Decades of movie poster history go online | Hacker News Reader

Decades of movie poster history go online

sites.utexas.edu

133 pointssohkamyung23 comments

Several years ago I took advantage of digital fabric printing services to create functional and attractive sound-absorbing acoustic panels with movie poster art, suitable for home theater installations. Getting a hold of high-quality digital sources for movie posters sometimes presented a problem, particularly for fans of older movies. This is a great resource, and I'm already plotting on a few new pieces to make!

Here's a build thread on how to make your own: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/19-dedicated-theater-design-co...

That sounds fantastic. Do you have any pictures of the finished home theater space? How much did this project run you?

The total cost of the 4 posters in the OP shown there was $80 - these things aren't expensive to build!

I recently moved to a new place and we don't have a dedicated HT space any longer, which is mostly due to lack of use. Our viewing habits have changed and these days I get more value out of a dedicated VR space than we would out of a theater.

Having said that, sound-absorbing panels are useful in all sorts of living spaces and I still intend to hang my existing panels and add a few new ones should the right poster art come along.

You've piqued my interest about your VR space. What sort of dedicated VR space do you have? What kind of VR content do you watch mostly - is it traditional 2D movies or 3D/VR movies?

Well that's the thing with a VR space - the only requirement is square footage and a fast computer, so it's nothing much to look at from the outside. As far as content, we don't tend to "watch" much of anything as the real fun in VR is in interactive content.

We still watch traditional movies, but do so now in our living room on a regular flat-panel television and are none the worse off for it. My 92" projection screen is hanging on my call without a projector, and nobody is in a hurry to get it running here in the new space.

When I was s little kid in 1977 or thereabouts I wrote a letter to 20th century fox and asked if they could please send me a Star Wars poster and they mailed back this poster like in this page http://www.my-sf.com/2015/08/21/star-wars-film-review/ it was very exciting.

Happy days. I wonder what today's response would be?

They could send you a .tiff to print it yourself :p

You mean they'd send you a link on their web page to a .tiff for you to print out.

If you wanted to be cynical, they'd send a c&d letter because usage of the term "star wars" was caught by their filters

If they'd only had made a "normal" working website. Don't get me wrong, I love JavaScript, but for web applications, not websites.

The interface is a desaster.

I was pretty excited to browse the collection. But after 5 minutes I gave up. It's too frustrating.

The giant fixed header is a pain. And you cannot open the images in a new tab because they do not use normal links.

I am confused, are we looking at the same page? This seems like a perfectly ordinary web page when I view it. There is a photo gallery in the middle that is probably JavaScript-based, but that's working fine for me too. I clicked the zoom button and used the right and left arrows to browse through it (or swiped on my phone). I viewed it both on my phone and on my portrait mode 4K monitor, looks great on both.

I'm not disputing what you saw, just puzzled that we seem to be seeing two different things.

I wonder if the URL was changed or something? This is the one I'm looking at:

http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2018/01/18/deca...

Click through to the actual catalog, not the article about it

Oh, mystery solved, thanks! (And thanks to mackwerk too.)

I'm guessing the previous poster is talking about the actual gallery located here: https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

Apologies. I should have been more clearer, totally my bad. As mackwerk pointed out, it's the click-through to the actual gallery at which my comment was aimed, not the blog on which it was announced.

All museums do this; it's an understandable inability to relinquish control. If they actually just wanted people to have access to the images, they could just make a torrent. They would spring up on 100 different sites in at least 4 different ways (modern internet, you know), and people with a deeper interest could download the lot and examine them in their viewers of choice at their leisure.

People would also completely forget the source, and the museum would get very little credit for the effort put into digitizing them. Sharing this data is not naturally profitable and can't be made profitable without some form of DRM, and a terrible interface is de facto DRM. This is a typical place where the state should intervene, where huge value for the many (the sum of small value for hundreds of millions of people) is sadly outweighed by infinitesimal costs to a few (the sum of the massive labor of half a dozen people.)

Actually, they support IIIF which is a great way of sharing collections.

http://iiif.io/

https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/custom/iiif/

http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/mirador/p15878coll84

This one should be on some offices' walls perhaps -

https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

"And Mackintosh is Dead..."

This looks like it would be interesting to test OCR and feed back into the project as meta data

Please do. It would be wonderful to be able to search via actor. Even better if you could cross reference that with genre from IMDB or something.

looks like only 500 out of the 10000 are online, and the rest may take until 2019?

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