You don't have to be a professional artist to make sweet crafty gifts out of the humble Sharpie pen. On a budget, you can easily make personalized yet visually pleasing gifts for your favorite people out of Sharpies and a blank canvas in the form of ceramic mugs, T-shirt, tote bags, canvas shoes, ornament balls, lampshades, and more.
One of our favourite movies of 2011—Manborg, which we saw at Toronto After Dark—has become one of our favourite movies of 2012 with its week-long run here in Toronto at the Royal. A gloriously funny pastiche of ultra-cheap kung-fu, horror and sci-fi, Manborg is also a perfect example of the DIY ethic: it wears its rough, hand-made edges proudly, and its intense roughness makes its devotion to ‘80s channel-100-at-3-AM crap-cinema ephemera even funnier. We had a chance to speak with director St...
Check this cool tutorial that show you how to make a sweet Storm Trooper helmet out of junk! It's cheap and very fun to make! Let's hope that after you make it, you actually are able to hit stuff you shoot at with your laser gun though. Milk Jug Storm Trooper Helmet.
Collapse At Hand Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy.
Representative Henry A. Waxman is in charge of California’s 30th Congressional district. He is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ever since he began his career in the government business, he has been involved with health and environmental issues. He represents cities such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake Village and West Hollywood, as well as such areas of Los Angeles as Beverly-Fairfax, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Beverl...
They've been at it for a few years now, but the crazy group of amateur rocket scientists who call themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals have triumphed over adversity, successfully launching their DIY rocket nearly 2 miles into the sky last Friday. The privately funded, non-profit aims to one day send human beings into suborbital space on the cheap, without the need of government budgets and administration.
AMD vs. Intel processors - How to pick your ideal PC. Okay figuring out what computer you want is one step, but figuring it out what it's used for could save you money and achieve you much better performance. Every dollar saved could be used for something else in that computer to make it last longer, stronger, faster and better in general.
Pulp heroism rules! And everyone's favorite masked vigilante hits the big screen tomorrow night, thanks to fantastical filmmaker Michel Gondry and his new superhero movie, The Green Hornet.
Equipment list for the low budget crowd Let's assume you have a script (not just an idea) and have gotten your pre production out of the way. These are both incredibly important and should not be taken lightly, especially when you have no budget. So you have an awesome film and all of your ducks are in a row, what do you bring with you to the shoot... or what is really necessary?
Update: New Trailer (7/9/10) In July of 2008, Fawaz Al-Matrouk, director of "To Rest In Peace", brought me on to shoot his USC graduate thesis film. Two years, 3 cameras, and over 15,000 miles later, the film is in its last week of post, having completed our final color correction at Light Iron Digital in Culver City yesterday.
This how-to is aimed at the uncynical, bright-eyed outsider who wants to become a television producer…the talented person who believes he or she has the ‘it’ to crack Hollywood. The ‘Sammy’ who just arrived in 90210.
Business owners and marketeers are diverting from traditional marketing techniques, including billboards, radio and TV advertising, brochures, and any other outdoor promotions, to cheaper but effective Internet marketing strategies. Under the new arrangement, business owners reach out to the final consumers through advertising on the World Wide Web.
Sound production doesn't get any cheaper than this. If you need some quick, professional-sounding voice-over dialogue for a student film or YouTube project, then all you need is an iPhone, an app called VoiceRecord and an ordinary blanket to block the background noise.
Banana bread has always been a favourite treat whether it was fresh from nanna's oven or from the local bakery. The addition of Mars Bars or another one of your favourite chocolate bars can be a great addition for the kids as long as they eat their vegetables first.
This contest can be the ultimate prank on a fan- or another one can be created. Upon winning, the first day of the "prize" can start with a flight on a crappy airline with 2 long layovers. (one can be a hopper flight with a pilot that appears intoxicated) Once arriving in LA, the winner should be met by a driver waiting to take them to their hotel in a beat up old limo. (having them sign a waiver to be filmed first of course) The driver should stop on the way at a drive thru and tell the winn...
I'm pretty sure that it's a universal dream for everyone in the world to retire early. Who wants to to be stuck with the rest of the country and retire when you're almost 70 years old? You heard me right, 70! Most people can't go out and do the things they love to do by the time they're 70, unless they've been practicing good health and exercise their entire life.
The possibilities are endless for 3D printing. With your very own 3D printer, you can make spare parts, circuit boards, inflatable balloons, duplicate keys, Minecraft cities, and even tiny replicas of your face. From a more artsy standpoint, you can make complex sculptures, like this cool mathematical sculpture of thirty interwoven hexagons by Francesco De Comite:
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
The costume I mentioned in my last post is taking longer than I thought it would be, but it's almost done! I'm hoping to finish it either this evening or tomorrow. All the little mods I've added have taken up more time than I thought... but isn't that always the way it goes? It seems like every time I plan out a project, it always takes me at least an hour or so more than I originally planned, usually more.
Choosing a camera, perhaps one of the most difficult decisions there is when it comes to photography. But being a great photographer on a budget isn't as hard as you think. It gets a little intimidating when you're looking at all these DSLR Canon and Nikon cameras. (By the way "DSLR" just means "Digital Single-Lens Reflex") But you don't NEED a big, bulky, expensive camera like those. Granted they are amazing cameras and you def. get what you pay for. But let's face it, the normal "just as a ...
A man going by the pseudonym of Ed Dante has written an illuminating account on his life as a career cheater. His clients include ESL students, hopeless dummies, and spoiled, lazy rich kids:
Every day of the week, WonderHowTo curators are hard at work, scouring the web for the greatest and most inspiring how-to videos. Every Friday, we'll highlight our favorite finds.
From Gaming Age: An Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack includes:
Peekfreak is a collaborative project between industrial designer Wai Lam and photographer Yann Huey, both hailing from Malaysia. The aim of the project is create experimental cameras made from household junk (such as plastic food containers, discarded bicycle parts, and floppy disks).
How do you top a movie like Avatar? James Cameron's recent release pioneered in 3D technology, and was the first film to gross more than $2 billion, as well as being the highest grossing 3D movie of all time. What do you do after wrapping up a project like that? Well, Cameron's current plans truly place him at the crossroads of science and art. Cameron has paired up with NASA to shoot Mars in 3D.
Space is tight (not to mention expensive) in Hong Kong. What's the solution? Architect Gary Chang has come up with an ingenious design: a small, 344 sq. ft. "accordion" apartment that can transform into 24 different rooms, simply by employing the use of sliding panels and walls. Via the New York Times,
I recently shot a short film for director Keegan Uhl for Canon’s Beyond the Still contest and our film “The Beach” won first place. We had a lot of fantastic support getting the film done, and I’m really glad to see people liked what we put together. Keegan put in a ton of work and it’s always rewarding to win something like this, especially when the film was done all out-of-pocket. My Gaffer on the film, Matt Irwin was awesome as well. He provided a lot of his own equipment, and even provide...
The OnePlus 3 just launched, and if you're not sure about taking the plunge on the $399 budget smartphone, you can at least check out how the device's new wallpapers will look on your phone right now.
If you want to avoid the hassle of going out on New Year's Eve, you can always host your own New Year's Eve celebration at home—and it doesn't have to cost a lot, either.
The Toronto International Film Festival is but a distant memory, though we are still getting compliments on all the awesome footage we shot, both for our Midnight Madness coverage and interviews with directors like Don Coscarelli and Rob Stewart. But here's the thing - we had big, large help. Even though we've been at it for 5 years, shooting an event like TIFF is never easy! It's hectic and unpredictable and as a result, getting good looking footage can be difficult if you don't have the rig...
Remember the Power Pwn, the clever little hacking tool disguised as a power strip? It's great in theory, but with a $1,295 price tag, it definitely doesn't fit into most people's budgets.
Self-storage may not be a new industry, but it is one that is rapidly reshaping its operations to suit a progressively more modernized customer base. In order to stay competitive with your self-storage facility, you'll need to keep an open mind, embrace current marketing trends, and most importantly, have a well-defined set of marketing goals. Your main focus should revolve around the following points:
Stunt fighting. It ain't rocket science. There's no way this Star Trek scene between Captain Kirk and this dino-monster could be worse. It's plain awful. Come on Shatner, we know you can fight! No excuses. Stunt fighting. It ain't rocket science. There's no way this Star Trek scene between Captain Kirk and this dino-monster could be worse. It's plain awful. Come on Shatner, we know you can fight! No excuses.
Whether you are just trying to play a prank on somebody, or you are a production designer for a low-budget movie, you might find this tutorial interesting. In this video tutorial you will learn to add scars to faces in Photoshop. You will use the lasso tool and noise filters to do the job. Create scars on a face in Photoshop.
Nothing is more fun that fly fishing with popping bug for panfish. With popping bugs, you can get bite after bite from little bass. Wade Bourne, host of Wade's World on MyOutdoorTV, shows you how to fish for bluegill and panfish using a fly rod and popping bugs.
Turn your bright daytime footage into a look that seems as though it was shot at night. This common technique known as day for night was done on many low budget films in the 60's and 70's. Turn day footage into night in After Effects.
BioShock is one of the best games of all time. It combines FPS gameplay with RPG storytelling and supports multiple systems better than any other game, that much is for sure. And the setting of its amazing story is a place called Rapture, a high-tech libertarian colony at the bottom of the Atlantic built by Andrew Ryan, a greying industrialist clearly inspired by John Galt and his creator Ayn Rand, the mother of Objectivism and modern American libertarianism in general. Ryan is a Soviet exile...
Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all sorts of other important aggregators though, and you probably use at least one every day: Fark and Reddit for web content, Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and Metacritic for a variety of media, but most importantly, vid...
Both on and off the set, the Gaffer or Chief Lighting Technician is one of the most important positions around. Though the average movie goer most likely has no idea the job even exists, they probably don't know what 99% of the other crew is/does either.