This 1948 travelogue about New York City is part of Pan American Airways “Wings to…” series, directed and photographed by Charles Beeland. The film opens wit...

The bright parts around the black hole are the accretion disk, which is in reality just a flat disk in the equatorial plane similar to the rings of Saturn, but is distorted visually by gravitational lensing. You can see a page here that gives some code for creating images using ray-tracing of light rays in curved spacetime, which offers a more schematic diagram of the visual appearance of a disk around a black hole (with a checkerboard pattern on it for clarity):

[image]

In this Q&A with Kip Thorne, he gives some background on how they created the images, indicating that they used a more sophisticated technique than ray-tracing:

I had been seen many years ago an image of an accretion disk with gravitational lensing that Jean-Pierre Luminet in France had made. I had sort of forgotten about it, but when I first saw the gravitationally lensed accretion disk that you actually see in the movie, it was a mixture of amazement on one hand and recognition that “Yes I do remember seeing something like that, years ago.” And a bit of awe and excitement that this team at Double Negative had just taken the equations I had given them — they don’t just use ray tracing, they propagate ray bundles or light beams — they’d used light beam propagation equations, laid down their own accretion disk based on artistic models based on astrophysicist’s stuff, and come back to me with a full-blown image of the sort you see in the movie. I was really impressed and gratified that they pulled it off and was so pleased with how it looked.

They didn't simulate all the optical effects that would be seen though--the physicist mentioned above, Jean-Pierre Luminet, comments in a facebook post here that the Interstellar image doesn't include "the strong Doppler and gravitational spectral shifts induced by the rotation of the disk at relativistic speed", and that after commenting about this he got a message from Kip Thorne saying that "The doppler shift was left out of the images, because (as you showed long ago) it makes the disk highly asymmetric, and much harder for a mass audience to grasp."

The appearance of the black hole in Interstellar was not created arbitrarily. It was actually modeled using the real relativistic equations describing the path of light in the gravitational field of a super-massive black hole spinning at near the speed of light. As a result, it may be the most accurate depiction we have to date of what such an object might look like. Astrophysicist and gravity expert Kip Thorne collaborated with the visual effects team to produce new software specifically to model the equations and render the black hole. The appearance was initially somewhat unexpected, but Kip Thorne realized "Why, of course. That's what it would do."

I don't pretend to be an astrophysicist, but on a basic level, here's what's happening: The glowing accretion disk of plasma remains in a single plane as expected (there's no perpendicular ring), but some of the light from the back side of the disk is warped by the intense gravitational field, over the top and bottom of the black hole. Thus in the region just outside the black hole, you are actually seeing around to the back side of it.

Indeed, the discoveries made during the rendering process has even led (or will lead) to the publication of several scientific articles on gravitational lensing.

There's more detail, including a video with Kip Thorne describing the effect, here:

http://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-black-hole/

Filmmakers often use a technique called ray tracing to render light and reflections in images. “But ray-tracing software makes the generally reasonable assumption that light is traveling along straight paths,” says Eugénie von Tunzelmann, a CG supervisor at Double Negative. This was a whole other kind of physics. “We had to write a completely new renderer,” she says.

Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”

That's what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he'd supplied. //

For anyone interested in reading more: this is simply called a "gravitational lens" - the wikipedia-article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens – oezi Dec 9 '14 at 7:02

most prominently it's reflected in the character of Cooper himself. He is exactly representing this pioneering attitude as one of the few people who are not ready to give up humanity's progress and accustom himself to the situation rather than actively trying to advance beyond it, as also reflected in his dialogue to Donald after the meeting with the teachers:

It's like we've forgotten who we are, Donald. Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers...Well, we used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.

This is also reinforced by the screenwriters Christopher and Jonathan Nolan themselves in an interview with Jordan Goldberg, as printed in Interstellar: The Complete Screenplay with Selected Storyboards where they even go as far as setting it in relation to our current attitude towards space exploration, putting the movie as a parable to remotivate humanity's drive towards the stars (emphasis mine):

JN ...I wanted to do something that reflected what I thought was the current state of human ambition. Which it is to say we congratulate ourselves every day on living in this spectacular moment of technological advancement and progress [...] but we're not going into space. Measured purely by altitude, the human race peaked fifty years ago. //

JN ...the safe bet was in a million years that alien anthropologists would come to Earth and they would find a stick with a piece of polyester on the moon, and they would say, 'Wow, they almost made it. They got that far.' So, you wash away all the day-to-day stuff that we get caught up in. [...] That drive to get out, to explore the universe, will be the residue that's left behind. Armstrong will be the person that people talk about.

Which brings us back to the "faked" moonlandings. They are a perfect way to highlight this contrast between Cooper and the society he lives in, seeing how the Apollo missions were the pinnacle of human-led space exploration and to this day remain a signpost achievement in this regard. For humanity to ignore and deny that achievement, they ignore and inhibit their own progress.

While electricity availability doesn’t guarantee wealth, its absence almost always means poverty.

Juice takes viewers to Beirut, Reykjavik, Kolkata, San Juan, Manhattan, and Boulder to tell the human story of electricity and to explain why power equals power.

The defining inequality in the world today is the disparity between the electricity rich and the electricity poor. In fact, there are more than 3 billion people on the planet today who are using less electricity than what’s used by an average American refrigerator.

Electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. To illuminate its importance, the Juice team traveled 60,000 miles to gather 40 on-camera interviews with people from seven countries on five continents. Juice shows how electricity explains everything from women’s rights and climate change to Bitcoin mining and indoor marijuana production. The punchline of the film is simple: darkness kills human potential. Electricity nourishes it.

Juice explains who has electricity, who’s getting it, and how developing countries all over the world are working to bring their people out of the dark and into the light.

Particularly since the dawn of the 20th century, Judeo-Christian imagery has stirred the American mind, as reflected in these 10 films on Disney Plus.

When Hollywood makes the right's point for them?

The atomic bomb and meltdowns like Fukushima have made nuclear power synonymous with global disaster. But what if we’ve got nuclear power wrong? An audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, PANDORA’S PROMISE asks whether the one technology we fear most could save our planet from a climate catastrophe while providing the energy needed to lift billions of people in the developing world out of poverty. In his controversial new film, Stone tells the intensely personal stories of environmentalists and energy experts who have undergone a radical conversion from being fiercely anti to strongly pro-nuclear energy, risking their careers and reputations in the process. Stone exposes this controversy within the environmental movement head-on with stories of defection by heavyweights including Stewart Brand, Richard Rhodes, Gwyneth Cravens, Mark Lynas and Michael Shellenberger. Undaunted and fearlessly independent, PANDORA’S PROMISE is a landmark work that is forever changing the conversation about the myths and science behind this deeply emotional and polarizing issue.

Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey star in this Peter Docter-directed animated film. //

When Joe discovers he's not technically dead—merely in a coma in a hospital bed—Joe asks 22 to help him get back to his earthly body. He just needs to succeed before the entities who monitor the "soul count" catch on as to why their count is suddenly off. "Is all this living really worth dying for?" the skeptical 22 asks. I'm betting that Joe (and Pixar) answers with a resounding yes.

We need heroes who will face death fearlessly and keep their eyes on eternity. In Max von Sydow's roles as an aged oracle, that is what he did.

Max von Sydow has died at the age of 90, the legendary knight of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), who played chess with Death and gave his life eventually to save a child. The film showed we are human because of this desire for eternity, in ourselves as long as we can, and in our children next.

But unless you happen to love Bergman, you probably know von Sydow because of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, or Ridley Scott. The movie legend became a part of Hollywood, a part of our desire to meet legends.

He was the mysterious, vaguely German-sounding doctor dealing with Leonardo DiCaprio in “Shutter Island” (2010), the director of the pre-crime program in “Minority Report” (2002), and Robin of Loxley’s father in “Robin Hood” (2010). He was the father figure in all these movies, a role he first undertook in the days of the action movies as Stallone’s father figure in “Judge Dredd” (1995). He was also the father in Wim Wenders’ “Until the End of the World” (1991), Dr. Kynes in the wonderful David Lynch “Dune” (1984), and Father Merrin in Billy Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” (1973). //

Beyond the more famous movies I’ve already mentioned, let me close with two recommendations for von Sydow admirers: “Steppenwolf,” Fred Haines’ 1974 adaptation of the Hermann Hesse novel, wherein von Sydow plays the protagonist Harry Heller, and “Three Days of the Condor,” the 1975 Sydney Pollack paranoid CIA thriller starring Robert Redford, in which von Sydow is wonderfully villainous as a European assassin with eccentric aristocratic pursuits.

Moonlight cameras, thermal imaging, night-vision goggles, infrared light, and more.

Clarence Thomas's is 'a classic story of going from dire poverty in the segregated South to the highest court of the land, including many twists and turns.'

More than any movie since "Saving Private Ryan," "1917" immerses the viewer in the realities of war and what it requires of human beings. //

The plot is the stuff of a standard action/adventure flick: two soldiers on a desperate mission to stop a British unit from charging into a trap.

At a more substantive level, however, it’s a movie about the humanity and inhumanity of war. On that front, it’s the best since “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and definitely worth seeing.

Like Steven Spielberg’s tale of a squad of soldiers trampling around the Normandy countryside after D-Day, this Sam Mendes storyline is equally implausible. As a set piece of military history, it is to be scrupulously ignored.

Yet, there are reasons to engage with “1917” as a serious war film.

For one, the movie gets the details exquisitely right. Here, “Saving Private Ryan” set a high bar. It would be difficult to have a more realistic appreciation for what it was like to land on “Bloody” Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion without a time machine.

More recently, Chris Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017) hit that mark, as well.

These movies have avoided the kind of groaning missteps that detract from otherwise excellent movies like “Patton” (1970), which paraded around “German” armor that were clearly just American tanks painted up with Wehrmacht symbols. //

To understand just how accurate the look of the movie is, compare “1917” to Peter Jackson’s incredible documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old” (2018), which relies exclusively on recovered archival footage from the World War I.

'1917,' which follows the 'They Shall not Grow Old' by one year, shares a story of selflessness and honor through technically dazzling cinematic effects. //

It’s not often a film about a conflict as brutal and heartbreaking as the First World War manages to cut through tragedy and tell a story of courage and bravery. “1917,” which follows the release of Peter Jackson’s groundbreaking World War I documentary “They Shall not Grow Old” by one year, shares a story of selflessness and honor through technically dazzling cinematic effects. //

Beyond the technical cinematic achievement and the moving, haunting portrayal of soldiers risking their lives to save others in the later stages of the First World War, “1917” is energetically paced and will leave no viewer yearning for more action. With so few modern war films set during World War I, “1917,” which is in select theaters now and releases nationwide on Jan. 10, proves you do not need a history degree to appreciate such an incredible story.

It goes against every piety of the liberal elites to portray the hippies as evil, but Quentin Tarantino points out that the new liberation spawned a murderous cult in Hollywood.

he nearly closed 2019 was a surprisingly good year for conservatism at the movies, thanks to work by Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, James Mangold, and Roland Emmerich. Famous directors made wonderful movies, some successful at the box office, some likely to gain more prestige in awards season than popularity and therefore likely to be remembered.

Most recently, Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell” continued his series of true stories about citizen-heroes. //

Next, Tarantino’s “Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood,” which was both successful ($370 million worldwide) and admired, and is therefore the only good choice for the Oscars this year. Tarantino continues the project he started ten years ago with “Inglorious Basterds,” the ironic rewriting of history. But this time around, we get an explicitly conservative story: The 1960s hippies—the beautiful people, all about free love and understanding, and expanding your mind—are the murderous villains. //

Finally, Mangold, who recently impressed audiences with “Logan,” now has another movie about manly men doing manly things in the ‘60s: “Ford v. Ferrari,” starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale as Caroll Shelby and Ken Miles, who won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1966, proving that American engineering, daring, and endurance were the match of anything produced in Europe. //

I would like to close with a mention of a movie I believe will survive, Emmerich’s “Midway.” Emmerich was once a successful blockbuster director—think “Independence Day”—but his career seemed over before he managed to make this movie. It’s not great cinema, but it is the only picture we have about the most important naval battle of the 20th century.

The action is spread out over six months, starting with the attack on Pearl Harbor, moving on to the daring Doolittle Raid, when Americans proved they could bomb Tokyo and the Japanese could not stop them, then the Battle of Midway itself, which won America the war in the Pacific.

That this story has never been adequately told on film is shocking, but now we have it and it is a film that shall live if patriotism lives.

The new movie “Midway” opened in theaters around the country this weekend. It has been roundly endorsed by Navy leadership. Here is the official statement about the movie from the Director of Naval History:

From: Director of Naval History

To: Senior Navy Leadership

Finally, Hollywood decided to make a $100 million dollar movie about real heroes instead of comic book heroes. In this case, the heroes are the pilots, aircrewmen, submariners, sailors, intelligence officers/code-breakers and senior commanders who against great odds and at great sacrifice turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Empire of Japan at the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. Although the movie is not perfectly historically accurate, the producers went to great lengths to be as accurate as possible given time and resource constraints, and it comes far closer than any other movie about naval combat (and is way more accurate than the 1975 “Midway” movie or the more recent “Pearl Harbor.”)

When the Walt Disney company released their iconic movie Fantasia in 1940, it was the first feature film to have stereophonic sound–the film included a right, center, and left channel. In fact, the concept was so new to the general public that Disney eschewed any technical nomenclature and simply called the audio experience “Fantasound” to link the experience to the name of the film.

What’s just as interesting (if not even more interesting) than the bit of trivia about Disney being first in line with stereo sound is how they recorded the score. Rather than record the score in a Disney sound studio, almost the entire film score was recorded in the Academy of Music concert hall in Philadelphia, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, and recorded by an army of sound engineers—seen in the photo here—working out of the basement where 33 microphones across eight channels of audio were piped down to recording stations. The entire process took seven weeks, used over ninety miles of film to record the audio, and had to be completed in carefully controlled shifts to ensure the safety of the engineers and the performers—old film was nitrocellulose-based and only a certain number of film cans were allowed into the wooden building at any given time to avoid the risk of fire or explosion.

In the mid-1800s, hundreds of Red River carts rolled down from the Winnipeg area in the summer and passed through Sherburne County on the way to St. Paul. Later on, the Winnipeg-St. Paul rail connection brought grain from the fields of Manitoba and Saskatchewan south to the mills of Minneapolis.

        This historic trail was also the route of the great 1917 500-mile dogsled race sponsored by the St. Paul Winter Carnival and fictionalized in the movie Iron Will.  Eleven teams started in Winnipeg on January 24, but only five finished at Como Park on February 3.  The arduous race and bitterly cold and snowy weather took its toll.

Most of the participants were Canadian. Albert Campbell, the eventual winner, was a mixed blood Cree trapper from Manitoba and had won the 150-mile Le Pas dog-team sweepstakes in 1916.

‘You’ve Got Mail’ wasn’t quite a blockbuster when released, but it’s stood the test of time for those of us hopeless romantics, book lovers, and fans of New York, dogs, and coffee. //

Nora Ephron was an essayist, novelist, and director. She directed “You’ve Got Mail,” but was perhaps better known for directing “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” (you see a theme here) and the adorable foodie love story “Julie and Julia.” Nominated for several Academy Awards for Best Writing, Ephron was the epitome of talent, wit, grace, and humor.

'Everything is copy,’ her mother once said, and she and her husband proved it by turning the college-age Nora into a character in a play, later a movie, ‘Take Her, She’s Mine.’ The lesson was not lost on Ms. Ephron, who seldom wrote about her own children but could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, her apartment, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelets.

The obituary observed that Ephron had a gift for writing and directing about “romantic comedy and for delayed but happy endings that reconcile couples who are clearly meant for each other but don’t know it.” She is credited with saying, “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” a theme that resonates in her films, whether it’s about love or cooking. //

Joe Fox says in one scene, “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or who on earth they are can – for only $2.95 – get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall. Decaf. Cappuccino!”

About Facing Darkness

In the spring of 2014, the Ebola pandemic was sweeping across West Africa. One organization stepped up with people and resources to provide compassion and care in the Name of Jesus. But when the deadly virus infected its own medical personnel, including Dr. Kent Brantly, the epic crisis truly hit home for Samaritan’s Purse and its leader Franklin Graham. FACING DARKNESS tells an incredible true story of faith, determination, and prayer … and of how God performed a miracle!