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15 December 2014

10 Things We Learned About 'The Amazing Spider-Man 2'

Spidey is back in theaters today in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the sequel to 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man. We found out a little bit about the movie from the director, stars, and producers.

1. THE ENTIRE MOVIE WAS FILMED IN NEW YORK.


Sony Pictures
In fact, it was the largest film to ever shoot in New York State. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 filmed on location in the boroughs of New York City and in Rochester, as well as at studios in Brooklyn and Long Island. Some places to look out for: the Hearst Tower at 57th Street and 8th Avenue, which doubles as Oscorp; Lincoln Center; Union Square; Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Chinatown.

2. SPIDEY’S SUIT LOOKS DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND.


Youtube / Youtube
The suit in the first movie was designed to look like something a kid from Queens could actually make himself, using materials he could easily procure (the eyes, for example, were made with sunglasses). This time around, director Mark Webb wanted to stick a little bit closer to the suit that’s in the comic books, making the blue darker, and the eyes of the mask white and large. Costume designer Deborah L. Scott—who created Marty McFly’s iconic look in Back to the Future and made the costumes for Titanic—brought this version of the suit to life.

3. PRODUCERS WANTED TO MAKE GWEN STACY A TRUE EQUAL TO PETER PARKER.


Sony Pictures
Producer Matt Tolmach said that in many of the previous Spider-Man movies, the focus has firmly been on Peter Parker’s journey—but it’s different in this film. “The truth is, [Gwen] is driving this story,” he said. “Peter is trying to keep it all together. That’s his struggle. Gwen has a real sense of who she is and what she wants. It’s not that it isn’t complicated but it’s incredibly empowering in a character. She’s making choices.”
Emma Stone, who plays Gwen, agrees. “I love how the relationship evolves in the second movie,” she said. “The clarity and maturity that Gwen has sort of achieved—I think because of the death of her father, honestly—has brought her life in sharp focus. So she’s really following her destiny. I think that’s one of the most inspiring parts of their relationship is that it is two incredibly equal parties.”
“When the comics were written—in the ‘50s and ‘60s—women didn’t really have much of a role in comics,” producer Avi Arad said. “They were supposed to look good and stay on the side and we are all very proud we were able to change [that] completely.” And a lot of that credit, he said, lies with Stone: “When you have a great actress and you give her the bulk of the material, now you have a real scene. You don’t just have someone screaming. When you have someone like that, you better make it a two person act all the time.”
4. THE CREW BUILT A REPLICA OF TIMES SQUARE.
For the scene where Spider-Man faces off against Electro for the first time, the crew shot for a couple of nights in Times Square—and then built a replica set at the studio in Long Island. “The logistical obligations of that scene were so complex, [that] we had to, and we could, amazingly,” Webb says. “I remember that scene came up in the script and we worked on it a little bit and I was sorta denying myself the pain/fear of how it was actually going to be shot.” The replica included the red TKTS stairs, recreations of storefronts, Father Duffy Square, and numerous Jumbotron scenes (the rest of the area was added later using CG).
But even though building the replica set allowed the crew the control they needed, it still wasn’t easy. “It was a very difficult thing, just in terms of bringing the amount of lights that were required, the amount of cement that was required,” Webb says. “Our production director did a really extraordinary thing, and it was a huge spectacle. There were explosions and extras and all that stuff.”

5. BOTH JAMIE FOXX AND DANE DEHAAN HAD TO UNDERGO A PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION TO PLAY VILLAINS.


Sony Pictures
Foxx wore 21 thin silicone facial prosthetics—which better mimic the quality of skin than foam prosthetics—to transform from Oscorp employee Max Dillion into Electro. The look was designed by The Walking Dead’s Greg Nicotero of NBB EFX Group and finalized by special effects makeup artist Howard Berger. “It was like taking me and dipping me into blue candle wax like four hours,” he said. It was also his idea to give Max a combover. “My sister is my hair stylist and she created the ‘Django’ look; Ray Charles and things like that,” he told Jay Leno. “When I’m the nerd guy, I want to be the first black man with a comb-over. I told her, ‘Make me look like I would look if I never made it.’”
DeHaan, meanwhile, endured 3.5 hours in the makeup chair—donning contacts, teeth, and prosthetics—to play the Green Goblin. “Then there was another hour just to get into the suit,” he said. “I literally had four people using screwdrivers and wrenches getting me into that suit.” Performing in the suit was tough not just because it weighed 50 pounds, DeHaan said, but because of the temperatures on set. “[The] set was at least 110 degrees. They were literally pouring buckets of ice water down my suit in between takes,” he said. “It had evaporated by the time they called action—that’s how hot it was. I think I lost 7 pounds in like two days. Which for me is a high percentage of my body weight.”

6. TO NAIL ELECTRO’S LOOK, THE VFX TEAM STUDIED ELECTRICAL PHENOMENA.


Sony Pictures
After deciding on the right look for the makeup, Foxx said, “[The VFX crew] took it from there. Those guys are geniuses at what they do. [Jerome Chen, Sony Picture Imageworks Visual Effects Supervisor] was like, ‘We got it, we know what we want to do. We want to make a thunderstorm inside your body.’ It’s great to see it all work.” VFX artists made it look as though the electricity was inside of Electro, not just running along the surface of his skin, and watched footage of nighttime thunderstorms and bioluminescent animals and photos of nebulae to achieve the look.
Foxx was thrilled with the way the CGI and practical makeup worked together. “The CGI guys would come out and be there and look at me and take pictures and say ‘stand this way, say this, laugh,’” he explained. “It was really fun. It was like you were back at your crib where you’re looking in the mirror practicing on how to act. When I looked and saw what they did with the CGI, I was like that is incredible because people don’t even know that that is actually me. They think it’s all CGI.”

7. IN ONE SCENE, GARFIELD’S FOOT GOT BRUSHED BY A CAB.


Sony Pictures
Andrew Garfield, who plays Peter/Spidey, has a favorite scene—which Webb and Stone also love—in which Peter and Gwen see each other for the first time in a year. Garfield had the idea that Peter should see her and cross the street, oblivious to all traffic. “[He] talked about cartoons—when the skunk gets a smell and he floats across,” Webb says. “It was that kind of idea.”
Peter Parker might have been oblivious to the traffic, but Garfield didn’t make it through unscathed. “In the take [that was] used, the taxi actually ran over my heel,” he says. “You can see a little facial recognition of that just as I’m about to step onto the pavement. Literally, a tire smacked my heel. It was really scary.”

8. PAUL GIAMATTI WANTED TO PLAY THE RHINO.


Sony Pictures
The actor appeared on Conan O’Brien’s show in 2011 and said that if he could play one character in a Spider-Man movie, it would be The Rhino. “Rhino came to us for the role!” Arad said. The Rhino’s mechanized suit is entirely CG, but he wore a rig on set.
“[Paul] was so great to have on the set,” Tolmach said. “He just showed up and [was] about fun. This movie felt like we were now free in some ways to have fun, and to tell a bigger story—and a more tragic story. We were freed up of the obligations of origin. [We could] build a movie that we all really believed in and tell this big superhero opera. And that’s what you’re going to see more of going forward—the expansion of the universe with all these characters.”

9. CERTAIN SCENES WERE INSPIRED BY SILENT-ERA STARS.


Sony Pictures
Webb, Garfield, and stunt coordinator Andy Armstrong are all big fans of silent film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, who performed physical comedy on-camera. This time around, they wanted some of that physicality to inform how Spider-Man (and Peter Parker) moved. “Sometimes, Spider-Man is witty and sometimes not—he’s trying his standup routine out on the criminals before he takes it to the comedy floor,” Garfield says. “The physical ability he has—we don’t want to just be punching and kicking and being cool. There’s something sort of trickster element that we wanted to capture.” They hired Cal McChrystal, the physical comedy director on One Man, Two Guvnors, to help come up with a few moments.
“It was dipping into a different kind of filmmaking and acting,” Webb says. “If you sit down and watch a Charlie Chaplin movie and don’t listen to the music—or if you play different music over it, like a Pixar soundtrack—it becomes accessible in a way that is profound. It becomes emotional and beautiful and there’s something really powerful there. That was an attempt to bring back vaudeville for a second, which is a lost art. It was one of those things where people watch and it goes by and it's as it should be. But it took a long time to do.”
Armstong watched a particular scene from one of Keaton’s shorts where the actor grabbed the back of a moving car and is whisked out of the scene almost horizontally; once he figured out how Keaton did it, they emulated it for a shot in ASM2.

10. THE PRODUCTION BUILT RIGS TO DO STUNTS PRACTICALLY.


Sony Pictures
A fight in a plane that kicks off the movie was accomplished mostly using actors and not stunt people. The crew built the interior of a G-5 plane and combined it with a motion base and two rings that could rotate the plane 360 degrees. They also used the rig in a later scene—inspired by Fred Astaire’s work in The Royal Wedding, in which the actor danced on the walls and ceiling—where Garfield rolls up onto the wall and walks along the ceiling, removing the Spidey suit. “All that stuff, people get a certain kind of pleasure from that,” Webb said. “It’s different from comedy, it’s different from action. it’s like watching people dance in a way. It’s physical virtuosity that people enjoy in a different kind of way.”
Garfield prefers to do his own stunts, but it's not always possible. "I used to be a gymnast and an athlete and it’s important to me—just like with every other aspect with the character—[that] I have some enjoyment of it," he said. "I don’t want to let it pass me by and watch somebody else play Spider-Man. I want to do it because it’s my only chance to really play it in a way that’s not just crawling up the doorway at my mum’s house. So I felt really stoked to get a chance. There’s me and there’s two stunt guys. It’s usually better man wins in terms of whatever stunt we’re doing. Sometimes it’s just the insurance risk is too high if I do them. If I die, the movie has to stop."

FACTS ABOUT INDIA

if you look into India's history you will see that India is filled with many interesting facts. Indians have always been
intelligent and creative. It is one of the oldest countries in the world.




India is a land where people from different cultures and religious backgrounds live together as a nation.

Indian people are found to be very friendly and caring. They like spending time with their families.

Many different languages are spoken in India but still one can communicate with people through the national language called Hindi.


10 Interesting facts about India:

  • The famous board game, called Chess, was invented in India.
  • In India's 100,000 years of history, it has never invaded any other country.
  • India is the 7th largest country in the world, the largest democracy and one of the oldest civilizations.
  • India was one of the richest countries in the world before the British invasion in 17th century.
  • The value of "pi" used in mathematics was first calculated by the Indian mathematician Budhayana in 6th century.
  • India is one of the largest exporter of computer software products. It exports software to over 90 countries.
  • India is home to the world's largest pilgrimage destination called the Vishnu Temple. The temple is located in the city of Tirupati. About an average of 30,000 people visit this temple donating about $6 million US dollars, everyday.
  • India originated Yoga about 5,000 years ago.
  • India has the most number of mosques. It has 300,000 mosques which is much more than the Muslim world.
  • Christians and Jews have been living in India since 52 A.D. and 200 B.C. respectively

26 August 2014

DAMN INTERESTING

May Have Settled
It was early in the morning on the 1st of May 1832 in New York City. The ordinarily gentle horse-drawn traffic of the up-and-coming metropolis seemed a bit more dense than usual, and as the morning progressed the avenues and boulevards became increasingly crowded. At 9:00 AM, almost as if on cue, thousands of doors on thousands of buildings burst open to vomit humans, furniture, and other sundries out into the bright morning sun. Within moments the streets of New York were a jangling amorphous pandemonium.
English author Frances Trollope happened to be in New York City to witness this peculiar spectacle:
On the 1st of May the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague, or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day.
All over New York, tenants along with their belongings abandoned their abodes to criss-cross the city in mass migration to fresh dwellings. This was Moving Day. Owing to a quirk in New York law, nearly all rental contracts expired every year on May 1st at 9:00 AM, resulting in the simultaneous relocation of a multitude of persons and property. For over a century, from colonial times until shortly after the Second World War, it was the custom for the city to spend every May 1st as a scarcely navigable morass of humans, carts, and livestock.
We here at Damn Interesting headquarters (i.e., my residence) have recently performed our own interpretation of Moving Day, having spent an exhausting morning, noon, and night shuttling furniture, appliances, and corrugated cardboard cubes from one structure to another. The preceding packing and subsequent reorganizing have unavoidably disrupted our normally abnormal posting schedule. Next week, however, our jangling amorphous pandemonium will be over, and we shall be back to posting new articles.

interesting articles

We’ve been bringing you everything from the bizarre to the beautiful for over three years now–and often writing at length about some of our more fascinating findings all the while. And just in case you’ve missed some of them, here’s a quick way to catch up! Without further ado, here are the best All That Is Interesting articles that you haven’t read yet:
Viewing note: clicking on a post title or image will open a new window to the article.

The World’s Most Remote Places


Remote Places Interesting Articles

Internet surfing can serve many purposes, ranging from informing yourself of current events to stalking your ex to scouring for a Portuguese dish to make for a pretentious dinner party. Each of these activities are united by one thing, though: you are absolutely alone while you do them. But if that cyber solitude isn’t enough to get your introvert on, you might peruse our list of the world’s most remote places and jet off to an uninhabited archipelago smack between South Africa and South America or a scenic roadless province in Tibet. Or, at the very least, daydream about it.

Interesting Articles: Incredible Natural Phenomena


Natural Phenomena Lightning

If you’re anything like us, the enjoyment of nature is often translated as “admiring its beauty from the insect-free comforts of your computer screen”. That rings especially true in the case of natural phenomena, which when they’re not found at a prohibitively far distance from your home are potentially quite dangerous. For those of you with a naturalist’s heart but an agoraphobic’s mind, check out the world’s most mind-blowing natural phenomena.

99 Interesting Facts About The World To Blow Your Mind


Interesting Facts

When Twister was first introduced, many referred to it as sex in a box. Otters sleep holding hands. Twenty percent of coffee mugs contain fecal matter (gross). If you’re on the prowl for awesome party trivia, look no further than this handy list of interesting facts that we’ve compiled for you. Great news: we’ve got 99 of ‘em.

The Astounding Origins Of English Idioms


All That Is Interesting Articles Idioms

Given our familiarity with the language, it’s quite easy for us to assume that the English language, much unlike its more “exotic” and “colorful” linguistic counterparts, lacks rich and imaginative idioms. If you’re one of those who thinks that your mother tongue is rather bland, fear not! We’re here to remind you of seven idioms with bizarre–and fascinating–origins.

42 Staggering Photos Of Abandoned Detroit


All That Is Interesting Articles Detroit

The Motor City has certainly seen some brighter days. Declaring bankruptcy in 2011, Detroit is one of the many–yet most visibly–suffering cities in the wake of the Great Recession. The industrial metropolis once served as home to around two million people, but today the numbers hang just over 700,000. Truly a dying city, these photos of an abandoned Detroit are incredibly sobering.

30 November 2013

EXPO 2020 DUBAI

The UAE

For two and a half millennia the Gulf coast has been a crossroads of the world. From the Persian Royal Road to the Han Dynasty’s Silk Road, from the trading posts of the 19th century to the hypermodernity of today’s UAE, people have always converged here. They come to do business but also to share ideas, experience and inspiration.
It is strange to imagine that 20 years ago Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai’s main thoroughfare, was mostly sand. Now it is one of the world’s most modern urban landscapes, linked by multi-lane highways and a state-of-the-art Metro system. Indeed in four decades the country’s soft and hard infrastructure have developed to such an extent that the UAE today might be one of the most hyper-connected places on the planet, where more than 200 different nationalities mingle daily.

A city of Arabia, Dubai is also a city of the world. With the UAE’s increasingly pivotal role in the global economy, we know our continued progress depends on interaction and cooperation between individuals worldwide. This interconnectedness lies at the heart of who we are and what we do. Our passion for bringing people together drives our desire to bring the World Expo for the first time to the region and to the UAE.


28 October 2013

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT DUBAI

Below is a list of 11 interesting facts about Dubai, although some facts may already be well-known by many, lots of them will not. This guide will not help much if you are looking to move to Dubai, however it will give you a brief insight into what you can expect and a few interesting facts and figures you may not have known about. ENJOY!
          

Cars - As astonishing as it may sound, in 1968, Dubai’s car registration number stopped at 13. As of 2012, there are now more than 1.13 million registered cars in Dubai. Even though the car industry has and still is going through hard times, companies like Ford, Volvo, Porsche, Hyundai, BMW and Toyota increased their sales in 2012 by between 7% and 40%
 

  • Cranes - Dubai has around 30,000 operating cranes and it is estimated there are a total of 150,000 cranes in the world, this means Dubai holds around 20% of the world’s cranes.
  • Skyscrapers - The incredible skyline that Dubai has today began first in 1979 when the Dubai World Trade Centre was finished and remained to be the only skyscraper until 1991. At present, there are approximately 450 skyscrapers in Dubai alone. The tallest skyscraper in Dubai and the rest of the world is the Burj Khalifa at a total height of 828 metres (2716.5 feet).
           
       
  • Population - Dubai’s population has tripled in less than 20 years. In 1995, Dubai had around 640,000 residents, whereas now there are more than 2.3 million. Another interesting fact is that just over 10% of Dubai’s population are local (Emirati), the remaining 90% are expats.
  • Bullion - The second largest distributor in the World is Dubai, importing 360 tons and exporting 350 tons per year.
  • Crime - Although many think Dubai is crime free, crime does take place and the crime that does take place can be just as violent as it may be in more dangerous parts of the world, the main difference is the amount of crime, for which in Dubai, very little major crime occurs. The two main reasons crime is minimal in Dubai and the rest of the UAE is first because of law enforcement, and secondly because the majority of Dubai’s residents are middle-class.  
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DID YOU KNOW: One in every 5 Dubai residents buy more than 5 pieces of gold jewelry per year? The majority of UAE gold sales are made from within the Gold Souk in Deira.
  • Tax - The concept of having your income 100% free of charge does raise questions. Trying to make a complicated subject simple and understandable, it all depends on where you have your tax residence. Therefore, if you are living in Dubai, but still have your tax residence in the UK, you will still have to pay taxes. It is not as easy as just living in Dubai and like a magical potion your tax responsibilities disappear. In the UK for example, from April 2013 the HMRC has determined a statutory basis. These new rules are known as the Statutory Residence Test (SRT).
  • Postal Service - There are no street addresses in Dubai, instead all post is either delivered to your office PO Box (most common) or if you choose to set one up, your personal PO Box address. Also, unless you live on a compound, getting a take-away for the first time may prove to be a bit of a challenge.
Climate - Averaging a 33.4 ºC (92.1ºF) high, 22.3ºC (72.1ºF) low and 94.3mm (3.711 inches) of rain a year, Dubai is a place for people who don’t mind hot climates.