Interview and longer clip at Africa is a country.

(link)

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

So I’ve been gathering information on animation techniques. One of the things that I need to animate in an upcoming project is bird silhouettes. So I do a bit of searching for existing animations, tutorials, etc… What do I find? My favorite thing ever (right now).

I sure hope this sort of thing can continue.

This, from the overly-scented mall store Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2007 Back to School Line:

Or this, from designer Vanessa Bruno’s Spring 2010 line?

And which is actually more appealing?

Discuss.

The House That Jack Built from William J. Meyer on Vimeo.

Not much in my life had as much as an effect on me as Calvin and Hobbes did. I still have a distinct memory of being asking in class to name a type of mammal and I said “human”, I was 8 at the time, and the whole class laughed at me. I didn’t know why they laughed at the time and to this day I still don’t understand. I think maybe I connected more with Calvin than I did with my peers. A child who has too much knowledge and not enough social skills to understand how that might cause problems. In other words, this:

This is a fascinating and brilliant project unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The concept of spatially complex video paintings intrigues me, and I have a feeling they will be a important part of contemporary art in our science fiction future thats coming. Click on the picture to jump to the site and watch the video.

How its used :

When he asked us to work with him on Civilization, a vision he had of taking hundreds of stock footage, movie footage and original clips and combining them to create a moving landscape depicting the ascension from hell to heaven, we knew that it was going to be huge challenge but one we were very excited about.

The project had two huge challenges. Firstly we needed to figure out how to create content that could move with the elevator where it would ultimately be viewed. The idea was this, when you go up in the elevator the content goes down and when you go down it goes up. Not unlike a ride film this project was designed to be synced to the moving environment of the hotel elevators in New York. We wanted to synchronize the footage to the movement of the elevator as best as we could.

As /rupture admits, “Auto-Tune is culturally complicated”. Some of us may have heard of Shawn Corey Carter’s hate on Auto-Tune, but frankly, J.Z. hasn’t released worthy of a close listen (actually J.Z. only appears on The Jaz records, so the prior should actually read Jay-Z) – not to say that certain Clark Kent, Premier, 9th Wonder, The 45 King’s Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem) and the Kev Brown Brown Album productions on Jay-Z’s albums aren’t not worth a listen – since the In My Lifetime/Can’t Get Wit Dat 12″ (1994). Orignal rap? A Rockafella neva sellin’ out, eh?:

Now, although the cleanliness, glory and occasional uplifting moments of Empire State of Mind is far from Nas’ Queensbridge project-born, dark realist masterpiece NY State of Mind – all Jay-Z’ll prolly do is squeal – and I do not necessarily disagree with Mr. Carter and Ms. Keys possible belief that New York is perhaps the city where dreams are made of, but I will judge both by the content of their character, as New Jacks masturbating on their wealth made in a culture industry that has exploited the creative potential of hip-hop as an artistic expression and emptied it of any artistic expression. Hip-hop lives, but Jay-Z has nothing to do with it: it is moving in directions founded on intelligent, creative, poetic expression, militant politics and a universal self-empowerment of the poor, and MPC, electronic and turntable experimentalism: misogyny, capital and social inequalities are and have always been its primary targets. From the looks of the Empire State of Mind, it seems Mr. Carter takes pride in becoming a billboard for MacDo, NYPD security cameras, pharmaceutical companies, Hershey’s, T.G.I. Fridays, the Nets, Knicks and Yankees…and that poverty no longer exists in Brooklyn or elsewhere around the Metropolis. Thanks Jay-Z! There is nothing you can’t do! If I move to New York for graduate school at least I’ll know that I can play out my fantasies there! Or at least I can play out my fantasies in fantasizing about that Empire elsewhere!

My criticism is not necessarily of Jay-Z, the man, as, since Proust, at least, one should not confuse the art with the artist. I find a strange joy whenever Canibus, Chino XL, Ras Kass and other battle rappers toss their (often violent) criticisms at Mr. Carter’s work. Nevertheless, how quickly one forgets how apparent is the robbery in Jay-Z’s lyricism, the sonority of which is nothing but a New Jack version of the machine-gun, stutter-stop-go lyricism of Das EFX, the only difference being that Skoob (bookS) and Krayzy Drayzy brought the style straight from the sewer and never came out. :

More can be learned here