Psychic children break out of an oppressive institution and run wild with their powers. What more could you want from a music video? Oh, how about some brilliant music, too?! Then here you go:
And the rest of M83′s album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is exceptional. It’s been the soundtrack to my last couple of weeks.
In the video, a great mood is struck between the visuals and the music itself. They could make a whole movie about these kids’ misadventures in ‘Midnight City’ through each consecutive single release. I’d watch them all, as I’m sure you might, too.
In other psychic kid news, Warner Bros. have just greenlit a live action Akira remake. With this, the above, and the recent exploits of the students of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, it’s interesting how popular culture keeps returning to the theme of outcast, yet highly talented students. What’s going on there?
Cinemetrics is the fascinating result of Frederic Brodbeck‘s bachelor graduation project at The Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands.
As 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.
Coming Soon: 3D computing. Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
image credit: http://goo.gl/98PXI
My claim is that 3D is the next step in object-oriented user interface (OOUI), which is the way most of us interact with computers after someone (at Apple, I think) had idea that we’d store ‘documents’ in ‘folders’ rather than access them via a command line. Ever since, we’ve been using ‘object-oriented’ analogies to interact with our machines.
Now is the age of 3D screen technologies, with Hollywood fighting back from piracy with a new golden age for cinema, Samsung outperforming Sony to becoming the number one manufacturer of 3D TVs, and the Nintendo 3DS making use of prismatic 3D in it’s menus, and of course in-game (think I might be buying Ocarina again soon). Not to mention Microsoft’s Kinect, which changes the way we interact in the three dimensions of physical, as opposed to virtual space.
But before all of this, there were innovators trying to make 3D compliant with everyday use, such as TATMobile who, without the power to print prismatic screens, force a behaviour change through the use of 3D glasses, or sell expensive stereoscopic 3D projectors, had come up with a pretty cool lo-fi solution:
The video above demonstrates the use of a front-facing camera on one’s mobile phone to track the location of your eyes, augmenting what’s onscreen, allowing you to see ‘behind’ icons or onto different screens by peering around. Hopefully you can imagine how a 3D screen might alter the way you interact with your device, so it’s no wonder they were bought by RIM and are now developing UI for BlackBerry.
While we’re at it, also check out the work of Bumptop (sadly now defunct), Johnny Lee‘s Wii hacks, and even YouTube‘s foray into 3D video.
Another lo-fi solution to making 3D useful comes from Mozilla, outlined in this fascinating article. Their technology, called Tilt, is not a way to physically see in 3D (it’s just software at this point), but certainly nods towards the future 3D stereoscopy web content. You can test Mozilla’s Tilt plugin in Firefox with their beta plugin at that link, but here’s a demo:
All we need now is for computer, laptop, tablet & mobile screens to become 3D-enabled, and for vast swathes of web designers to optimise their sites for WebGL, and suddenly those social buttons become a bit more clickable.
I’m talking about the principle that when things appear, or intend to appear as visibly human as possible they often can’t jump the gap in one’s perceptions, thereby freaking the living crikey out of an observer.
Take some time to digest the diagram above, and then hit up the video below to see what I mean. My suspicion is that, yeah, they’ve just about played it safe, but the characters in the film will feel less familiar than they did in the comics, or even the cartoon series.
For more on the Uncanny Valley, check out my post on Branded Robotics, where a leading scientist gives me his thoughts on what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully, the Tintin creators have done their research too.
As 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.
