Self-Made Camera Test

It's often said that there are three types of singers: those who sing beautifully, those who sing terribly, and those who sing with great passion but are unaware of the suffering their audience endures.

The same applies to acting. Every actor thinks they're giving Oscars- worthy performance, unaware that the audience is only seeing awkwardness.

Henry's equipment was indeed impressive and novel. But Charlize Theron quickly snapped out of that mood and looked at her awkward performance in front of the camera.

Henry, on the other hand, was adjusting the newly manufactured equipment, trying to get all the parameters and settings in place so that it could be used directly in the future.

The camera he used was an old Hollywood film camera, often seen in small film crews with limited budgets.

This is Hollywood, and there's a lot of broken camera equipment here. Through connections with the Actors Guild, Henry quickly found a broken camera whose optics were mostly intact, but which was otherwise a complete mess.

It's said to be one of the casualties during the filming of special effects scenes in some action blockbuster. It hasn't been disposed of yet, so it's a good deal for Henry, the junk collector.

The latter half, however, was transformed by Henry into a crudely made metal Monster. Exposed wires, brackets secured with screws or welded in place, and all sorts of bizarre devices were fixed behind the lens.

Henry didn't consider aesthetics at all. Firstly, because it was a hastily made product, and secondly, because this thing could potentially be modified and upgraded, and covering it up completely would be troublesome.

This custom-made modification actually involves the image sensor and encoder. It converts the images captured by the lens into digital signals and stores them on Henry's custom-made high-capacity hard drive.

I've considered buying commercially available high-capacity hard drives and building a NAS server to serve as storage for the cameras.

However, the time required to build a project from scratch would be at least as long as building a high-capacity hard drive directly, so Henry decided to go for it from the start. After all, this was just something he would play with, and no one would care whether it was too far ahead of its time in terms of technology.

The output end was certainly not a CRT screen of this era, or one of those LCD screens that had only recently come out of the laboratory. Henry simply used a projector, and the "screen" was just a whitewashed wall in the room.

Henry had long since given up on television. While ordinary people outside were still marveling at the big screens at 32 or 38 o'clock, Henry had already set up a movie-quality projection screen in his own home.

We don't have a space as big as a movie theater at home, so we can't afford a 200-hour screen. But the wall space that's been left empty has a projection area of 80 or 90 hours, which is big enough.

When watching TV, I usually connect the antenna and TV decoder to the projector. Then I slightly reduce the projection area to avoid the image being too grainy.

Henry was already quite skilled at this kind of manual work involving motors.

Connecting this projector to a homemade camera and displaying the footage is no big problem.

If I had to point out a drawback, it would be that the room's lighting needs to be dimmed when using a projector. Otherwise, the projected image will be rather pale and you won't be able to see anything clearly.

Unlike commercially available projectors, Henry's projector doesn't require all the lights in the room to be turned off to see the projected image clearly.

However, in order to see more clearly, Charlize proactively turned the lights down to a dim level.

Besides the clearer picture, this also allows you to see the situation inside the room more clearly, preventing you from bumping into or hitting anything while moving around. After all, this isn't a movie theater where you sit for two hours without moving.

Charlize Theron was initially praising the equipment Henry had come up with, especially the use of an entire wall as a "screen" for the projector. She had never seen such a large screen before, except in movie theaters.

Soon, she was so embarrassed by her own impromptu performance in front of the camera that she was speechless.

That's a soliloquy by Lady Macbeth, a wicked woman, from Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth.

If you can portray a villain in a way that makes the character detestable, you've already achieved half the success.

The remaining half requires understanding the character's psychological state and ensuring that the body language and subtle facial expressions match the character's current behavioral pattern.

After all, there are many different reasons why someone might be hated, and each reason should be expressed differently. True success lies in portraying these differences and bringing the character to life.

However, during the test shoot, Henry only asked that we do a short, easy scene to test if the equipment was working properly.

So Charlize brought out one of the results of her previous studies at acting school, her attitude not exactly casual but also not too serious.

Then I regretted it.

Henry didn't use a home-style V8 camera; he used equipment close to cinematic standards. With every detail magnified and projected onto a wall that looked like it belonged in the 80s or 90s, Charlize was so embarrassed she could practically dig a three-bedroom apartment out of her skin with her toes.

Especially the way he laughed halfway through a scene, then straightened up and continued acting as if nothing had happened—that's definitely a black mark on his record!

Being tricked into shooting a Playboy photoshoot hadn't made her feel this desperate. But looking at her first on-screen appearance, a red-eyed Charlize Theron had an urge to silence everyone who knew about it.

"Burn the film!" Charlize glared at the man standing next to the camera, laughing as he watched the footage, and said viciously.

"Oh, is this jargon you learned at acting school? Not bad, you've actually learned something."

Film cameras all use 35mm film. "Burning the film" is, of course, the most thorough way to ruin a movie or a scene; it's impossible to recover it. This is considered industry jargon.

Realistically speaking, Henry didn't use film, so of course he had no negatives to burn.

So, facing Charlize, whose eyes were bloodshot, he gripped his own neck with his two grotesque, claw-like hands, muttering, "Burn the film!"

Henry could only appease him, saying, "Alright, alright, this machine doesn't have film, so we can't burn it. But I'll delete the archive of this footage later, so there won't be any data left."

"Really?" The atmosphere had shifted from a horror movie to that of a fawn, her eyes brimming with tears as she looked at the person.

It evokes pity in one's heart.

Given the effectiveness of this transformation, Henry had to admit that this girl's future Oscars win was no fluke.

Henry immediately started operating the camera. Since it was for his own use only, he didn't make a very simple user interface; all commands had to be entered via the keyboard.

In a few quick movements, the previous files were deleted, and the projector screen naturally became blank. This finally relieved Charlize.

It's a bit of a shame that we couldn't capture the future Best Actress's performance during her early years. However, this also proves that the stuff I put in a few days of work was indeed useful.

Therefore, the subsequent performance training can proceed smoothly.