Hacker Cinema
Piper
2016 · Film · short · 6 min
Directed by Alan Barillaro
A mother bird tries to teach her little one how to find food by herself. In the process, she encounters a traumatic experience that she must overcome in order to survive.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
> "Mentorship basically does not exist for those in the bottom"
I love movies for this and also why I recommended Piper. It's about a baby bird learning to get food, and a crab teaches it.
But you can apply the same pattern everywhere. Movies have something called the Three Act Structure. Act 1: Hero faces a problem, tries to solve it their way, gets deeper in it. Act 2 begins where the hero is now stuck. There's a mentor by now that the hero doesn't acknowledge. The hero will continue to fail on their own and can't see the solution. Then the mentor points it out and all is solved, with Act 3 being the denouement.
In Lion King, Timon & Pumbaa mentor Simba from being scared/guilty to being carefree, and again from carefree to bold. In romance films, it's usually two people changing a part of themselves for the other person. Boy learns to be honest, girl learns to be less judgemental. Conan learns that flesh can be stronger than steel. Sarah Connor learns about humanity from a robot assassin. And so on.
I still like comparing it to dating, in that it just happens. It's awkward to make it formal and long term. Sometimes we have rituals for this, like university and 1-1s. Often you have to start the process long before the ritual, though.
Movies are actually very good at showing a natural mentor relationship. Every Pixar movie has a mentor, often two. For mental development, and emotional. The hero is stuck on something and only gets out of it with the mentor's help. The 7-min Pixar short Piper is IMO the most direct example.
i wouldn't be able to tell that the chair in the first few seconds of this isn't real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nKb9hRYbPA
on the blue ray dvd of pixar's finding dory, closely examine the sand and water (ignore the living creatures) in the first few minutes of the short film piper. you know a-priori it's not real, but i'd like to hear people describe what they think looks off with the environments (not the creatures). try to normalize that with the intent of a director trying to craft an identical ambiance from a recorded video (color temperatures may be made warmer in post, increased saturation, more vignetting, etc).
in big hollywood vfx house showreels, there's a lot that's obviously cg (again, we're still off on creatures), but what about the environments within? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnfdpgDDLc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SabPuZ5coKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i0XuA9KLEo
in particular, i don't think people watching that night-time sequence of deepwater horizon in theaters would identify it as entirely computer generated.
Watched "Piper" before "Finding Dory" the other day. We liked it better than the feature film.