Category: Art

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Ira Glass on Storytelling

Ira Glass bequeaths the tricks of the trade in four YouTube videos that are extremely interesting, whether or not your are in the publishing/podcasting/video making business.

… It is your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions — you don’t have the story part that works or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works and you’re going to need both, and in a good story you’re gonna flip back and forth between the two like to be a little bit of action and someone will say something about it and then a little more action and someone will say something and it and that’s really like a lot of the trick of the whole thing you know is to have the perseverance that if you’ve got an interesting anecdote that you also uh… can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that will support it and then the two together interwoven into three minutes or six minutes or however long your story is will make something that’s larger than the sum of its parts.

(Via Kottke)

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Say What Again

I’m a typographic artwork fan, a Quintin Tarrentino movie fan, and I really like motion graphic compositing projects, so, when I saw Jarratt Moody’s time-based typography assignment (at SCAD) based on Samual L. Jackson’s “Say What Again” dialogue from Pulp Fiction, I figured I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this:

The basic idea of the project is to take a piece of audio from wherever (movie, song, poetry reading, answering machine) and then represent that audio on screen using only typography.

Jarratt chose a famous bit of dialogue from Pulp Fiction as his subject matter. (Okay, what dialogue from Pulp Fiction isn’t famous?) The resulting piece is full of whimsy and style. Jarratt does some great things with scale and simple but effective camera movements. Get those headphones on and prepare yourself for several lashings of Samuel L. Jackson’s naughty tongue.

Say What Again by Jarratt Moody

Watch the piece | Visit Jarratt’s Site

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Queen Mary 2 Enters the Bay

Minimum Headroom

The Queen Mary 2, sailed smoothly into the San Francisco Bay on February 4th. It is the largest ship ever to have entered the Bay and it cleared the Golden Gate Bridge with about 30 feet of room.

Having just visited San Francisco last month, the photos and videos make me smile. I wish I would have been there to get some photos of my own.

SF Gate coverage.

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Happy Valentines Day

A special valentines day cartoon I came across today that is sure to put a smile on your face: Ah, L’Amour by Don Hertzfeldt.

“Ah, L’Amour” (1995) was produced during Don’s freshman year at UC Santa Barbara for a beginning production class, and was never intended to be screened publicly. The two minute 16mm short was somehow completed in just a few weeks despite Don having had little experience working with film; made most noticeable by the visible fingerprints all over the camera lens. By no small miracle, Don’s shaky guitar soundtrack — recorded solo in his dorm room on a broken down boom-box — somehow stayed in sync.”

From Bitterfilms.com

The movie initially saw limited action at film festivals because Don was embarassed by it. He was also afraid of being pelted with rocks by angry women, until screenings revealed that women usually cheered very loudly for the cartoon girls, and always applauded much louder than the men.

A few of the “evil women” in the film are crude caricatures of some of Don’s ex-girlfriends – drawn not so much out of bitterness but from the fact that he was running out of different hair styles to think up. No one could tell that Don drew caricatures because you can barely tell that Don drew people.

Luckily, the incredibly grungy look of the movie plays into its frustrated energy, so it appears as if it was made to look bad on purpose. Don usually stays very quiet whenever this is brought up.

“Ah, L’Amour” became a wildly popular cult film that gave Don the shot in the arm to begin pre-production on Genre. “L’Amour” was still playing the midnight movie circuit in 1998 when it was awarded the World Animation Celebration – HBO Comedy Arts Festival Grand Prize Award for the “World’s Funniest Cartoon” – and it continued to rerun at animation festivals for several years after.

Midnight audiences began a tradition of chanting along in loud unison to the cartoon’s dialogue captions – all the men chanting aloud the man’s lines, and the women chanting along with the women’s. It’s very spooky.

Our studio name, Bitter Films, comes from this film’s opening caption, “A Bitter Film by Don Hertzfeldt.

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Averaged Beauty

Attractiveness by Age Experiment
Attractiveness by Age
Originally uploaded by manitou2121.

Pierre Tourigny downloaded about 30 pictures of women from Hot or Not, a popular internet “photo rating” site, then used SqirlzMorph to create each of the virtual women in the composite images shown here.

“These women do not exist. They are a composite of about 30 faces that I created to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet.”

See also averages based on Hot or Not ratings and origin.

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The Flickr/Yahoo! Situation

As anyone that cares to listen knows, I’m a big Flickr fan.
It’s bothered me that Flickr has decided that all the original members need to update the way they login by merging their accounts with Yahoo! accounts.
Here is a copy of the announcement:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,
On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at: http://go.yahoo.com.
95% of your fellow Flickrites already use this system and their experience is just the same as yours is now, except they sign in on a different page. It’s easy to switch: it takes about a minute if you already have a Yahoo! ID and about five minutes if you don’t.

You can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page:
http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Nothing else on your account or experience of Flickr changes: you can continue to have your FlickrMail and notifications sent to any email address at any domain and your screenname will remain the same.
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here:
http://flickr.com/help/signin/

Thanks for your patience and understanding – and even bigger thanks for your continued support of Flickr: if you’re reading this, you’ve been around for a while and that means a lot to us!
Warmest regards,

– The Flickreenos

Obviously in the end I’m going to stay a Flickr user, but I will admit, I did take this opportunity to shop around, just in case there was something else out there that compares. For a hard core flickr fan like myself, that’s a serious statement.

I know I shouldn’t admit that a change in the way I login to Flickr bothers me, but it does. I really don’t like Yahoo! and so I’ll try not to let my hatred of companies that play dirty get in the way of enjoying the world’s best photo sharing site.

Here is the Official Old Skool Merge Topic on Flickr. The backlash has been fierce. I’ve found reading the comments fuels my disappointment, but also the way the Flickr staff has handled it has me feeling good about the long term future of the site.