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Cinemetrics: Interactive Movie Infographics

By Tom Saunter on August 18, 2011 // design, film

Cinemetrics is the fascinating result of Frederic Brodbeck‘s bachelor graduation project at The Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands.

poster 3 | Cinemetrics: Interactive Movie Infographics | Digital CortexAs a graphic designer, Brodbeck is drawn to particular style details, but as a generative coder he’s interested in exploring the role for graphic design in analysing these same details.

He picked the medium of film as his ‘data-set’ and came up with something actually very unique: rather than analysing the meta-data around a film (i.e. from IMDB), he’s using movies themselves.

The project seeks to ‘fingerprint’ films (a bit like the recent moviebarcode site) and turn them into interactive models. The models can be manipulated to allow users to identify differences or trends in the graphics via a sexy looking interface, all of which he’s now open-sourced on GitHub.

Here’s a demo:

Brodbeck defines the project as “an experiment to find out if the data that is inherent in the movie can be used to make something visible that otherwise would remain unnoticed.” It’s a really interesting area for academic inquiry, one which he set out the following goals:

Measuring and visualizing movie data to reveal the characteristics of movies and to create some sort of unique “fingerprint” for them.

Extracting and analyzing information – such as the editing structure, use of colors, speech or motion – and transform them into graphic representations, so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily be interpreted or compared.

Working experimentally and presenting the work both in print and digital media.

A side effect is that the system he’s built is great at comparing films, so as to see differences between originals and remakes; within similar genres; among a string of sequels, similar filmmaking styles or certain directors.

What’s great is the system is actually useful. It’s an infographic engine for film-buffs, and we know how popular those are, don’t we?!

Frederick, I look forward to the sequel!

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I Give You My CSS3 Heart

By Tom Saunter on August 12, 2011 // design

I made this little heart shape with CSS3, which I’ve been playing around with lately as a way of rendering rounded corners in the latest version of Subscription Options. Turns out there’s loads you can do with CSS3!

Here’s the (admittedly complex) code that’s used to render the above:

#heart {
    height: 200px;
    position: relative;
    width: 400px;
}

#heart:before,
#heart:after {
position: absolute;
content: "";
left: 120px;
top: 0;
width: 120px;
height: 200px;
background: url("http://files.digitalcortex.net/images/header/rotate.php"); // this makes the colour the same as my header image - but could be any HTML colour instead
-moz-border-radius: 100px 100px 0 0;
border-radius: 100px 100px 0 0;
-webkit-transform: rotate(-45deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(-45deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(-45deg);
-o-transform: rotate(-45deg);
transform: rotate(-45deg);
-webkit-transform-origin: 0 100%;
-moz-transform-origin: 0 100%;
-ms-transform-origin: 0 100%;
-o-transform-origin: 0 100%;
transform-origin: 0 100%;
}

#heart:after {
left: 0;
-webkit-transform: rotate(45deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(45deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(45deg);
-o-transform: rotate(45deg);
transform: rotate(45deg);
-webkit-transform-origin: 100% 100%;
-moz-transform-origin: 100% 100%;
-ms-transform-origin: 100% 100%;
-o-transform-origin: 100% 100%;
transform-origin :100% 100%;
}

If you’re interested in playing around with CSS3 shapes like the above, loads of them are are available at CSS Tricks.

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Aside

A Better World, Through Typography

By Tom Saunter on August 8, 2011 // design

Try Helvetica: website that photoshops user-submitted images of Brazilian business signage, replacing hand-painted text with Helvetica, the classic font designed to make whatever it’s used with appear fresh and modern:

tumblr lctiaweMfy1qdtz0po1 500 | A Better World, Through Typography | Digital Cortex

tumblr l7tqhfG2RJ1qdtz0po1 500 | A Better World, Through Typography | Digital Cortex

tumblr lj5yoq1Sze1qdtz0po1 500 | A Better World, Through Typography | Digital Cortex

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Sun, Sand & Selective Laser Sintering

By Tom Saunter on June 27, 2011 // design

It’s the Summer. It’s an extremely hot day here in London, the hottest day of 2011, in fact. So it’s with just the tiniest stretch of the imagination that I could be right there in the desert watching Markus Kayser at work on his next great experiment.

He’s built his own solar-powered 3D printer out of a large panel of magnifying glass and a computer-guided motorised panel, the raw material being the desert’s primary natural resource: sand.

With his design, he is able to create a focused laser beam that melts sand, so that it cools and hardens in a design of his choosing. In effect, he is ‘growing’ his designs right out of the sand. It’s really, really impressive:

Markus describes the process on the project’s website:

Silicia sand when heated to melting point and allowed to cool solidifies as glass. This process of converting a powdery substance via a heating process into a solid form is known as sintering and has in recent years become a central process in design prototyping known as 3D printing or SLS (selective laser sintering).

These 3D printers use laser technology to create very precise 3D objects from a variety of powdered plastics, resins and metals – the objects being the exact physical counterparts of the computer-drawn 3D designs inputted by the designer.

By using the sun’s rays instead of a laser and sand instead of resins, I had the basis of an entirely new solar-powered machine and production process for making glass objects that taps into the abundant supplies of sun and sand to be found in the deserts of the world.

22 solarsiter014 530x353 | Sun, Sand & Selective Laser Sintering | Digital Cortex

Markus with his Solar Sinter

Sintering is a natural process, commonly occuring products being Fulgurites, which are glass tubes that form deep in the sand when lightning strikes in the desert. Each have a unique quality: colour; shape; consistency and location, which together with their ‘atmospheric origins’ they’ve become quite collectible artefacts.

My take is that Markus’s device will allow command over the sun to grow one’s own kind of ‘artisanal fulgurites’, quite a powerful idea, and undoubtedly a great use of technology that harnesses our most abundant natural resources in a really cool way. Nice one!

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Design Excellence in Tron Legacy

By Tom Saunter on April 27, 2011 // design, film

I watched Tron Legacy this weekend.
Awesome movie, if only for the following reasons:

  • The music
  • The aesthetics
  • Jeff Bridges
  • That’s it

Despite not having the greatest storyline or script, the film has still had quite a profound effect on me thanks to its frankly mind-blowing visual identity.

tron legacy1 300x187 | Design Excellence in Tron Legacy | Digital Cortex

As with most of the films I watch these days, I like to do a quick post-view scan of the web to consolidate my thinking around certain plot points, characters, or to brush up on production trivia.

This time, I hit up IMDB’s forums to read others’ views on Tron’s iconography, delved into some pretty weird fan pages, and researched the history of the crew – but in all of my post-view readings, I think I’ve found the major contributing factor towards why this film looks so damn good.

tron gfx br 01 | Design Excellence in Tron Legacy | Digital Cortex

This film looks so damn good, in my belief, due to Joshua T. Nimoy, a software artist who worked on the film’s procedural artwork and user interfaces, which add a thick and gooey layer of believability to both Encom’s software, and to Tron’s 3D environment.

He has this to say:

I made software art before there was Flash or Processing. Things have not grown easier or harder, they are simply different. I am not just a user of Adobe and 3D programs. I work in the source ideas from which those programs originate. If I need a new algorithm, I learn it from theories, ask one of my peers, hunt for reusable code, or invent my own way. My most contagious meme is BallDroppings. My most visible work is commercial. My artiest works have shown in serious galleries and museums.

So, here we have a guy who is just brilliant at design, working on some of the world’s coolest and most progressive brands, plus a shitload of other stuff, and who knows how to hack to achieve a great effect. Pretty much the perfect dude to lead the march at Digital Domain when they were asked to work on Tron Legacy.

Following clearance from Disney, Josh has published a fascinating piece on his site about his work on the film, which I’ve pulled some interesting thoughts from:

I spent a half year writing software art to generate special effects for Tron Legacy [...] in addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility.

TRON GFX BR 04 | Design Excellence in Tron Legacy | Digital Cortex

I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded “equations” is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo, The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and on and on).

I like this guy even more now – who hasn’t cringed at stuff like this?

TRON GFX BR 08 | Design Excellence in Tron Legacy | Digital Cortex

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that’s all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

Now, I don’t understand much of that last paragraph, but it’s cool to consider that there are people out there applying proper nerdery to their work, that 99.9% of people would totally miss. It just makes things better, doesn’t it?!

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