After doing some bad methamphetamine, Kim Jong Un and his brown nosing generals decide to hit the U.S. with their new long-range missile the KN-08. The intended target was either Los Angeles or San Francisco according to RAND Corporation analysts.
The missile guidance system fails, as predicted by Stephen Colbert, and lands a thousand miles to the north. The missile and its nuclear warhead land in southern Alberta, Canada. Barley missing blowing up a herd of 10,000 black Angus cattle.
It is time Canada gets on board with the U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense system.
I watched a movie the other day and when ‘The End’ text appeared a really catchy song started. So I listened to the song and began watching the credits. It seemed to never end, credit after credit with name after name. A question arose in my head; how many people are in a crew for a Hollywood film?
By Stephen Follows
Last week I ran a course in Malaysia for the Met Film School and the Malaysian Government. Malaysia is set to be a popular destination for Hollywood projects, thanks mostly to the 30% tax break and the brand new Pinewood Studio complex. The studio is not officially open yet but already ‘Marco Polo’ has set up shop and is hiring. The Malaysian government is funding courses to prepare locals for work on huge Hollywood productions and my course last week was for would-be Production Assistants.
In order to give the students a sense of the scale of these productions I asked them to guess how many people worked on the movie ‘Avatar’. Guesses ranged from a few hundred up to a thousand. The actual figure (according to IMDb) is 2,984.
This got me thinking about what the number of crew members could tell us about a production. There are few caveats to this approach which I’ve laid out at the bottom of this article, but nonetheless it’s quite a revealing process. I took the 50 highest grossing films of each of the past 20 years (giving me 1,000 films to study) and looked at the number of people credited on IMDb. In summary…
Iron Man 3 credits 3,310 crew members
The average number of crew credits in the top 1,000 films between 1994 and 2013 was 588.
Over half of the top films had under 500 people in their crew
On average the top films of the past two decades have each had 3.5 writers, 7 producers, 55 people in the art department, 32 in sound, 55 in camera / electrical and 156 in visual effects.
The Butler had 39 producers – 5 producers, 17 executive producers, 6 co-executive producers, 4 co-producers and 7 associate producers
A third of the workers on Love Actually were in the art department
Crew credits suggest that Peter Jackson favours special effects over visual effects more than the industry average.
Now You See Me has six times the average number of people in the camera department
23% of the people who worked on ‘Pokemon: The First Movie’ were in the music department
The largest crew on a Hollywood film
The biggest crews are rather staggering, with 3,310 people receiving a credit on Iron Man 3.
FILMS WITH LARGEST CREWS (1994-2017)
Iron Man 3
3,310
Avatar
2,984
Marvel’s The Avengers
2,718
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
2,709
Chronicles of Narnia: Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
2,622
Man of Steel
2,543
Captain America: The First Avenger
2,536
Thor
2,384
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
2,376
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass
2,235
Overall, the average number of crew credits was 588, with the top 25% of films accounting for half of all credits. Out of my list of 1,000 films…
Only 1 film had over 3,000 credits
13 films credited between 2,000 – 2,999 people
133 films credited between 1,000 – 1,999 people
287 films credited between 500 – 999 people
566 films credited under 500 people
Visual Effects
Avatar just pips Iron Man 3 to the Oscar for ‘Most People Credited in the Visual Effects Department’. Interestingly, The Golden Compass is the only Hollywood film in the top 20 of this visual effect chart which was not released in 3D.
FILMS WITH LARGEST VISUAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENT (1994-2017)
Avatar
1,844
Iron Man 3
1,834
Marvel’s The Avengers
1,514
Man of Steel
1,445
The Golden Compass
1,252
For 57 of my 1,000 films, the Visual Effects Department made up over 50% of all crew members. If you meet someone in a pub who says they worked on Harry Potter there is a 62% chance they worked in visual effects. Similar numbers are true for Gravity, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Total Recall. In fact, the VFX department of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II made up a larger percentage of the total crew than Avatar (62.0% versus 61.8%). This is surprising as Harry Potter appears to be an almost exclusively live action film whereas Avatar is largely CGI animation.
Special Effects
Special effects include on-set physical, mechanical and in-camera effects and should not be confused with digital / visual effects. Hollywood films by Peter Jackson take up four out of the top five places, revealing his love of real-world, on set trickery.
FILMS WITH LARGEST SPECIAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENTS (1994-2017)
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
225
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
217
Avatar
212
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
211
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
195
Stunts
The number of stunt performers involved with the most recent Batman film is rather impressive, due in part to the huge street battles.
Heywood “Woody” Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian, and musician whose career spans more than six decades. He worked as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
High Plains Drifter is a classic Eastwood movie from the early seventies. I think I have seen the movie 7 or 8 times. And every time I watch it I am mesmerized by that beautiful lake.
High Plains Drifter is a 1973 American Western film, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood and produced by Robert Daley for The Malpaso Company and Universal Pictures. Eastwood plays a mysterious gunfighter hired by the residents of a corrupt frontier mining town to defend them against a group of criminals.
The film was shot on location on the shores of Mono Lake, California.
Mono Lake is a large, shallow saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in a basin that has no outlet to the ocean. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. These salts also make the lake water alkaline.
This desert lake has an unusually productive ecosystem based on brine shrimp that thrive in its waters, and provides critical nesting habitat for two million annual migratory birds that feed on the shrimp.
Mono Lake
Max. length
15 km (9.3 mi)
Max. width
21 km (13 mi)
Surface area
45,133 acres (182.65 km2)
Average depth
17 m (56 ft)
Max. depth
48 m (157 ft)
Water volume
2,970,000 acre·ft (3.66 km3)
Surface elevation
6,383 ft (1,946 m) above sea level
Islands
Two major: Negit Island and Paoha Island; numerous minor outcroppings (including tufa rock formations). The lake’s water level is notably variable.
Clint riding into the town of Lago, on the shore of Mono Lake.
In the movie they paint the town red to try and disorient the killers who are on their way.
The movie set (town of Lago) in the first picture, and the same location with the town gone in the second.
The most unusual feature of Mono Lake are its dramatic tufa towers emerging from the surface. These rock towers form when underwater springs rich in calcium mix with the waters of the lake, which are rich in carbonates. The resulting reaction forms limestone. Over time the buildup of limestone formed towers, and when the water level of the lake dropped the towers became exposed.
Ark Encounter is a Christian religious and Young Earth creationist theme park that opened in Grant County, Kentucky in 2016. The centerpiece of the park is a large representation of Noah’s Ark based on the Genesis flood narrative contained in the Bible. It is 510 feet (155 m) long, 85 feet (26 m) wide, and 51 feet (16 m) high.
Ark Encounter is operated by Answers in Genesis (AiG), a young Earth creationist (YEC) organization that also operates the Creation Museum 45 miles (70 km) away in Petersburg, Kentucky. The theme park promotes pseudoscientific young Earth creationist beliefs about the age of the universe, age of the Earth, and co-existence of man and non-avian dinosaurs.
After feasibility studies projected that the park would be a boon to the state’s tourism industry, the Ark Encounter received tax incentives from the city, county, and state to induce its construction. This drew criticism from groups concerned with the separation of church and state. A dispute over AiG’s hiring practices was adjudicated in U.S. federal court, which found in 2016 that the organization could require Ark Encounter employees to sign a statement of faith as a condition of their employment, prompting criticism of the park’s discriminatory hiring practices.
The ark contains 132 bays, each standing about 18 feet (5.5 m) high, arranged into three decks. Visitors enter on the lowest deck and move between decks on ramps constructed through the center of the ark. Bays on the first deck contain models of some animals that AiG believes could have been on the ark; there are no live animals within the exhibit though there is a petting zoo on the grounds. The models are meant to represent “kinds” of animals, which AiG says gave rise to modern animals after the flood. Prior to the Ark’s opening, media outlets reported it would feature models of dinosaurs and “Biblical unicorns”.
This is the worst nightmare for pilots conducting trap landings on an aircraft carrier.
This video was filmed on Mar. 18, 2016 and shows an E-2C Hawkeye performing a trap landing on the flight deck of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
As the footage shows, the cable used to catch the landing aircraft snapped: you can see the E-2C, slowed down by the #4 wire, continue toward the end of the flight deck, disappear off the flight deck while falling toward the sea before reappearing several seconds later, miraculously managing to gain speed and altitude.
According to the Virginian-Pilot media outlet, U.S. Navy investigators blamed human error and an improperly programmed valve for the incident in which eight sailors were injured.
Aircraft performing for an arrested landing on a carrier apply full throttle immediately after touchdown for two reasons: they may miss the cable or, worst case scenario, the cable might snap.
The Longaberger Company is an American manufacturer and distributor of handcrafted maple wood baskets and other home and lifestyle products. It was one of the primary employers in the area near Dresden, Ohio with more than 8,200 employees and 1 billion dollars in sales. Started in Dresden, the company is now headquartered in Newark, Ohio.
The old Longaberger corporate headquarters on State Route 16 is a local landmark and a well-known example of novelty architecture, since it takes the shape of the company’s biggest seller, the “Medium Market Basket”. The seven-story, 180,000-square-foot building was designed by The Longaberger Company, and executed by NBBJ and Korda Nemeth Engineering. The building opened in 1997. The basket handles weigh almost 150 tons and can be heated during cold weather to prevent ice damage. Originally, Dave Longaberger wanted all of the Longaberger buildings to be shaped like baskets, but only the headquarters was completed at the time of his death. The company stopped paying property taxes on the building at the end of 2014, and as of July 2016 intended to relocate all remaining employees to offices in nearby Frazeysburg.
The Longaberger headquarters building in Newark has a seven-story atrium inside. Jonathan Quilter/Dispatch The 7-story atrium inside the Longaberger Headquarters (The Big Basket) in Newark on Tuesday, May 10, 2016.(Columbus Dispatch photo by Jonathan Quilter)
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