Posts tagged film
A Boy and His Atom
IBM researchers have created the world’s smallest movie, a 90-second stop motion animation made by moving a few dozen carbon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope.
The video is viewable once you magnify it 100 million times, and would take 1,000 frames laid side by side to equal the width of a human hair.
Via the BBC:
The new movie, titled A Boy and His Atom, instead uses the STM, an IBM invention which garnered the scientists behind it the 1986 Nobel prize in physics.
The device works by passing an electrically charged, phenomenally sharp metal needle across the surface of a sample. As the tip nears features on the surface, the charge can “jump the gap” in a quantum physics effect called tunnelling.
The 242 frames of the 90-second movie are essentially maps of this “tunnelling current” with a given arrangement of atoms. It depicts a boy playing with a “ball” made of a single atom, dancing, and jumping on a trampoline…
…The effort, detailed in a number of YouTube videos, took four scientists two weeks of 18-hour days to pull off.
It underlines the growing ability of scientists to manipulate matter on the atomic level, which IBM scientists hope to use to create future data storage solutions.
IBM reports that while it currently takes about a million atoms to store a bit of data on computer devices, they have successfully reduced that number down to 12 with what they call atomic-scale magnetic memory. Meaning, the future of computing devices is about to get very, very small.
For example, “Being able to increase the data density of devices means more storage in a smaller space: specifically, storage that is 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives, 150 times more dense than solid-state memory. An entire music and movie collection could fit on a charm-sized pendant around your neck.”
Stabilize that Camera
Ever have problems with a shaky cam when you’re shooting in the field? We all do, but check this new camera stabilizer.
Via Gizmodo:
The product is called MōVI, created by Freefly, longtime maker of crazy camera-drone equipment and stabilizers. [Vincent] LaForet is presenting a short film and behind-the-scenes video to illustrate its abilities, which consists of a completely custom-made gimbal and 3-axis gyroscope that digitally stabilizes the camera (a Canon 1DC in this case). It looks to be very light and portable, a far cry from giant metal arms, vests, and weights that almost the entire camera support world is based on.
Via Vincent LaForet:
This device isn’t the end of the sticks, Steadicam, slider, dolly or jib to be sure… but it sure will make you think twice about using those tools on many of your shots when you find out how quickly this device allows you to execute a similar shot but in a fraction of the time. It can literally take longer to explain a shot, than it would to execute a perfect shot with the MōVI.
It’s way beyond our price range, coming in at $15,000 for the version currently in production with smaller model to be released for around $7,500, according to LaForet. Still, would be good for a day rental on an important shoot.
Or, hopefully, as Gizmodo suggests, the technology will trickle down to more affordable models and spinoffs in the nearish future.
RIP Roger Ebert
Video: Remaking My Voice, via TED.
The situated documentary allows us to examine the emerging transformation of the storytelling model of journalism from the analog to the digital age. In the traditional model of analog journalism, storytelling is dominated by a linear presentation of facts, typically from beginning to end. The audience experiences the story in a passive—almost voyeuristic—mode. Stories tend to have a single or sometimes dual modality of media forms (e.g. text, or text combined with photographs, infographics, audio, and video). A story is published and fixed in time. Corrections might be published later as an afterthought. Stories tend to be based on events, and as such, are episodic rather than contextual. The voice of a typical story is that of a third-person narrative, perhaps best characterized by legendary CBS Evening News Anchor Walter Cronkite’s signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.”
The new media storytelling model is nonlinear. The storyteller conceptualizes the audience member not as a consumer of the story engaged in a third-person narrative, but rather as a participant engaged in a first-person narrative. The storyteller invites the participant to explore the story in a variety of ways, perhaps beginning in the middle, moving across time or space, or by topic. Nonlinear storytelling may come as a bit of a shock to some traditional journalists, but it is possible to adapt to new technology without sacrificing quality or integrity.
~John V. Pavlik and Frank Bridges’ monograph, The Emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) as a Storytelling Medium in Journalism, published in Journalism and Communcitaion Monographs, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2013. (via virtual300)
FJP: This came across my Twitter radar a few days ago where Jill Falk was kind enough to share the quote. It’s an interesting concept and one that has roots beyond contemporary multimedia storytelling.
For example, my favorite books growing up were of the choose your own adventure variety. You read a chapter and were then told to proceed to chapter X, Y or Z depending on your plot desires. Later, as a teenager, I was fascinated by Julio Cortázar’s “Hopscotch”. The table of contents told you you could read the book traditionally, from Page 01 to the end. It also gave you an alternative reading. That is, read Chapter 01, then jump about nilly-willy, forward and back between chapters. The end result is a type of narrative driven more by “impressions” than linear storytelling.
William Burroughs did this as well. “Naked Lunch” can supposedly be read any which way. Front to back, back to front, jumping about the middle. It’s all good. Urban legend has it that Burroughs dropped the manuscript on the way to his publisher. Despite pages spilled on the ground there were no worries. Again, the book could be read any which way so he gathered the pages up, stuffed them in his binder and continued on his way.
Film plays with this too. Fans of Memento enjoy the front to back and back to front chronologies. Other films employ this technique as well. Back in the 1960s, Jean Luc Goddard famously remarked, “I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.”
So let’s go back to multimedia storytelling with the Internet as a primary distribution platform. The underappreciated hyperlink is our key to moving back and forth within a narrative. Our design and UX considerations help control where the story inquisitor might go. But despite our best intentions, that independent viewer is going to pick and choose his or her way through a narrative.
Check our Multimedia Tag for references here. These are stories that have beginning, middle and end. But they’re also stories where the viewer chooses what his or her beginning, middle and end actually is. Site visitors are independent operators. We can try to guide them with our design but they’ll go where interest guides them to go.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to the crux of the matter — multimedia storytelling or not — and that’s the atomic unit of online consumption.
This is a concept that’s been around for a while now. In my interpretation it means something like this: Whatever you do, whatever you post, whatever you research, whatever you pour your heart and soul into, the following will happen: your story will be sliced and diced and shared on social networks and otherwise refactored elsewhere. This could be the mere title. It could be a sentence buried deep within you article. It could be seconds 00:45 - 00:55 of a video. It could be an animated gif of that video. It could be metadata of the information that you produce. It could be an API mashup of all the above.
Simply, whatever story you produce, and whatever media you use to produce it in, your content will be broken down into its smallest parts and shared on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs and the like.
This is not a bad thing. It’s an agnostic thing. This is remix culture.
Simply and unambiguously, we must deal with it. And from this side of the Internet, we deal with it pleasurably so. — Michael
2012: What Brought Us Together
News, politics, sports, science and culture from around the world. By Jean-Louis Nguyen.
Stunning.
CLOUDS Interactive Documentary – Exploring creativity through code.
FJP: We’re sold, “People across the planet are dreaming together… it’s like experiencing a documentary in a video game environment.”
Central Park Time Lapse
The FJP dedication to craft award goes to Jamie Scott who chose 15 locations throughout Central Park and returned to them to shoot around sunrise two days a week for six months.
The stunning result captures the park’s ever changing color.
H/T: Colossal.
IMDB’s Top 250 Films in 2.5 Minutes
Edited to a DJ Faroff mashup of Joan Jett, The Beatles, House of Pain and Cypress Hill, Jonathan Keogh brings together 250 movies in 2 and a half minutes.
H/T: Slate.
The World’s First Color Film
Via England’s National Media Museum:
In 1899, just five years after British audiences first saw moving pictures, Edward Turner, a photographer and, and Frederick Marshall Lee, his financial backer, patented the first colour moving picture process in Britain.
A complicated process, it involved photographing successive frames of black-and-white film through blue, green and red filters. Using a special projector (which you can see in the gallery) these were combined on a screen to produce full-colour images.
Turner died in 1903 and Charles Urban turned to early film pioneer, George Albert Smith, to perfect the process. After working on it for a year, Smith deemed Turner’s process unworkable and it was abandoned in favour of his own, simpler, colour process. Marketed by Urban as Kinemacolor, this became the first commercially successful colour moving picture process and made a fortune.
Blade Runner: Aquarelle Edition
I’m a fan of patient things. If you wanted to dig deep it’s a reaction to the hyper immediacy of digital lives. With everything a touch, click or swipe away, we forget the journey on our leap to the destination. Communication, ideas and thoughts get reduced to an atomized 140 characters.
Which, now that my jaw is no longer on the ground, I say take twelve minutes to watch Anders Ramsell’s watercolor remix of Blade Runner. This reportedly is part 1 of more to come, and Ramsell has created it by painting and then animating 3,285 separate watercolors across his timeline. — Michael
The Price of Sex (Trailer):
The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives. Learn more at www.priceofsex.org .
FJP: The Price of Sex was written, directed and produced by Mimi Chakarova, won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and the 2011 Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.
If you’re in DC there’s a screening of the film this evening.
I’m deeply honored that President Obama will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by introducing it to a national audience. I believe it remains the best translation of a book to film ever made, and I’m proud to know that Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch lives on — in a world that needs him now more than ever.
Harper Lee, author, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Background: This Saturday President Obama will provide an introduction to USA Network’s 50th anniversary screening of To Kill a Mockingbird. The film is an adaptation of Lee’s only published book but one that won her a Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contributions to American literature.
Via Hollywood Reporter:
The film stars [Gregory] Peck as a lawyer in a small Alabama town who takes the tough case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Told from the point of view of the attorney’s daughter, the novel is heralded as one of the first to portray America’s race issues frankly and remains on many schools’ mandatory reading lists.
The film was nominated for eight Oscars and went on to win three of the awards including Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Art Direction.
Archipelago Cinema
One of America’s most nostalgic pastimes is enjoying a revival in Thailand, where moviegoers recently floated to a theater flanked by massive rocks.
Via Architizer:
For the final night of the Film on the Rocks Yao Noi Festival earlier this month, guests were taken by boat to savor a final screening on a floating cinema designed by Beijing-based architect Ole Scheeren. Scheeren’s Archipelago Cinema consisted of a floating screen, cradled between two towering rocks, and a separate raft-like auditorium, together offering a spiritual and vaguely primordial cinematic experience.
And once it has finished showing films, the structure will be remodeled. Made with recycled and reusable materials, the theater will one day function as a stage and playground for community children.
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