I think in the movie they did hedges too or something. Obviously they were designed to walk a line between wacky and terrifying.
IIRC at the end of the movie after the protagonist has survived all manner of trials and tribulations and successfully won the heart of his lady love there’s a final shot where the two drive off in their honeymoon car… and a DeathMower follows in close pursuit. It’s like that episode of Black Mirror.
Robot lawnmower? I’ve seen Frankenhooker. I know where this goes.
Silvia: We were shooting a scene where a lawnmower—the machine that cut the grass—was following a boy to kill him. And we put the camera on the ground with piece of wood beneath. To wedge, okay? I remember that Armando Nanuzzi ask to Stephen King, “Can we take out the blades?” But Stephen King say, “no, no, I like to see them.” Armando say, “But we don’t see them in the shot.” But Stephen King say, “No. No. Better that you let it.”
Roberto: Many times, Armando say to take out the blades. And then many times, Stephen King would say, “There’s no fucking way. We have to be as real as possible.”
I’ve heard good things about Dutch clover, but should’ve smothered the wild strawberry and Creeping Charlie first. The clover was no match for them.
Can these mowers operate at night? I mean, that’d be convenient, right?
Check with your local native plant groups and nurseries. Establish native plants on your land that don’t require lots of watering, chemicals, or motorized tending. Enjoy the butterflies, bees and general sense of harmony.
Yeah they can easily run at night.
You should bring them inside in the winter if the temps get near freezing though (bad for the batteries).
This is really cool and I’m surprised I didn’t think to look at these when I bought a mower last year.
I ended up getting an EGO electric lawnmower and utterly love the thing, but if for only a few hundred more I could have automated away the task of mowing, I’d have at least considered it.
Regardless of whether you want a robot or just an electric mower - I heartily recommend the plunge though. Electric (self-propelled!) mowers rock.
With the other suggestion of converting it into a meadow from above this all sounds very labor intensive. Sure NC has native grasses, but everything else out paces it 3 to 1. There is a lot in our neighborhood that is not owned by anyone, but was once pasture land. It gets bush hogged once a year in the late fall and in the course of that year you get 3’ tall grasses followed by 4’ tall briers, pokeberries, honeysuckle, and other random plants and vines. The lot besides me is infested with wisteria, which seems almost as bad a kudzu.
My “yard” is simply mowed. It’s as much native weeds as it is grass. It doesn’t get watered or fertilized. As a testament to it’s mediocrity every blow & go yard service stops and leaves me a card or door hanger. That’s about what I can muster. If I’m going to be tending anything outside I’ll plant a vegetable garden.
My yard does nothing until the rainy season hits, then practically overnight grows 6", and continues doing that until the rains stop 4 months later. The ‘grass’, such as it is, is weedy, prone to making tough hillocks that would defeat any robo-mower. There are also trees and rocks and plantings to dodge on a slope. I think I’ll stick with my electric mower.
Or I could just move to a state without grass.
My dad has got a Husqvarna robo mower, but he says it’s unionized, so he programmed it accordingly - 38.5 hour workweek, lunch break, weekends off.
And King was right about this.
When Billy Wilder was shooting Five Gravves to Cairo, Erich von Stroheim insisted on details like having a film in the Leica he was carrying, because otherwise the audience would notice.
(One of my personal bugbears in that respect is suitcases. Actors making a big show of schlepping around “heavy” suitcases that are bleeding obviously empty. Because inanimate objects can’t act, they just move the way physics make them. Sometimes okay for for comedy when it adds to the overall effect. Mildly annoying in most of everything else. A disaster when “couldn’t escape the pursuers because of lugging around heavy stuff that mustn’t be discarded” is a plot point.)
Unfortunately, King’s cameraman lost an eye.
Coffee Cups. I’m looking at you Law & Order.
You dick around with workplace safety you (or worse, someone else) will get hurt, maimed, killed. There are ways of doing things safely. You want people doing dangerous work, you make sure they have adequate protection. If you don’t know how to do this, get someone in who does.
And where responsibilities are neglected, there should be sanctions (I’m looking at you, John Landis ). This includes close calls & lucky escapes - you get away with something, you’ll do it again.
It’s okay to modify standard rules for specific use cases if you know what you’re doing (and document the how and why thoroughly), but that’s it.
This is not meant as victim blaming - being responsible for workplace safety on building sites used to be part of my job for many a year. One of the few things I’m proud of is that there wasn’t anything serious on my watch, ever. (You’d want to avoid that anyway, even if you’re a ruthless bastard without an once of empathy - the paperwork is quite a sight to behold.) Work sites can be safe, even under pressure from clients/timeframe/budget/etc. If something goes really wrong, the blame usually lies not with the poor sod who got mangled but somewhere higher up. Proper paperwork prevents them weaseling out of their resposibilities.
When filming Catch-22 second unit director/cameraman John Jordan refused to wear a harness during a bomber scene and fell out of the open tail turret. While the plane was flying at 1,200 m.
That’s both spectacular and stupid in its own right, but given that Jordan
(1) had only recently developed a special helicopter harness for filming aerial shots of the mountain slopes and action sequences in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (he would hang 5 m below the chopper in his contraption),
(2) had already lost a leg while filming You Only Live Twice (He was leaning out of a helicopter to get a better shot. Another helicopter was caught in a gust of wind and was blown closer. The rotor blade cut Jordan’s leg which had to be amputated.)
you’d think he could have avoided that one.
This.
People eating/drinking. Or rather not really eating/drinking.
I suppose this has to be a major PITA for continuity, but some just pull it off better than others.
And don’t get me started on driving…
This this this. It’s my biggest prop peeve. Every coffee cup in every TV show is obviously empty. Even worse is when they fake drinking from them. I get that liquids would be a hassle on set, but why aren’t weighted prop cups a thing? Glue some washers to the inside, at least. You can’t “act” physics, and it shows.
My local garden shop sells these for $300. Are there a fleet of three of these in the box to justify the $900 price tag? Or is the blade made from synthetic ruby?
