Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars: Revelations Available Online
Lemming Mark writes "Panic Struck Productions have just released their first Star Wars movie, 'Revelations.' The movie has been produced on a not-for profit basis by a team of volunteers and is available for free download. Despite its humble origins, the production appears extraordinarily professional. The film is over 40 minutes long, complete with space battles and lightsaber fights -- need I say more?
See more details at the official site, or jump straight to the download mirrors." (As promised last month.)
jump straight to the download mirrors
t ions_film_QT_large.mov.torrent
t ions_film_large.wmv.torrent
Or better yet, jump straight to the torrents. I'm getting ~500KB on both of them. I'd probably get more but my cap is set at 4mb/sec.
Quicktime
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revela
Windows Media Player
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revela
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
You know it's sad when you kill the list of mirrors, before a single comment.
funny munging
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/revelat ions_film_large.wmv.torrent
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~zap/revelations/day-1.m ov.torrent
Carousel is a lie!
Are there any subtitles for this, or is anyone willing to make them for a deaf person like me? Subtitle Workshop
Except for the acting. :(
Obi-Wan and Luke were both very hungry after their long speeder trip to that wretched hive of scum and villiany, Mos Eisley. They settled themselves in a cantina and ordered a big dinner of noodles, rice, sweet and sour dewback, and other oriental style goodies.
The food soon arrived and they set to. Obi-Wan handled his chopsticks deftly, quickly and securely picking up a noodle here, a prawn ball there. He soon sat back satisfied, and let out a quiet burp.
Luke, on the other hand, was in a right state. He just couldn't get the hang of the sticks, and had dropped far more food on the table and down his front than he had managed to get into his mouth. He sat, surrounded by rice and noodle debris, still as hungry as when he started.
Seeing his pupil in such distress, the Jedi Master leant over to dispense some of the wisdom of his years.
Use the forks, Luke he whispered, Use the forks.
I am sure the internet shall sense a disturbance in the force....
Anyone have a torrent of the torrents?
Star Wars Kid got a girlfriend?
Clicky
Who needs to watch something professional anything when you can have the story of two Pizza Delivery Jedi and a fonzie-looking Yoda?
"Star Wars Kid got a girlfriend?"
Heh. Imagine the pain that'd cause most of the Slashdot community.
"Derp de derp."
The last amateur star wars film I saw with light saber fighting in it wasn't so good...
Read reviews of shopping cart software
milions of souls cry out as their lives were being extinguished.
Don't get me wrong, the production looks professional, but the acting leads something to be desired.
Hrmm... try this: go watch Episodes I & II first, come back, watch it again, and see if you feel better about it.
...I don't understand why people are complaining about the quality of the acting - after all, I thought that there were many complaints about the acting in the official films?
This is, of course, unless the acting in this make Jar Jar Binks look like a classically-trained Shakespearean actor...
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
Darth Vader discovers that he's really not for profit, changes his name to Gnu/Vader, and establishes the PanGallactic cult of RMS.
See subject.
After seeing the poster they did up for it, who cares what the actings' like? Those two women are hot, that third one in the upper-left...not so much.R EVELATIONS_OFFICIAL_POSTER.jpg
http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/images/
There is a reason why hex dumps are not used to transmit binary data as ASCII. For starters, there is no integrity check -- how can you be sure that the file you copied is the same file posted? Second, this method does not provide compression or a way of making the encoded file smaller. Third ... this method will also succomb to the Slashcode effect -- corruption is almost a certainty. There are many more reason... I'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
Ads? What ads?
I have to reconsider my stance on keeping BitTorrent legal.
It's interesting to see bittorrent working on such a large scale type of thing. Notice that the webserver hosting the .torrent files have gone down, and as of now 1338 (darn it I'm # 1338) people are downloading it sucessfully. While it is true that it is going to take me 2 hours to get it all, I remember the days of old 56k modems when a 200mb download would take 2 days, so this is fast enough for me.
For those of you going slower then about 30K down, make sure you have holes poked in your firewalls.
Also, for the rest of us, leave the thing running for a while after you finish getting it please, it 's sad to see the number of seeders drop as quickly as they are....
My UID is prime and so is this number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
The acting is terrible. The plot always centers around a couple of dorky Jedis. Because even the fattest nerd can fit into the robes.
The effects are always good, but haven't we learned by now that the effects are not what makes for good Star Wars movies? It's the characters. Specifically, it's Han Solo.
Without someone as cool as Han Solo, Star Wars is just lame. The new movies lack anyone to fill that role, and so do all the fan films. The ultra-serious Jedi are fucking boring.
See, that's the difference in teaching styles between Obi Wan and Pei Mei. Plus Pei Mei has the cooler beard.
The special effects were good, that's for sure. But honestly, this production needs light as badly as Doom 3. I actually used QuickTime's brightness and contrast controls on it.
And another thing. What's with people and using Sorenson 3? This is the fucking year 2005. Use XviD, 3ivx or at the very least DivX for crying out loud. All are viable options on QuickTime. And whose brilliant idea was it to encode with the black bars?
The acting, yes, is not the best however is on par with most of anikin/amidala from Ep1/Ep2. I thought Liam Neeson in Ep1 really brought it out there and Ewan McGregor was great support for Neeson but in Ep2 there was.. nothing.
Anyways, the lightsaber scene between the two chicks was horribly choreographed, why would a jedi whip out a second light saber only to swing them both in unison? I thought the one male jedis fight was pretty good, but it seemed like the only one, and it was too short.
These jedi seemed to have a lot of emotions including love between jedi? Did these guys who wrote this thing ever watch any of the movies at all? The only sane guy out of the "good" crew was the one who wasn't a jedi. Being a jedi, wouldn't the two be able to sense the general alignment of the other? The whole trust fight at the beginning is odd. If my sister, who was a seer jedi, knew another jedi and trusted him, why would I, also being a jedi, not trust him, especially if I could just sense his feelings? It makes no sense. Plot = swiss cheese.
Could have been better, had potential, blew it.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Since everybody else is talking about problems downloading it, let me be one of the first (I think) to write some kind of a review of the movie itself:
The special effects are more than impressive. The CG modeling is on a professional level. This is particularly obvious in the space battle -- dozens of finely detailed starships flying around in considerably more elaborate flight paths than I've seen in any fan film yet. The camera tracks and follows the ships in a nice theatrical manner rather than 1990s-style videogame CG. Earlier, there is also a very impressive fly-through of a large, futuristic city with nearly as much detail as was seen in the Fifth Element. A sequence seen later on of a spaceship flying towards and landing on a planet is on par with the non-character CGI of the Final Fantasy movie.
The most strikingly impressive special effects come in the form of blue screen. There seems to be extensive use of real-life sets (which are on par with most television productions), and the camera moves around quite freely (sometimes it's hand-held). The CG effects in the blue screen windows, as well as other little additions (holograms, neon signs on walls, etc) follow the camera movements extremely well. This in itself makes this superior to every other special effects-driven fan film I've ever seen.
The storyline, as with most fan films, is entirely irrelevant (unless you pay attention to storylines in videogames, of course). The whole point of the story here is to move the characters from one cool location to another (night club, ancient Jedi temple, etc), have them meet up and give them a reason to fight each other. The film heavily borrows elements from movies like "Unbreakable" and recycles plenty of scenes and dialogue from existing Star Wars films, as is common practice among most fan films. Other than that, it feels like a storyline from a Star Wars videogame, only shorter.
The acting is obviously not going to be that good, and the creaters once again continue the fine tradition of fan film casting by employing chubby, goatee-sporting geeks and goth girls to stand around and attempt to recite the cheesy lines given to them, though some try harder than most to sound convincing.
The lighting is also very nicely done, matching the CG and real-world sets quite well. On a greyish-yellow planet (all CG), for instance, the characters do not stick out like sore thumbs and generally blend in quite well with their surroundings.
Light saber battles are not the best. If you want to see how real light saber fights should be done in a fan film, watch "Art of the Saber", whose choerography and combatant skills match those in The Phantom Menace.
Overall, I'd say that this film is an extremely fine technical achievement. The production design has a very expensive look to it. The ending credits are downright HUGE. This is a fine achievement, and shows exactly what big budget fan films can accomplish. Copyright issues and the whole Star Wars labeling apart, this looks like something that could easily have come from a production company that works for the Sci-Fi Channel. It may not be as impressive compared to the real Star Wars, but it is definitely not any worse than, at the very least, cable television production.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
First off, I only watched the first 15 or so minutes (it was late), so this is a point of view based on it's opening. However, what I saw will probably carry through for the entire thing, considering how basic the issues are. First, the special effects. This is a low-budget "home-brew" movie. I'm not going to demand an ILM quality production. It was fairly decent - on a par with many B movies that recieved far better funding (and full time work). Filming Techniques... these leave something to be desired. The camera shots don't look very well planned out, and are by no means dramatic. Not terrible (the camera's not in anyone's face), but between the lighting and the uninspiring shot angles, it's nothing to brag about. Many no-budget independant films with nothing else to show for, do better than this. Writing... ungh. While a lot of movies get by with poor writing by having high production values and a lot of glitz to distract you from the lines, when you're on a shoestring budget you can't hide a lack of a good script. Acting. This is my main gripe. It was bad. I've seen worse on direct-to-video, but I know non-actor friends who can do better than this. And people who say "watch the originals, are they better" are just looking for something to gripe about - there is no comparison. This is like watching someone's live-action rpg played out on a screen. The actors don't really seem to be into their roles, and are doing more posturing and pronouncing than conveying their characters. The glory of net-distributed films is that it allows people with no budget, no particular skill, and no training to put their heart and soul into a production that concentrates on attributes that have no price - imagination, intensity, and good writing. This didn't have any of these things. I'm sure this was a labor of love... and the sheer fact that they finished it is an accomplishment. The sheer fact that they got this many people interested is an even greater accomplishment. The end product, however, is not.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
They allow for it so long as it is non-profit...
Although, I hear this one was looked at and watched very carefully....