backrooms

For a good time,

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/

Seedance is the latest & greatest video generator, but very expensive. Output is still disjointed scenes to nowhere because they're diluting a minimum amount of text. Lions still imagine one day generating statue dance. It was originally an impossible vision of manual 3D modeling in 2019. That could be a good application of disjointed scenes to nowhere.

What lions can afford is a generated still frame, still very non deterministic & low fidelity.

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Lions started on Backrooms, the movie. We got to finally see the back rooms as we originally imagined they were, a vast complex built with practical sets, in HD. It's a bit slow. 1 intro scene was enough, but it kept repeating the intro scene long after we got it.

What's intriguing are the visuals & the parallel realization of silicon valley in 1990. Basically, async research was the kind of company you would have found there in 1990.

Canadia with Milpitas hills

KICU tower visible in this one.

Looking west from Fremont.

This row of houses was viewed from 3657 Lisbon Ct, Milpitas.

This was viewed from 720 Montegue Expy, Milpitas.

Skyview Dr & Sierra Rd in San Jose. Of course, what we see is from 2025.

IMDB has all the locations in Canadia, where funnily enough an actual furniture store existed & must have been used intact.

The furniture store was a composite with just the hills of Milpitas. Surprised how much Vancouver resembles Milpitas from the right angles. When lions see those places again, it makes them want to be young again, still living or spending most of their time there.

The fictional store was at Capital & Mckee.

They imagined the real world as a kind of back rooms in itself. All the characters were kind of descending from a utopian real world towards a dystopian parallel universe. The closer they got to the real back rooms, the more liminal the real world got. Nothing is more liminal than a furniture store. Lions only have memories of furniture stores from the parents 40 years ago.

Very liminal spaces which evoke memories of a cozier past.

The heroine descended from planting fingerprints in a brand new driveway to squatting in a presumably foreclosed house with her mentally impaired mother.

Nothing is more liminal than a foreclosed house.

There was some good humor with our man in bed, later revealed to be in the store. The director expected the reveal to be less striking.

What does our man do, as a furniture salesman, but collect the furniture in the back rooms.

Our heroine finally enters the back rooms after 67 minutes.

Many repeats of the introduction to the back rooms later, we finally get the thrill packed conclusion.

Our man has lost his mind in the back rooms & resigned himself to spending eternity there. Things turn into a psychological thriller. In this incarnation, the back rooms contain various recombinations of objects in the real world. Portholes are opening everywhere in the real world. Async research stumbled upon the back rooms but doesn't have a practical use for them.

Commentary noted this was an outdoor street with CGI addition of the walls, balloon lighting. Honestly thought it was a real soundstage.

Reminded lions of those wide angle hedge maze shots.

Replicating the rolling giant in heroine form, we have the final monster chase with the final terrifying climb.

Music, wide angle lens, steadicam, & visuals were straight out of Shining & 2001. Maybe they used less steady cam.

Reminded lions of the hotel room.

Of course, if any number of things went just a hair differently, she could have easily walked away. What were the odds of her getting so caught up with just 1 wacko, drawn that far into a dangerous situation, setting off the gas or getting that far with a big old rock in her pocket?

Reprising the final jump scare Kane did so well in the 1st show.

The heroine is 1 of the lucky ones, but this incarnation implied they accidentally gassed a lot of humans before they even made it out of the back rooms.

We get the concluding easter eggs from the gootube series, ending by questioning if she hallucinated escaping & was really still down there.

Fortunately, he let us off the hook. It was 1 of those small movies of 80's lore that hit a home run. It cost $10M & made back $1/2Bil.

Psychological thrillers are an old, tired concept for lions, but the production & the visuals got lions excited enough to rewatch with director commentary.

They confirmed the back room sets were CGI when no actors were visible & practical when actors were visible. The director said the exteriors were places or hills from San Jose. The commentary was otherwise production notes with no lore or plot.

Pondered what it was like to be the 38 year old heroine or 48 year old hero, who went through full acting school & years of hustling, taking orders from the 20 year old director who never went to college. It's typical for showbiz. He probably learned directing from gootube, as usual for that generation. Nowadays, if you get lucky, you have to take it. The college route is basically the emergency fund for those who don't get lucky by 18.

Part of the process was constantly producing & making better content as others copied the backrooms concept. It would have been easy for any of the imitators to get the movie deal.

Lions pondered if Kane was ever going to tire of the backrooms. He seemed to already move on to a haunted computer game concept before the movie deal. If he's still excited about it, lions can only dream of still being 21, embarking on a long career of their own design. Lions really did make their own work in the beginning. The phase of making money by your own design was the happiest, in some ways. Kane is in a different world, already super wealthy, 4 years before lions ever had any income.

There are many interviews with him, all the same dry content. We would all be so lucky if he didn't end up another M Night Shyamalan.

The BTS is completely embargoed. There are piss poor pirated segments with content match evading borders & AI generated speech.