Quadcopter, Trillion FPS camera, Screenplay Site

I recently bumped into some neat stuff on the interwebs.​ I say, stop thinking about tax day and start watching something awesome. (What? You weren't? My bad.)

1) The Phantom, $700, ready to fly, quadcopter from DJI Innovations for shooting video with GoPro cameras. Don't forget some sort of third party vibration mount to alleviate the "jello" effect. Also consider balancing the props, and perhaps some FPV goggles to round it out.

Oh, and it's got a big brother, the Spreading Wings S800 equipped with a Z15 gimbal that shot this incredible footage ($7k price point with camera gimbal, no transmitter, no battery packs)

2) A trillion frames per second (not an overstatement) high speed (slow motion) camera that can analyze photon trajectories. Kinda brings the whole "high speed" definition to a new level. They use many controlled light pulses and scan one plane at a time in order to achieve it. To give an idea of the magnitude of this, the speaker, Ramesh Raskar, uses the example of watching a bullet fired from a gun at this framerate. He says watching that footage at this framerate would take a year.

3) Wordplayer.com Want to write a screenplay Hollywood would buy? Well, I just found this site you may like. (Or perhaps I re-found it. The site design looks really familiar to me). Terry Rossio says he'll show you how. Even if that's not what you're going for, it seems to be a great resource for those of us interested in writing screenplays. A couple friends and I are all working on screenplays right now, which is why it's especially interesting to me.

Speaking of High Speed photography, it may not be speed-of-light, but The Slow Mo Guys use a $100k Phantom v1610 to show some beautiful, bubble bursting shots.