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Updated 161 Days ago
Get your big break in a St. Louis-made movie!
For St. Louis filmmaker Oscar Madrid (right), and partner in crime Jim Ousley (left) film making in St. Louis is all about the dream.
"The idea would be to start here and eventually make the big move," according to Madrid.
That move hasn't come yet, but after receiving accolades in some smaller film festivals for their self described "mocumentary" "Hooch and Daddy-O," the pair has enlisted some local bands to help them raise money for their next movie project.
This is how it works for people who haven't been discovered by Spielberg yet. You scrape up money and help where you can. Fortunately, Madrid says, St. Louis has proven to be fertile ground for this.
"It's a nurturing environment for a filmmaker as the whole process is still somewhat of a novelty here. You'll find that local professionals in the industry are willing to help out on the cheap or even for free. That's obviously key for the low-budget filmmaker."
Madrid is St. Louis area guy, quick with the answer to, "where did you go to high school?"
"Francis Howell North High School. I'm glad you asked that - it tells you all you need to know about me. I'm from the OTHER side of the river."
He spends his days testing software, or, as he terms it, breaking things for a living. But now, he thinks he and Ousley are on to something with their next effort, "The Bloodfest Club." (Obviously another spoof)
If you'd like a chance to hear about their plans yourself, you'll get it at the "Killer Rock Jam" they're throwing Memorial Day weekend. (Friday May 23rd to be exact) They will also be looking for people to put in the movie!
So a week from Friday, you can go to a bar, see bands, meet filmmakers, and become a star. Not bad. And you'll still have two days left in your weekend! The flyer is below.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.