Tower 37 siphons every drop of water from a once-pristine lake, that is, until the station’s steward realizes that it is slowly destroying an entire ecosystem.
The Incident at Tower 37 (2009) is a ten-minute HD animated film, written and directed by Chris Perry and produced within the collaborative animation curriculum at Hampshire College.
Yearly Archives: 2011
Influencers
Video
INFLUENCERS is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.
The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.
Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today’s pop culture.
“Influencers” belongs to the new generation of short films, webdocs, which combine the documentary style and the online experience.
One Shot
Video
Starring Jayson Floyd and Eliza Dushku, and featuring the stunts of Action Factory.
And don’t miss the behind the scenes video!
Clone
Video
A man hangs off the edge of skyscraper far above a future city.
His clone pursues him with a single purpose; the vial of pure DNA essence which all clones are reliant on to preserve their life force. Should he hand over the vial or plunge to his death? Would you trust a clone of yourself with your life? Would you trust yourself…
Clone was shot in 4 hours on the rooftop of a London flat!
Arduino The Documentary
Video
Lazy Teenage Superheroes
Video
Tyler is your average awkward teenager just trying to get by like the rest of us. Until one day, he moves in with three unusual roommates – Mitchell, Calvin, and Richard all have extraordinary, super human abilities. Although Tyler still has one thing they don’t have: ambition. Lazy Teenage Superheroes follows Ty as he tries to get his new “super” friends to put down the video games, get off the couch, and use their powers to help save the world, instead of themselves.
Flawed typefaces
Optimo Didot the Elder compared to Linotype Didot.
What constitutes a flawed typeface? For this article it is defined as a typeface that is perfectly fine—except for one nagging aspect, usually a single character. A flawed typeface is one that either you avoid using entirely because of this lone defect; or one that you use sparingly—and only then, after some alteration of either your design or the face itself to ameliorate the “flaw”. Flawed typefaces are not bad or even mediocre. The whole premise here is that they are good, perhaps even classic or wildly popular. And yet there is a single character that ruins them or, at the very least, causes one to pause before specing them.
Beyond Black Mesa
Video
Beyond Black Mesa is a short Independent fan film Inspired by the Half-Life Video Game series. This is an action packed short film centering around Adrian Shephard and a band of resistance fighters struggling to get out a warning about the impending invasion.
One camera, seven friends, $1,200 and two years in the making.
The United Kingdom explained as a Venn diagram
Image
Eureka magazine
The second issue of Eureka — a new science supplement to The Times — is out and it’s looking like a design classic in the making. Matt Curtis (art direction), Matt Swift (information graphics), and David Loewe (design) comprise the design team for the new publication. Going to have to track down a copy for myself.
Browse the full issue here
Search Engine Deoptimization
The blog Live at the Witch Trials proposes a method for harming the search engine rankings of any companies you feel may be deserving. To abbreviate:
- Look through your target websites terms and conditions to find a clause that prohibits linking. Ryanair’s site has the following T&C:
“Links to this website. You may not establish and/or operate links to this website without the prior written consent of Ryanair. Such consent may be withdrawn at any time at Ryanair’s own discretion.” - Search for all the websites that do link to them anyway.
- Find contact information for those sites and send them strongly worded cease and desist notices that look official, but make no false claims.
This should have a pretty big impact on how important search engines feel your targets site is, and they’ll soon start to drop in the rankings accordingly.
Fun!
A Posterous SEO issue you should probably be aware of
Posterous places nonremovable canonical URL tags on its posts. That tells the search engine to assign all the “link juice” to the Posterous-hosted page no matter where else the content may exist.
I do not want the Posterous version of the document to be the official URL for much of my content.
(via Why I’m dropping Posterous this weekend – forums.posterous.com)
I hadn’t spotted this, but I’m glad I know now.
This could be a problem for you if you duplicate your own content on a Posterous blog, but you don’t want Posterous to be the main home for that content. It is very likely that your Posterous blog will rank higher than the other place, whether you want it to or not.
In truth, it’s probably not an issue for most users. Better to know and not care than to care and not know.
Further reading: Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes – mattcutts.com
Buttons and dials: Inside a working Russian nuclear power plant
Gallery
This gallery contains 10 photos.
Well, here’s the thing, as Christopher Mims at Technology Review brilliantly points out: touch is a powerful, powerful thing. And not the sterile, featureless version that passes for “touch” on your iPad. I’m talking about the physical, primal, ultra-high-res sensorium … Continue reading
Cardiff Comic Expo: My first convention
Yesterday was the first Cardiff International Comic Expo, the first comic convention I’ve ever attended. I had a great time, saw some cool stuff and spent a little more than I expected!
Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights for me… Continue reading
A minimal dark wallpaper for the 11″ MacBook Air
Gallery
This gallery contains 2 photos.
This has been the wallpaper on my 11″ MacBook Air for a few months now. I didn’t make it any larger than the 1366×768 screen. Although there’s not much to it, the other minimal wallpapers I shared on this site … Continue reading
Cardiff Arcades Project
These wonderful pictures are from the new Cardiff Arcades Project by Amy Davies. I particularly love the wide-angle architectural shots.
The blog has also inadvertently kicked off a bit of an investigation into the claims that John Lewis is enjoying a 20-year rent free grace period. According to Amy, their PR representatives have denied this and are issuing a press release tomorrow. If there’s any truth to the rumour at all, it will be big news.
Replacing the “N-word” with “Robot” in Huck Fin
Update 2011.12.31: WordPress.com don’t support KickStarter video embeds, so you have to click through to see the video.
If this isn’t the best Kickstarter idea yet, it’s almost certainly the funniest Kickstarter video!
QRobots: A QR code alternative with personality
QR Codes are a great idea but they are big and ugly. You can customise them to a degree, but they still lack personality. For example, here are some I made to print as Moo stickers:
There is also the Microsoft tag, but that looks even worse.
I wonder if it would be possible to create another type of code that works in the same way, but instead of generating a random checkerboard pattern, it created some kind of face. I’ve quickly drawn up two examples of what these could look like (at the top), but I imagine a much more detailed/abstract look would be required to accommodate the amount of information they would need to contain.
Google’s Jules Verne doodle: The whole picture
The novelty value of the Google Doodles is starting to wear thin. What used to be an amusing quirk of the company has now become a regular occurrence. It’s interesting to look at the kind of topics they choose to give the doodle treatment too: Nothing overtly religious (not even Christmas) and nothing likely to be at all controversial, but it’s fine to promote Scooby Doo or run a weeks worth of Sesame Street doodles.
Still, they do some good stuff, and today’s interactive 20,000 Leagues themed Jules Verne doodle is particularly nice. It’s also fantastic that they use web native technologies, and don’t just slap up some Flash movie. The geekier doodles are brilliant too, especially the Pac-Man one, if only because of the chaos it caused.
The above picture is not entirely accurate because I didn’t edit too much to account for the parallax effect. And here is the image sprite that makes up the frame:
Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’
When Darren Aronofsky was 13-years-old, he won a United Nations poetry competition at his Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn school for a poem about the end of the world as seen through the eyes of Noah. And so started Aronofsky’s obsession with the biblical figure. In September 2008 we talked to Aronofsky about his idea for a film based on Noah:
“It’s the end of the world and it’s the second most famous ship after the Titanic. So I’m not sure why any studio won’t want to make it,” said Aronofsky. “I think it’s really timely because it’s about environmental apocalypse which is the biggest theme, for me, right now for what’s going on on this planet. So I think it’s got these big, big themes that connect with us. Noah was the first environmentalist. He’s a really interesting character. Hopefully they’ll let me make it.”
Aronofsky has later revealed that they have a script and even a “big name” actor attached to the project, but that isn’t enough to get the studios interested.
First Look: Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Noah’ – via slashfilm.com
Sounds like a Kickstarter project to me! I wonder if that model could be scaled up to support $100million+ feature film budgets? Then we’d finally be able to see if people really do just want to see mindless action movies and romantic comedies…
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