2009 in 500 Words

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//December 24, 2009//

Waaah, sudah hampir tahun 2010 rupanya. Hmm, hmm, 2010. Tahun yang mengharuskan gue untuk lulus kuliah :P But there’s just so much beautiful memories on 2009. Why should rush it to 2010?

Tahun 2009 buat gue adalah tahun yang menyegarkan!

The Writing Experience

Tahun kemarin, gue berjanji menulis lebih banyak review film, and I did it! Tahun 2008 adalah tahun pertama gue mencoba menulis review film karena janji sama Tangkas buat bikin review Iron Man. And here I am, the non-stopping-writing-engine. Haha… Omong-omong tentang menulis, gue benar-benar melanjutkan kembali kesukaan gue untuk menulis di tahun ini. Dan entah kenapa, jadi banyak yang suka sama tulisan-tulisan gue (apa gue yang terlalu PD?) Tapi entah kenapa setiap ada yang bilang suka sama tulisan gue, gue jadi lebih semangat untuk menulis lagi. Coba kita lihat. Gue sudah menulis review:

Billy Elliot, Mary and Max, Avatar, UP, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Inglourious Basterds, 17 Again, Transformer, This is It, LANJUT, Gan!

Wew, lumayanlah ya… Yang gue seneng banget, tahun ini gue mencoba ikutanNanowrimo. Website ini istilahnya adalah writing project yang mengharuskan kita menulis sebanyak 50.000 kata selama satu bulan yaitu bulan November. Gue sudah lama banget mengidam-idamkan untuk ikutan acara ini, sayangnya memang gue belum punya banyak waktu untuk menulis, jadi gue akhirnya menyerah di tengah November. Novel yang gue tulis adalah interpretasi dari film yang pengen gue bikin, yaitu kumpulan cerita pendek berjudul The Tale of Rainbow—Cerita Pelangi. Tapi tahun depan gue pasti ikutan lagi, and that’s just my wish for next year.

The Movie-Watching Experience

Tahun kemarin gue menargetkan nonton lebih banyak film di bioskop. Karena tahun 2008 kemarin gue sadar bahwa gue tidak terlalu banyak ikutan nonton bareng atau sejenisnya, jadi tahun ini akhirnya gue berhasil menonton 18 film di bioskop! Mungkin ada yang bilang itu jumlah yang sedikit, tapi gue mengalami peningkatan secara kuantitas di tahun ini. Film pertama yang gue tonton di tahun 2009 adalah Pintu Terlarang dan yang terakhir adalah AVATAR.

The Unbeatable Journey

Tahun ini adalah tahun pertama gue menjabat sebagai Fungsionaris LFM-ITB. Not much to tell actually, because I don’t want to spoil this one too much. I found light, I found passion, I found (many) children, and too much story to tell. But not today, I promised to write it in April 2010. Hihi ;P

Mangasi Napitupulu. Well yeah, it’s thirty. Why does it feel like seconds? Jangan terlalu banyak makan lagilah kita, bahaya.

The Random Fact

I’ve got my Oktomat! Gue KP di Medco E&P. Gue untuk pertama kalinya ke luar negeri! Waktu itu Kuliah Kerja (Kulker) ke Batam dan Singapura. Tapi ke Singapuranya cuma kamuflase untuk jalan2 semata. Gue jadi tim kampanye Cakahim di himpunan dan mendesign sebuah poster kampanye ala Facebook yang norak tapi banyak yang suka. Sayang Cakahim yang gue dukung nggak menang. Gue menambah tingkat kegaulan dengan punya Tumblr—playing with rainbow. Gue bertemu dengan kakak pengajar Invite34 tercinta, Billy Christian. Huooo, luar biasa!!! Never imagined anything like it before! :)

WOW! Isn’t that a year to remember?

The Bob Lennon – Endoh Kenji

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/December 23, 2009//

Semua orang pasti punya tokoh favorit, idola nama kerennya. Ada yang mengidolakan atlet, artis, politikus, Albert Einsten, Mother Theresa, Michael Jackson, dan banyak lagi. Banyak juga yang pasti mengidolakan tokoh komik. Gue suka sekali baca komik, bahkan sampai sekarang. Tapi mungkin bacaan kesukaan gue masih berasal dari para pengarang komik zaman lama macam Naoki Urusawa, Eiichiro Oda, Akira Toriyama, CLAMP dll. Di setiap komik, gue pasti punya tokoh kesukaan, macam Hanamichi dari Slam Dunk, Nobita dari Doraemon, Sawamura-nya Harlem Beat, Luffy dan Zoro dari One Piece, dll. Kali ini, gue mau memperkenalkan salah seorang tokoh idola gue, namanya Endoh Kenji dari serial 20th Century Boys.

Buat para pembaca 20th Century Boys, pasti udah taulah, ya. Soalnya dia adalah tokoh utama di seri ini. Dia adalah seorang pahlawan tanpa tanding. Dia memegang gitar layaknya senapan mesin, dan berhasil menyelamatkan dunia. Endoh Kenji adalah idola gue.

Kenapa? Entah. Di awal cerita, Kenji digambarkan sebagai anak laki-laki biasa yang menggemari music rock tahun 70-an macam Rolling Stone, T-Rex, CCR, dll. Kenji punya segudang imajinasi dan banyak mimpi setinggi langit, yang pada akhirnya tidak bisa diwujudkannya. Kenji bercita-cita jadi musikus terkenal, punya band dan tampil di TV. Tapi pada akhirnya, ia berhenti dari band dan membuka MiniMart. Dia terus gagal dan lari dari masalah. Dia orang biasa yang harus tunduk pada tuntutan zaman dan lilitan hutang. Seiring bergulirnya cerita, Kenji ‘diharuskan’ menyelamatkan bumi, dia pun bangkit dan tidak ada lagi yang mampu menandinginya. Dia selalu mengorbankan dirinya sendiri buat keselamatan banyak orang-orang yang bahkan sebenernya rela mati demi dia. Yang hebat dari Kenji adalah entah kenapa, dia mampu menarik banyak orang. Dia mampu membuat banyak orang percaya padanya. Hanya dengan kepercayaannya, dia mampu menggerakkan banyak orang dan hanya dengan sebuah lagu, ia membuat orang-orang kembali berharap.

Kenji mungkin memang orang biasa, tapi Naoki Urusawa (pengarang komik ini) bisa saja membuat tokoh ‘sekuat’ ini (Kenji gk punya kekuatan aneh2 macam bisa melar atau punya senjata laser, dia diceritakan sebagai ‘manusia biasa’). Luar biasa, luar biasa. Hal inilah yang membuat gue suka sekali sama Kenji, ada satu kalimat yang gue inget, “Orang yang akan bertahan hidup adalah orang yang punya keinginan untuk bertahan hidup.”. Kalau ada yang sempat, coba saja baca komiknya, pasti kalian gk cuma jatuh cinta sama jalan ceritanya yang luar biasa tapi juga suka sama penokohan setiap karakternya yang gk biasa.

Hmm, tahun 2010 sudah di depan mata. Kalau boleh mempunyai harapan, gue pengen seperti Endoh Kenji! :D

Trivia: Dalam serial ini, Kenji membuat sebuah lagu, yang diberi judul Bob Lennon (singkatan dari Bob Dylan dan John Lennon). Di Jepang, rekaman lagu ini dijadikan bonus untuk setiap pembelian komiknya. Lirik aslinya ditulis dalam bahasa Jepang, ini lirik bahasa inggris-nya:

The sun goes down, and I can smell
curry cookin’, somewhere.
How long will we have to walk
before we get home?
Will the croquettes from my favorite shop
still taste the same,
waiting for me?

Night comes down upon the earth,
and I’m hurryin’ home.

They say
the ogres will be laughing next year.
And I say
let ’em laugh all they like.
I’ll keep talkin’ about
five or ten years in the future.
And fifty years later, If I’m still with you.

Night comes down upon the earth,
and I’m hurryin’ home.

Well the rain may fall

and the storms may come
And the spears may fall.
Let’s all go home.
They can’t stop us.
Nobody has the right to stop us

Night comes down upon the earth,
and I’m hurryin’ home.
Night around the world,
the entire world is hurrying home.
And I pray that these days will
continue for you,
forever and ever.

AVATAR – behind the Glasses

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/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.

SIMCITY

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//December 19, 2009//

Neil Gaiman is an amazing writer. He is genius! His writing is like a river from a waterfall, it is rich and full of passion.

Neil Gaiman is the man who responsible of the amazing Stardust, Coraline, Mirror Mask, and many beautiful works (now you know who I’m talking about, right?) . More of his writing can be found on here. I want to share this lovely essay he wrote for the game SIMCITY. I love the essay because it is deep and full of imagination. I really do hope I’ll write like this someday (finger crossed).

SIMCITY

By Neil Gaiman 

Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities: in some cases one city has many different personalities — there are a dozen Londons, a crowd of different New Yorks.

A city is a collection of lives and buildings, and it has identity and personality. Cities exist in location, and in time.

There are good cities — the ones that welcome you, that seem to care about you, that seem pleased you’re in them. There are indifferent cities — the ones that honestly don’t care if you’re there or not; cities with their own agendas, the ones that ignore people. There are cities gone bad, and there are places in otherwise healthy cities as rotten and maggoty as windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost — some, lacking a centre, feel like they would be happier being elsewhere, somewhere smaller, somewhere easier to understand.

Some cities spread, like cancers or B-movie slime monsters, devouring all in their way, absorbing towns and villages, swallowing boroughs and hamlets, transmuting into boundless conurbations. Other cities shrink — once prosperous areas empty and fail: buildings empty, windows are boarded up, people leave, and sometimes they cannot even tell you why.

Occasionally I idle time away by wondering what cities would be like, were they people. Manhattan is, in my head, fast-talking, untrusting, well-dressed but unshaven. London is huge and confused. Paris is elegant and attractive, older than she looks. San Francisco is crazy, but harmless, and very friendly.

It’s a foolish game: cities aren’t people.

Cities exist in location, and they exist in time. Cities accumulate their personalities as time goes by. Manhattan remembers when it was unfashionable farmland. Athens remembers the days when there were those who considered themselves Athenians. There are cities that remember being villages. Other cities — currently bland, devoid of personality — are prepared to wait until they have history. Few cities are proud: they know that it’s all too often a happy accident, a mere geographical fluke that they exist at all — a wide harbour, a mountain pass, the confluence of two rivers.

At present, cities stay where they are.

For now cities sleep.

But there are rumblings. Things change. And what if, tomorrow, cities woke, and went walking? If Tokyo engulfed your town? If Vienna came striding over the hill toward you? If the city you inhabit today just upped and left, and you woke tomorrow wrapped in a thin blanket on an empty plain, where Detroit once stood, or Sydney, or Moscow?

Don’t ever take a city for granted.

After all, it is bigger than you are; it is older; and it has learned how to wait…

Now you know why I love Neil Gaiman.

Inglourious Basterds

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//December 17, 2009//

 

Inglourious Basterds
A Little Something You Can’t Take Off

 

Quentin Tarantino adalah sebuah nama ikonik yang terus melekat di hati saya, bersanding sejajar dengan Tim Burton, Sofia Coppola, dan Nia Dinata. Ketika film dengan ejaan ngaco ini muncul, saya memutuskan untuk HARUS menontonnya.

Inglourious Basterds tetap punya ciri khas Tarantino, dilantunkan dengan sebuah chapter untuk setiap babak ceritanya. Tetap dengan scoring yang membuat takjub karena selalu dapat menyampaikan getar maksud scene tersebut. Deretan castnya luar biasa, Brad Pitt bermain watak lagi, Eli Roth terlihat sangar sekaligus memancing tawa. Pujian terbesar tentu saja dialamatkan kepada Christoph Waltz yang memerankan Colonel Hans Landa tanpa celah. Karakter ini tidak akan pernah semenarik itu tanpa cara membaca jeda dialog yang tepat, gerak kepala yang terangkat tinggi, dan senyum kemenangan milik Waltz.

Tarantino kembali menggoreskan luka di pikiran para penontonnya, membuat kita semua berdecak kagum, bertepuk tangan, berteriak dan tertawa bersama film ini. Ia menghina para Nazi dengan menggambarkannya secara komikal. Lihat saja bagaimana Hitler berteriak histeris mendengar para pasukannya tengah diteror oleh pasukan misterius bernama The Basterds, ataupun Joseph Goebbels orang nomor dua Nazi yang gila dengan pujian. Tarantino kembali mengubah darah dan tembakan menjadi indah, dan kata-kata kasar menjadi pujian.

Satu-satunya hal yang membingungkan sayadari Inglourious Basterds adalah, saya merasa justru tidak ada tokoh sentral di film ini. Semuanya berakhir sejajar. Aneh memang, karena The Bride (Uma Thurman, Kill Bill) telah menjadi karakter terhebat sepanjang masa, saya berharap mendapatkan peran itu dari Capt Aldo Raine (diperankan brilian oleh Brad Pitt). Tapi mungkin, justru Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) yang mendapatkan kehormatan untuk berada di panggung utama. Saya tidak menangkap kenapa judulnya dipersembahkan untuk The Basterds kalau pada akhirnya mereka tidak mendapat peran terbesar tersebut.

Apapun itu, saya mungkin akan menunggu kelanjutan film ini (kalau Tarantino kembali membuatnya). Karena seperti Capt. Aldo Raine bilang, this film will give you something you can’t take off. As for me, it is the traumatic sensation that keeps banging your head as the scenes go from the opening to the credits. Another outstanding beautiful film, another standing applause.

Trivia: Kalau Anda memperhatikan bagian credit title di akhir film, Anda akan menemukan bahwa urutan nama cast yang biasanya ditaruh di awal credit title justru ditaruh di akhir credit setelah nama para crew film ini. Quentin Tarantino telah memberikan penghargaan yang luar biasa besar untuk para filmmakernya.