Video
For some reason it’s the most pointless things that make me feel most encouraged about the human race:
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I am naturally drawn to extremely long term, incremental projects. This probably explains why I have chosen to serialise 50+ issues of old Things on this blog at a rate of one a week; why I have spreadsheets tracking my sleep data going back nearly 10 years; and perhaps why it took me 6 years to complete a PhD. But as the title suggests, “He Took a Polaroid a Day” takes that kind of thing to a whole new level.
Quote
Leonard Bernstein: To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.
Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked why buses come in clusters. I think the main problem is the feedback loops – any traffic fluctuation that causes a bus to become slightly delayed means a longer wait at the next bus stop, which means more people are likely to turn up. More people take longer to get on board, and as Xuan points out make it more likely the bus will need to stop more often. Meanwhile, when the next bus turns up there has been less of a wait since the last bus left, so fewer people board, and by the same token the bus can make faster progress, so the gap between buses is closed by feedback loops at both ends.
One answer is to hold buses to “even out gaps in the service” as does indeed sometimes happen. Xuan also suggests better data on how crowded imminent buses are would encourage people to wait for the next, more empty bus, easing the feedback loop. I also think the surfacing of real time public transport data – as could be viewed a few weeks ago – will help us collectively improve efficiency in a similar way.
Pictures
Kanye West begins tweeting in a rather ostentatious way. In a stroke of inspiration, someone thought to use his tweets to re-caption New Yorker cartoons. Examples below; full story here.
Video
It’s strangely easy to forget that sufficiently well-made robots can move and react ridiculously fast. Here’s some nice reminders:
Links
Spoiler warning: if you haven’t seen Inception, these links are not for you. Move along to the quote.
I saw Inception and particularly liked the way you can enjoy it at face value or try to make out a deeper underlying truth. Whichever camp you fall into, I recommend checking out this YouTube video (more accurately audio), and if you’re trying to piece things together you might be aided by this simple diagram, or this more ambitious one.
If you want to dive deeper into working things out, I recommend you start with the IMDb FAQ which has some pretty good answers, then move on to the InceptionTheories forum.
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Piet Mondrian: Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Puzzle
Here’s a classic: why do buses come clusters?
Last Week’s Puzzle Last week I asked why walk-in freezers have doors that cannot be opened from inside. As Richard pointed out, the answer is that actually, they generally don’t. But if they did, I like Maria’s theory: “Maybe it is a Hollywood conspiracy. Think of the lack of plots if people didn’t get stuck inside a walk-in freezer.” Hollywood manipulating real life to make convenient tropes seem more plausible sounds like a fun premise for a film…
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The top 20 entries in a 5-second video contest – another great example of creativity out of limitation, as discussed in the Things Art Special (contains some scenes likely to offend, although only briefly):
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David Mamet’s extraordinary memo/rant/lecture on writing good scripts, packed with excessive capitalisation, fractured grammar and other weird errors, all of which only serve to reinforce the passion with which he is trying to improve the world, can be read here.
If you don’t have time for 1,099 words, here’s a synecdochic exceprt:
EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE – THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.
ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.
Puzzle
Some of you may remember cassettes, small mechanical devices about eight times the size of an mp3 player, with 90 minutes or so of music physically encoded on a piece of wound tape, designed to spool and respool through a larger mechanical device which would ‘read’ the tape and produce the appropriate noises.
The tape had two ‘sides’, and you would play the other side of the tape by literally turning the cassette over.
The puzzle is this: no matter which side up you turned the cassette, the same physical side of the wound tape would face outwards. So how did the machine know which ‘side’ to play?
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A well-thought-out flow chart to help you choose a font for any occasion:
I went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival and saw a whole bunch of films, which I enjoyed so much I am amazed it took me this long to work out that this is exactly the kind of thing I should do with holiday time.
Here’s my shortlist of the most interesting films that I saw. Some of these will see wider release in the near future, whereas others you will only hear of again in 13 years time when they pop up as a result of some Byzantine algorithm as a recommendation to you on some presently incomprehensible video-on-demand offering with a staggering range of content, at which point the title will sound very vaguely familiar to you and you will dimly remember the things about it which you are about to read here, and hopefully that will be enough to make you take the plunge. I hope you enjoy it.
Well, actually some of these are short animations which you can watch right now on the internet, so there’s a short term gain to reading the following too.
The Illusionist
What: Animated adaptation of an unmade Jaques Tati script by Silvain Chomet, the man behind Belleville Rendez-vous Good: Superbly captures the beauty of Scotland in general and Edinburgh in particular, with sublime hand-drawn character animation and deft characterisation Bad: Surprisingly loose in plot and fuzzy in storytelling Conclusion: Absolutely worth your time for the visuals alone
Monsters What: Low budget yet well-realised alien invasion as setting for semi-romantic road movie Good: Beautifully shot, atmospheric, with an incredibly realistic-feel for its budget and a beautifully understated soundtrack from Jon Hopkins. And giant alien octopi. Bad: Weakness in the development of the female character betrays a male gaze bias, undermining the main dynamic of the film Conclusion: Essential viewing for anyone interested in what can be achieved on a budget, giant alien octopi, or Whitney Able’s legs
No trailer available, but this clip gives some clues to the look and feel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH9NswxZyAQ
[Update – Trailer now available, see below! – Tim 8/1/16]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmR-l3y_coo
Skeletons What: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in reverse, but as a quirky-in-a-good-way British comedy Good: A great idea fleshed out with wonderfully convincing yet unexplained details Bad: Slightly odd in structure, as it does not entirely succeed in erasing all trace of its short-film origins Conclusion: If you’ve ever moaned about sequels and remakes and a dearth of new ideas, this is exactly the kind of movie that you should be watching instead.
Mark What: EIFF sum it up perfectly: “Touching portrait of a lost friend through footage gleaned from diverse sources.” Good: A fascinating patchwork of home video footage, photos, interviews, and scenes from entirely different movies, that combine to form a strangely affecting portrait in a way conventional methods could never reach Bad: The film-maker’s own relationship with the subject seems self-censored, slightly undermining the sense of insight and authenticity that pervades the film Conclusion: Mysteriously only moved me to tears about an hour after leaving the cinema, even though I thought I’d stopped thinking about it. Worth a try just to see what it does to you.
The Secret In their Eyes What: Past-and-present mystery detective story, also the biggest and purportedly best film ever to come out of Argentina Good: Just about everything about it is of the highest order, with some directorial flair that raised the hairs on the back of my neck Bad: Ultimately doesn’t quite satisfy, although it is possible that some key elements slipped between the cracks of translation Conclusion: Any film with so many top-notch elements deserves your attention
I saw four showings that curated short films and animations (mainly the latter), of which a few really stood out. I was particularly satisfied to see that digital technology now seems to be doing a brilliant job of getting out of the artist’s way and just helping them create something visually intriguing – for many of the shorts I couldn’t work out what animation technique had been used, which I consider to be a great thing.
Sarah Wickens’ “What Light (Through Yonder Window Breaks)”:
Animated in a way I’ve never seen before (actually the result of a combination of techniques elegantly disclosed in the credits at the end), watch this short extract and see if you can perceive the magic behind the movement:
David Lea and John Williams’ “Shadow Play”:
Shadow puppets combined with (what I presume must be) a digitally composed emulation of the multiplane camera creates a wonderful medium in which to tell a very silly story. You can watch the entire thing here, but from the way the site is designed I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to do so any more, so take a look now while you still can: http://www.passion-pictures.com/flash.html#page=d23&video=v2189
Bill Plymptom’s “the Cow who wanted to be a Hamburger”:
A weird, garish, jerky animation style and a purely orchestral soundtrack combine in a surprisingly wonderful way to tell a story with the energy and joy of a six-year-old
Teaser:
Joanna Lurie’s “Silence Beneath the Bark”:
A great example of how far CG has come since The Adventures of André and Wally B, approaching the aesthetics of natural collage. You can view a trailer and if you like what you see in the first few seconds I recommend you click to ‘view le filme entier’, which unsurprisingly enables you to see the full 11 minute animation (click the picture to start): http://www.joannalurie.com/
Marko Meštrović’s “No sleep won’t kill you”:
I can’t say I particularly understood or even enjoyed the experience of watching this, but it blew my mind in a way I won’t soon forget, and that’s something I like to experience. Watch the whole thing right here, if you can take it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbgxdIvXpo0
Jonas Odell’s “Tussilago”:
A variant on rotoscoping provides a distilled and and elegant way to present the harsh reality of finding yourself caught up in the kind of thing we usually only read about in the news.
[Update – Now fully available on Vimeo, see below! – Tim 8/1/16]
Angela Steffen’s “Lebensader”:
A wonderfully pure animated style, using digital tweening to achieve an amazingly smooth finish (I presume), which luckily enough you can view in its entirety right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-3anKZyOz0
Logan’s “A VOLTA”:
Blew my mind in a similar way to Tussilago: not very nice (certainly NSFW), hard on the eye and the brain, but fascinating, impactful, and dream/nightmare-like. You can watch the whole thing (or a few seconds if you just want to understand what I’m attempting to communicate) over at Boing Boing: http://boingboing.net/2009/06/09/bb-video-a-volta-fro.html
Finally, a couple of shorts I was very disappointed to find seem to be entirely absent from the world of internet video streaming:
Finally, Rainer Gamsjäger’s “State of Flux – wave #1”:
What looks like a continuous pan in one direction across a barrage while the water alternately flows forward and backward, which is of course impossible. Instills a strange trance as the brain struggles to comprehend both the impossibility and the beauty of what it is seeing. You can at least see some screenshots to get a rough idea of it, but there is no substitute for the moving image, so if you ever have an opportunity to see it then do so. Or just wait for it to pop up out of nowhere in 13 years time. http://rainergamsjaeger.com/?page_id=118
