of the images I feature are scanned by me from an extensive library- I only scanned them. They are not mine to claim. I am always surprised, amused, dismayed when I see bloggers paste watermark images over images they have scanned, or even more surprising- claim ownership of images from magazines, the content of magazines barely having even reached subscribers- by adding footnotes to their blogs like:

Maybe you’re young enough to remember Blue’s Clues, or old enough to have a little one hanging on the mystery-solving adventures of Steve and Blue as you read this. If, by any chance, Blue’s Clues happens to be on in the background, try this experiment: watch and see how long the camera holds on a single shot. You will, by design, be waiting a long time. The child psychologists who helped create Blue discovered that young viewers don’t know what to do with cuts and edits; they understand them as a new scene, not the same scene shot from a different angle, and they’re soon too confused to keep up. So the Blue’s Clues camera almost always holds steady, in a series of long and deliberate takes. On the grown-up channels, the camera can do more—but only because we’ve already learned the complicated visual grammar that makes the camera make sense. Think of the long list of visual cues we take for granted.

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls, and developed with contributions from users.

The videos can be played simultaneously -- the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.