Surrealist free diving video
Is this the first surrealist free diving video? I wasn’t sure and then Superman showed up.
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kottke.org posts about video
What David Fincher doesn’t do
Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting looks at the constraints David Fincher chooses to operate under while shooting a film. For instance, he very rarely uses hand-held cameras.
The last half of the video featuring a breakdown of how some of Fincher’s scenes were shot is fascinating.
Inherent Vice
I somehow didn’t know or forgot that PT Anderson was doing a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. It turns out he totally is and here’s the first trailer:
That looks entirely goofy and good.
Leech vs earthworm
This video of a giant red leech devouring an earthworm twice its own length is the most disturbing nature footage I’ve ever seen.
Damn nature, you scary!
Clouds crashing in the sky
There’s an incredible 16-second sequence in this video of clouds, starting at around 10 seconds in. It looks as though the sky is a roiling ocean wave about to crash on the beach. I’ve watched it approximately 90 times so far today.
It’s worth making the video fullscreen and pumping it up to the max quality (2160p!) to see it properly. (via colossal)
#aspirational
In the future, people won’t want to meet or talk to celebrities, they’ll just want to borrow some of their social capital.
(via ★interesting)
Entangled
Entangled is a short film by Tony Elliott about a quantum experiment that goes wrong. Shit gets real at approximately precisely 4:19.
Reminds me a bit of Primer.
World’s fastest onion chopper
I think this guy is the T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, but for chopping onions instead of assassinating future resistance fighters. Evidence:
1. In the brief view we get of his face at about 20 seconds in, he is not even really looking at the onion. Total robot move.
2. Um, he’s like superhumanly fast at chopping that onion.
3. The T-1000 can easily morph into other people, like this fast watermelon cutter or this pancake flipper or this lemon chopper. Different people, same shapeshifting food prep robot from the future! (via @kdern)
Aurora borealis
This looks like a time lapse, but it’s not. It’s just a straight-up gorgeous video of the aurora borealis filmed in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada.
It is real time motion! NOT time-lapse. Brighter the Aurora, faster the movement.
(via the kid should see this)
Raiders of the Lost Ark in black and white
In 2011, Steven Soderbergh revealed he’d repeatedly watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in black & white. Now he’s released a full-length version of the film in b&w, with no dialogue and an alternate soundtrack (Reznor and Ross’s score to The Social Network) so that you can focus on how the film is constructed visually.
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot — whether short or long — held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are — that’s high level visual math shit).
Piano/Video Phase
In 1967, Steve Reich wrote a piece of music called Piano Phase. The piece is performed by two pianists playing the same piece of music at two slightly different speeds. As the piece progresses, the music moves in and out of phase with itself. Classical percussionist David Cossin performed with a duet of Piano with himself to produce a Piano/Video Phase:
Give it 30-90 seconds for the phase shifting to kick in. For those who aren’t so musically inclined, this pendulum phasing video provides a more visual representation of what’s going on:
(via @pieratt)
Update: See also this Piano Phase visualization from Alexander Chen, Rhythm Necklaces, and an animation of Reich’s Clapping Music. (thx, @anotherny, @RianVDM, and everyone who sent in Chen’s piece)
Update: And whoa, here’s Rob Kovacs playing Piano Phase on two pianos:
That seems….difficult.
The Chinese black market iPhone trade
Casey Neistat visited several Apple Stores in NYC on the eve of the iPhone 6 launch to observe the folks standing in line. He found that many of those in line, particularly right in the front, were Chinese resellers.
The iPhone 6 won’t be available in China for several months, so a lively and lucrative black market has sprung up. The video shows several typical transactions: two phones (the maximum allowed per person) are purchased with cash and then the people sell those phones to men who presumably have them shipped to China for resale.
I remember last year, when the iPhone 5s came out, there was always a line of mostly Asian people outside the Soho store in the morning, even months after the launch. (via @fromedome)
Heard It Through the Grapevine
Marvin Gaye’s isolated vocals on I Heard It Through The Grapevine. The man has pipes.
Star Wars Episode II: The Friend Zone
Amidala friendzones Anakin, Obi-Wan hunts for drugs, and Jango Fett pumps the bass in this hilarious Auralnauts reimagining of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
You may have also seen their recent video of the Throne Room scene at the end of Star Wars without John Williams’ score (reminiscent of these musicless musicvideos) or Bane’s outtakes from The Dark Knight Rises. Still champion though: bad lip reading of NFL players. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Insane Fictional Traffic Patterns
In this video entitled Rush Hour, cars, pedestrians, and cyclists have been edited together to produce dozens of heart-stopping near misses.
Reminds me of the world’s craziest intersection, traffic organized by color, intersections in the age of driverless cars, and the dangerous dance of NYC intersections. (via colossal)
Video tour of Brooklyn and Queens typography
Join designer James Victore for an opinionated tour of the typography of Brooklyn and Queens.
We’re going to do a typographical tour of Brooklyn and Queens, We’re going to look at type on the street and signage on the street and try to figure out what the hell it’s for.
Favorite quote: [Pointing at a logo for a waxing salon] “There’s been a designer here. Which is not always a good thing.” (via gothamist)
This is Phil Fish
Using Phil Fish, the person responsible for critically acclaimed indie game Fez, this video by Ian Danskin explores what it means to be internet famous, something everyone who writes/creates/posts/tweets online has experienced to some extent.
We are used to thinking of fame as something granted to a person by people with media access. The reason people hate Nickelback is because of that record contract, that Faustian bargain — they bought into it. They had to be discovered; someone had to connect them to video directors, record producers, stylists, advertisers.
This is not what fame looks like on the internet. There, fame is not something you ask for. Fame is not something you buy into. Fame happens to you.
Phil doesn’t have an agent. He doesn’t have ad executives. He doesn’t tour the country on press junkets. He doesn’t have a PR department. (Obviously.)
He talked on social media. He did interviews when invited to do them. He was invited into a documentary. People read these things as shameless self-promotion or a desperate need for attention, or both, but that’s projection — nobody knows Phil’s reasons for doing them but Phil and the people who know him personally.
Phil never asked to be famous.
We made him famous. Maybe, in part, because we found him entertaining. Maybe, in part, because we found him irritating. Largely because many of us were once sincerely excited about his game. But he became a big deal because we kept talking about him.
On the internet, celebrities are famous only to the people who talk about them, and they’re only famous because we talk about them, and then we hate them for being too famous, and make them more famous by talking about how much we hate them. Could there ever be anything more self-defeating than this?
Here’s a transcript of the video. In his post about why he decided to sell Minecraft to Microsoft, Markus Persson cites This is Phil Fish as an influence:
I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.
Robin Sloan connected Persson’s post with a post by Erin Kissane on how she has curtailed her use of Twitter. Here’s one of her problems with Twitter:
The first is feeling like I’m sitting at a sidewalk cafe, speaking in a conversational voice, but having that voice projected so loudly that strangers many streets away are invited to comment on my most inconsequential statements — especially if something I say gets retweeted beyond my usual circles.
Many moons ago, I was “subculturally important” in the small pond of web designers, personal publishers, and bloggers that rose from the ashes of the dot com bust, and I was nodding along vigorously with what Danskin, Persson, and Kissane had to say. Luckily for me, I realized fairly early on that me and the Jason Kottke who published online were actually two separate people…or to use Danskin’s formulation, they were a person and a concept. (When you try to explain this to people, BTW, they think you’re a fucking narcissistic crazy person for talking about yourself in the third person. But you’re not actually talking about yourself…you’re talking about a concept the audience has created. Those who think of you as a concept particularly hate this sort of behavior.)
The person-as-concept idea is a powerful one. People ascribe all sorts of crazy stuff to you without knowing anything about the context of your actual life. I even lost real-life friends because my online actions as a person were viewed through a conceptual lens; basically: “you shouldn’t have acted in that way because of what it means for the community” or some crap like that. Eventually (and mostly unconsciously), I distanced myself from my conceptual counterpart and became much less of a presence online. I mean, I still post stuff here, on Twitter, on Instagram, and so on, but very little of it is actually personal and almost none of it is opinionated in any noteworthy way. Unlike Persson or Fish, I didn’t quit. I just got boring. Which I guess isn’t so good for business, but neither is quitting.
Anyway, I don’t know if that adds anything meaning to the conversation, just wanted to add a big “yeah, that rings true” to all of the above, particularly the video. (thx, @brillhart)
Update: From the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, a short essay called “Borges and I”:
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
(via @ezraball)
Instant ramen hacks
Here are some things you can do with instant ramen aside from eating it as directed on the package, including making a grilled cheese sandwich, gnocchi (a la David Chang), and pizza.
(via devour)
Incredible no-look backheel
This goal by AC Milan’s Jeremy Menez against Parma over the weekend is just beyond:
No-look backheel. Jeebus.
Dancebot 2014
This guy Fik Shun? He knows how to dance.
The thing he starts doing with his chest around 2:10 is some Exorcist-level shit. (via digg)
Apocalypse Pooh
The internet is full of remixes of movies and trailers these days: Wes Anderson’s Forrest Gump, The Shining as a romantic comedy, Toy Story 2 mashed up with Requiem for a Dream, Toy Story meets The Wire, and so on. But before all of that, from 1987, perhaps the first mashup of its kind, Apocalypse Pooh:
Todd Graham made this short film with VCRs and film nerds passed around copies on VHS tapes. (via @johankugelberg)
New York streets in beautiful slow motion
This starts out ordinarily, but give it some time…it gets really good around 90 seconds in. The combination of panning and slow motion creates a powerful sense of energy around almost-still imagery; it’s a trippy effect. See also James Nares’ Street. (via subtraction)
100 iconic film scenes
From Cinefix, the 100 most iconic shots in film.
Skews heavily toward pop culture favorites, but still worth a look. Here’s a video with annotations of each scene. (via digg)
Amish barn-raising time lapse
Watch as a group of Amish men raise almost an entire barn in a day.
(via colossal)
The history of Japanese video game music
Red Bull is sponsoring a six-part series on the history of Japanese video game music. The first installment covers the music of Space Invaders through the Game Boy. Highlight: composer Junko Ozawa showing off her hand-drawn waveform library she used in composing scores for Namco. Bonus: Space Invader-only arcades in Japan were called “Invader houses” while arcades in New Zealand were known as “spacies parlours”.
Update: Beep is a feature-length documentary film that will attempt to cover the history of video game sounds from Victorian mechanical arcades on up to the present day games. They are currently raising funds on Kickstarter.
Wes Anderson’s vehicles
A compilation of some of the vehicles used in Wes Anderson’s movies, shot from the first-person POV.
(via devour)
Slow-mo skateboard tricks
It turns out that this close-up video of slow motion skateboard tricks is all I’ve ever wanted out of life.
I had no idea that’s what they were doing down there. It’s a symphony of footwork!
The Wire, remastered in HD
Good morning, good morning. Welcome back from your beach vacation. Settling in? Good, good. Let’s get right to it then: HBO is remastering The Wire in 16x9 HD and rebroadcasting what looks like every episode on HBO Signature starting this Thursday (Sept 4). Here’s a teaser:
We haven’t had news to report on HBO’s The Wire in a long, long time but this tidbit caught our ear. HBO will be rebroadcasting one of its iconic series: The Wire in never-before-broadcast HD glory! The marathon will begin weeknights at 8PM starting on September 4th. You’ll find the episodes on HBO Signature, a channel most, if not all HBO subscribers should have access to.
No idea if these new HD versions will make it to HBO Go or Amazon Instant or even into the mythical The Wire Blu-ray. Hopefully?
Update: A reader writes in:
My friend who works at HBO says they are chopping the top and bottom off the 4 x 3 frame for the early seasons to “fit” 16 x 9. We saw this with FX’s Simpsons Marathon and I really wish companies would stop doing this. It wasn’t cool to chop the sides off Lawrence of Arabia and it is likewise not cool to chop the head and neck off of Stringer Bell.
Boo. Boo-urns. According to IMDB, only season 5 was shot at 16x9. They should just leave seasons 1-4 at 4x3 and make the picture better. (thx, john)
Update: From an extensive piece on how The Wire was filmed:
And perhaps the final contrast to the rest of high-end episodic television, The Wire for each of its five seasons has been produced in good old fashioned 4 x 3 standard definition. DP Dave Insley recalled, “The reason the show has stayed 4x3 is because David Simon thinks that 4x3 feels more like real life and real television and not like a movie. The show’s never been HD, even 4x3 HD and that (SD) is how it is on the DVDs. There is no 16x9 version anywhere.” As a viewer with an HD set I will point out that like much of SD television that makes its way to HD channels, it appears that HBO utilizes state-of-the-art line doubling technology. It may still be standard definition, but line doubled it looks considerably better on a high definition set than it would on a standard definition set.
Insley explained, “When the show started 2001 / 2002 they framed it for 16 x 9 as a way of future-proofing. Then a couple of seasons ago, right before Season 4 began shooting, there was a big discussion about it and after much discussion — David, Nina, Joe Chappelle, the Producers, the DPs — and we discussed what should be the style of the show. David made the decision that we would stay with 4x3. The DPs pretty much defined the look to be what it is now. And it’s been consistent for the past two seasons.”
If the chopping down to 16x9 rumors are true, David Simon cannot be happy about that. I wonder how much creative control he maintains over decisions like that? I am guessing very little. (via @tubofguts)
Update: HBO has confirmed the remastering to EW, but says the timeline for airing has not been set yet.
A promo claiming that a “replay marathon” of the series would start September 4 on HBO Signature ran prematurely, HBO said, and the series will not be airing this month.
(via @WaterSlicer)
Making plans is difficult nowadays
A plan used to be simple: you would agree to meet someone at a certain time and place and then you would meet them there and then. Now, a plan is subject to all sorts of revisions because “cellphones make people flaky as #%@*”.
A Plan: Once heralded as a firm commitment to an event in the future, a plan is now largely considered to be a string of noncommittal text messages leading up to a series of potential, though unlikely, events.
A Cellphone: Your primary device for making plans. More specifically, the medium with which most plans are conceived and later altered. It’s imperative that you keep your cellphone on your person at all times, as you can expect all plans to dissolve into an amorphous cloud upon conception.
I have experienced this recently and am convinced this is partially a generational thing. If you spent any part of your 20s without a cellphone, the sort of thing described in the video happens a lot less. But this practice is also contagious, as most social behavior is…if you witness friends doing it, over time it becomes more acceptable to do it yourself.
The Game of Thrones title sequence
From the excellent Art of the Title, an interview with Angus Wall, the creative director responsible for the opening titles of Game of Thrones.
Basically, we had an existing map of Westeros and a xeroxed hand drawn map of Essos - both done by George R. R. Martin - and I took those into Photoshop and played with their scale until they lined up perfectly. The actual dimensions, the locations and their placement, and the different terrains are all based strictly on George R. R. Martin’s maps. It was really important that we stay as absolutely true to the books as possible because of the ardent fans out there.
Wall also works as an editor, often on David Fincher films. He won two Oscars for editing The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
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