//February 27, 2010//

Ketika malam beranjak larut dan pagi menuju terang, aku ingin melihat warna yang tidak pernah terlihat.

Jingga atau marun.

Violet atau krem.

Tosca atau turqouise.

Sudah pernahkah kamu melihatnya?

Warna itu merasakan gerakan tanganku, maupun dentuman jantungku. Dan dia.

Warna merah yang sempurna atau hijau yang mutlak.

Akankah kami dapat melihat warna yang tak pernah dilihat itu?

Sebelum waktu habis dan dunia berubah lambat. Karena pada saat itu, kamipun tak dapat melihat satu sama lain lagi.

Warna yang tidak pernah dilihat, tolong ciptakan nama untuknya. Karena warna itu telah ada, namun tak punya kata untuk menyebut.

Atau lebih baik begitu?

 

//January 25, 2010//

Hari ini, langit kembali berubah merah. Tetesan darah kembali ditumpahkan ke bumi. Hei dewa, masihkah kau tertawa dalam keceriaan? Masihkah kau merayakan pestamu? Sudahkah kau puas dengan alunan musikmu?

Dentuman irama genderang mengalun syahdu. Bagimu. Bukan bagi kami.

Bagi kami, yang ada hanya tangisan, dan tegakan darah dari para saudara yang berperang.

Wahai Ares, kau pemusik yang jenius. Ritme indah dan nada merdu selalu terlontar dari genderang perangmu.

Wahai dewa, hentikan pestamu!

Karena besok, salah satu dari kami akan merebut genderang itu. Tungggulah pesta kami di bawah nirwanamu.
Inspired by Best Friend Hafidh’s original.

 

//January 25, 2010//

Cinta itu buta.

Semua kitab menulis hal itu. Semua prosa dan nyanyian menyerukan hal itu.

Bangunlah, para pencinta. Bukalah mata kalian yang tertutup itu. Sadarkah kalian bahwa semua ini adalah kebohongan?

Kebohongan yang indah, para pujangga bercerita.

Para pencinta menggantung dirinya bersama. Lari menjauhi keluarga dan kerabat. Hanya untuk mengagungkan panah sang dewa asmara. Yang kalian percaya adalah mukjizat.

Tapi bagi sang dewa asmara, panah itu tak berarti apa-apa. Panah itu diarahkan sembarangan, dibuang semena-mena. Karena sang dewa asmara tak dapat melihat, dewa asmara tidak memiliki mata.

Cinta itu buta.

Seperti butanya mata Sang Cupid.

Inspired by Best friend Hafidh’s original.

 

/December 20, 2009//

 

Technology is the most growing part of humanity nowadays. We’ve got a lot muscular to rest, and gain lot of laziness. But in the other hand, we cure more of sick people and finding new substance to create antidote against evil viruses. Technology has good and bad side, as every single thing have their own two sides of coin. But then again, technology could give you happiness and sadness through its existence. As happy as lovers go, technology also changed the way of watching cinema. Forever.

When Edward Muybridge founded the way to capture life through lenses and films in 1878, we might never think that those flat substances could bring depth—the so called third dimension we knew. After all years of the joy of watching cinema we thought that the technology couldn’t give us the merrier excitement. We knew that the sound could give us more real feeling through the digital surround sound, we knew that channel 10.1 is finally arrived at the cinema. But the ear alone cannot capture the life in the cinema. Because eye happens to be called the most important sense, so scientist and engineers tend to be aware of this opinion. Experiment is made and the search to find the newest invention to watch cinema had never end. Years and years passed and voila, the magic happens. The magic is called 3-D MOVIE.

 

James Cameron’s AVATAR was ranked 168 on imdb’s Top 250 with only 2 days of premiering with 8.7 rating and 82% in RottenTomatoes. Having $ 300 million on budget (said to be one of the most expensive films ever made), it is already returned $ 27 million profit on these 2 days. The 3-D version of this movie happened to be breathtaking and made us gasp and cheer as the same time. It is science fiction on new perspective. For fantasy genre lover, this is must be your lucky charm. James Cameron not only directed this one, he even wrote it (gosh, he added a sum of talented people being born with so much neuron and tons of imagination). The King of the World is return on blockbuster once again, and this time, it is with a vengeance. People are comparing AVATAR with Star Wars (1977), the movie that changed our perspective on creating and watching films.

When I’ve got the lecture on my class about 3-D images, I know that ‘we’ already could create 3-D movies. But then again, I’ve never thought that ‘we’ could create impact that much bigger. After watching my first 3-D movie experience, it tickled my common sense as an engineer (who loves to make and watch movies ;P ) to spread the joy more and more. When everybody just reviewed AVATAR with beautiful words, here I am, giving you the so-called-cheap-information to coup you up to create this so-called-mainstream-technology. I’ll be giving you the science of what really happen when you take on the glasses and sit through the movie.

Let’s start here. When does the magic really start happen? People said, although the 1950s are most often considered to be the 3-D movie decade, the first feature length 3-D film, “The Power of Love,” actually was made in 1922. Since that time the use of 3-D technology in theaters and television has gained such popularity and changed the standard of watching movie. It is actually simple, and you might be found the phenomenon on your TPB’s classes, yet it is amazing to find out what is actually happened behind the glasses.

The Magic

Most human beings gifted with two eyes and an absolutely amazing binocular vision system. The binocular system makes each eye see a different image, and the brain combines them into a single picture that we use to calculate distance. The binocular vision system lets us easily tell with good accuracy how far away an object is.

The binocular vision system relies on the fact that our two eyes are spaced about 5 centimeters apart. Therefore, each eye sees the world from a slightly different perspective. The brain uses the slight difference in angle between the two images, known as parallax that helped us to define depth. This is probably the answer to your question why we have to wear 3-D glasses to watch 3-D movie. It is to feed different images into our eyes. The screen actually displays two images, and the glasses cause one of the images to enter one eye and the other to enter the other eye.

 

Red/Green or Red/Blue

In this system, two images are displayed on the screen, one in red and the other in blue (or green). The filters on the glasses allow only one image to enter each eye, and your brain does the rest. The images that we saw through projector are contained of two color layers in a single film. One layer is dominated by red, and the other is dominated by blue or green. That’s why we have one red lens and one blue/green lens. These lenses let one eye to see the red part of the image and the other eye to see the blue/green part. The different color makes our brain combined them as one image with 3 dimensions. However, because of the use of color-filtering lenses, the color of the final image isn’t accurate. This type of 3-D technology has also caused some people to experience headaches and eye strain.

Polarization

In this newer system, two synchronized projectors are created two different views onto the screen, each with a different polarization. The light that creates each image is polarized to match the corresponding lens. The glasses allow only one of the images into each eye because they contain lenses with different polarization. Rather than looking like a mesh of red and green, movies that use this technology look normal, but blurry, when viewed without glasses.

Now you probably saying, “Ooh, so that’s what happen”, but it is just the magic happened on the cinema. You might be grows a new questions about how they actually created 3-D images. What’s exactly the magic happened when the camera is rolling? Catch another time maybe, and I’ll write why.

“Look, when Jim (James Cameron) writes a story, we figure out the technology to realize it. It’s not the other way around. We don’t say, ‘Oh, here’s the technology. Let’s come up with some story to do’.”
– Jon Landau, producer of AVATAR and Titanic

Prisanti Putri
(soon to be, hopefully) Physic Engineer

 

Credits:
Wilson, Tracy V. “How is digital 3-D different from old 3-D movies?.” 30 March 2007. HowStuffWorks.com. 19 December 2009.
Brain, Marshall. “How 3-D Glasses Work.” 18 July 2003. HowStuffWorks.com. 19 December 2009.
O’Hehir, Andrew. “Creating the world of James Cameron’s Avatar” 16 December 2009. 19 December 2009.
Ebert, Roger. “Avatar” 11 December 2009. 19 December 2009.

//September 18, 2009//

 

God answers prayers in 3 ways:
He says ‘Yes’ and give you what you want.
He says ‘No’ and gives you something better.
He says ‘Wait’ and gives you the best.

Toko Permata. Siang Hari

Di bawah sorotan lampu putih dan display etalase yang serupa, terlihat deretan cincin dan perhiasan diletakkan. Toko permata itu sangat terkenal, sudah menangani ribuan klien. Untuk kado ulang tahun, untuk pernikahan, dan tentu saja untuk melamar.

Sebuah kotak cincin terlihat dibuka oleh Sang Pegawai Toko.
“Ini yang terbaik, Tuan,” katanya sambil tersenyum. Dikeluarkannya sebuah pita berwarna putih.

Sang Pembeli mengambil kotak cincin tersebut dan mengangguk-angguk puas. Kotak cincin itupun ditutup, dililit pita oleh tangan piawai Sang Pegawai Toko. Sang Pegawai Toko menggesekkan sebuah kartu kredit di mesin. Kartu platinum, dengan warna hitam yang mengkilat. Tanda tangan siap dibubuhkan, dengan bolpen emas milik Sang Pembeli.

Suara mesin kasir terdengar berdentang. Sang Pegawai Toko dan Sang Pembeli berjabat tangan. Keduanya tersenyum, transaksi yang memuaskan.

Rooftop sebuah hotel. Malam hari.

Terlihat dua gelas terdentang. Malam itu, ratusan bintang berlomba mencuri perhatian. Dinner istimewa, satu meja di bawah langit yang gemerlap. Makanan pembuka, lilin remang-remang, main course, permainan violin (“Surprise!” kata Sang Pria), pembicaraan yang panjang, sedikit canda, dan tambahan rayuan manja.

Malam berlalu, Sang pria membuka kotak cincin, Sang Wanita (tampaknya) kaget bukan main. Sang pria memasangkan cincin itu di jari Sang Wanita yang sesaat menahan nafas. Sang Wanita menjawab.

Sebuah apartemen. Siang Hari

Terlihat sebuah kamar apartemen mewah. Sebuah suara terdengar dari telepon.

“Silahkan tinggalkan pesan setelah bunyi BIP.”

“Yandi, nggak ada di rumah, ya? Eh, udah denger belom? Gue tadi baru dapet undangan, terus gue langsung telpon elo. Si Nina, iya Nina, mau kawin aja gitu. Cincinnya bo… wah, gede banget… Tapi lo jangan pasang tampang kusut ya waktu dateng ke resepsinya. Ntar lo pokoknya sama gue aja… ngomong-ngomong gimana cewe yang waktu itu gue kenalin, rada-rada suka nggak nyambung gitu sih ngomongnya. Tapi cakep kan, bo… Udah dulu deh, Yan. Nanti kalo udah pulang kasih tahu gue ya, Bo. Katanya ada tempat sushi baru dibuka. Giliran lo nraktir, ya…”

Di meja terdapat pigura-pigura foto yang memperlihatkan foto sebuah pasangan. Terlihat genangan darah meluas, kaki seseorang terlihat terduduk. Di tangan kanan mayat itu ada sebuah pistol, dan di tangan kirinya ada sebuah undangan pernikahan. Nina dan Ardi, tulisnya. Di lantai, tergeletak sebuah foto, Yandi dan Nina, saling memeluk. Masa lalu dan kenangan-kenangan indah.

Sang wanita menjawab “Ya.”
Tapi jawabannya tak selalu indah.