Ken Burns on Story Telling
What makes a great story? For legendary filmmaker Ken Burns, the answer is both complicated and personal. In this short documentary about the craft of storytelling, he explains his lifelong mission to wake the dead.
Ken Burns: On Story from Redglass Pictures on Vimeo.
Camera That Can Capture At The Speed Of Light [video]
A team from the MIT media lab has created a camera with a “shutter speed” of one trillion exposures per second — enabling it to record light itself traveling from one point to another. Using a heavily modified Streak Tube (which is normally used to intensify photons into electron streams), the team could snap a single image of a laser as it passed through a soda bottle. In order to create the slow-motion film in the video we’ve got after the break, the team had to replicate the experiment hundreds of times. The stop-motion footage shows how light bounces through the bottle, collecting inside the opaque cap before dispersing. The revolutionary snapper may have a fast shutter but the long time it takes to process the images have earned it the nickname of the “the world’s slowest fastest camera.” (via engadget.com)
Wow! Microsoft Builds A Functioning ‘Holodesk’
It’s a start but – wow – that’s amazing and something the world has been waiting for since 1987. It’s not quite a Holodeck, but it’s tantalizingly close.
The reasearch arm of Microsoft, unlike the rest of the company, spends its days spinning crazed dreams into hacked reality.
Today Microsoft Research released a rather fascinating demonstration of one of its projects, what it calls a ‘holodesk,’ which has the potential to change the way we physically interact with digital items. Sounds trippy? That’s because it is. The user, looking down on a pane of glass, sees items (balls, blocks, whatever) on that screen. With their hands underneath the glass, they can move their appendages and digits and prod those images as if they were directly touching them.
It’s a bridge, essentially, between the physical and the digital. Microsoft dubs the idea at the “research project” stage only, so don’t get your hopes up about getting one for yourself. And of course, it uses a Kinect.
Now, if this is only a research project, why does it matter? Microsoft, as a company, is working on all fronts to build on what it calls ‘natural user interfac[ing].” What this means is that the firm is looking past the keyboard and mouse (blasphemy) and is instead working with touch, voice, and so forth. This is especially important in the tablet world that the company is so desperately behind in.
it’s hard not to wish that more of what Microsoft Research was market-ready. (via thenextweb)
A Real-Time Crowdsourced Production by New Yorkers
“The ‘New York Writes Itself’ script is a record of the real people in New York and what they have said and done as witnessed by a group of observational New Yorkers. If you hear a great quote or something catches your eye, submit it here as part of the script. Quotes, scenes and characters in the script are selected to be made into productions – like posters, exhibitions, music videos and short films.” Read more at www.newyorkwritesitself.com
GIF Shop – Brilliant New iPhone App
Love it! The animated .gif maker for your iPhone. Easily create and edit looping animations, upload to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all on the go! get it at the app store
Digital Rube Goldberg Processor
The Digital Rube Goldberg Processor is the outcome of a workshop The Product collective gave at the HfG Karlsruhe (Design School). The team was invited to give a 4-day Processing workshop for the communication design students there. Since they understand it is impossible to teach programming to beginners just within 4 days, they decided to focus more on the essential topics behind generative and computational design, to provide a grounded starting point for the students.
Jens explains: We first gave a quick introduction to the processing environment, thematically centered around the actual matter of generative design, namely digital data. Given the fact that any stored data is binary code in the end, it is the encoding and decoding algorithms that make digital data meaningful for us. To create an awareness for that, we came up with the idea of the rube-goldberg-processor (wiki). It is an potentially endless line of sub-processors that transform the same dataset from one state into another. Each group of students had a translate-from-to assignment, e.g. from moving image to sound. To make the steps more comprehensible for observers, the transfer was made in an analog way (camera pointing to monitor, microphone in front of speaker…) In the end, this obvoiusly led to an indecipherable outcome, but on the way, the teams had to negotiate basic “protocols” and concerned themselves with several techniques that are used in computational design.
The Product team provided the first step (image to text) as well as the last step, the flickr uploader. The rest was done by the students.
For more teaching by The Product, see the-product.org/category/teaching
The Product a berlin-based spatial and media-related design practice. They conceive design concepts. They create installations. They animate surfaces. They design spaces. They develop objects. And they extensively think about the application and combination of technologies in meaningful ways.
Citizenside – Journalism At Play
Citizenside’s goal is to create the largest online community of amateur and independent reporters where everyone can share their vision of the news by uploading photos and videos for fellow reporters to see.
sell photos videos to the press and media around the world.
If you have an interesting news-related image or video, Citizenside will contact media outlets on your behalf and offers you a much higher percentage of the sales price than those offered by traditional agencies (up to 75%).
Citizenside has around 10.000 regular contributors. In 2008 it sold the first public video of french trader Jerome Kerviel–whose illicit trade cost French bank Société Générale billions of dollars. The video was syndicated to several publications for around EUR 100.000
Citizenside was created in 2006 by three young associates passionate about the news (two cousins and a friend!) whose complementary experience offers you the best representation when it comes to selling your content.
In November 2007, Agence France-Presse (AFP), the 3rd largest news agency in the world, and the IAM company became shareholders in the Citizenside agency (formerly Scooplive). Primary shareholder of the IAM company and ex-CEO of France Televisions, Xavier Gouyou-Beauchamps, then became president of Citizenside.
Moments [Film] by Radiolab – Beautiful Observations
Radiolab presents: Moments by Will Hoffman. This films is a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.
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