Archive for January, 2009
timelapse : does it ever get boring?
I can watch timelapse after timelapse and never ever get tired of them.
A fella made this one on a flight from Amsterdam and it’s a good one:
The Wilhelm Scream
Heard of it?
I hadn’t until my pal, Lars, turned me onto it and next thing I knew I was combing the Web, looking for as many stories about it as I could.
Turns out, this scream sound effect has been used as a bit of a tribute in more films than you can shake a stick at.
Once you’re familiar with the Wilhelm Scream, you’ll be hearing it all over the place:
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Feel-Good Commercials Don’t Suck as Hard
Commercials have a way of kicking the authenticity out of our ability to be spontaneous.
People do things “spontaneously” now, more than ever, for Facebook or whatever social-networking site they subscribe to, which can be a drag but if it gets us off our butts and back into a playful, whimsical state-of-mind, it sure can’t hurt.
Case in point, T-Mobile’s new commercial shot in Penn Station. There may be hope yet for the art of the commercial – if it makes us smile or laugh – where there’s laughter there’s hope indeed:
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Farewell #6, you are a free man
We knew him, we loved him and, especially with a remake of The Prisoner in development, we will miss him.
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Necessity and Invention = Peas and Carrots
Yet another great example and sniff at the trail of a very elusive thing: discovery and innovation.
After all, it only took us how many thousands of years to think of all sorts of simple things that R U L E ?
We make these tremendous breakthroughs and stand there and wonder, “How come it took me so long to realize this has been staring me in the face for how long?”
One definition of industrial design is: a methodical way of solving problems with well-conceived products. Sometimes this process happens outside of the design world limelight, by people who have never taken a single Production Methods class or set foot in an ID studio.
Canadian pig farmer Mary Haugh had a problem; multiple heart attacks put her husband out of commission, and she alone had to somehow control and herd their 3,000 hogs through the barn. Traditional methods of getting pigs to move are to use a stick, an electric prod or a “chase board,” a length of wood the farmer wields horizontally to angle the pigs in a particular direction.
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Voice Rec is here [almost]
My tech-minded pals and I have used all the mediocre voice-recognition solutions out there for years and years, waiting patiently for some genuis to put it all together for the first time.
Welp, no one I know has actually used Dictate for the Mac, but demos like these are pretty compelling:
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They sure didn’t walk very far…
Last weekend, I watched In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary put together by Ron Howard about the Apollo missions to the Moon.
Like a lot of us, I’ve always been extremely curious about all of these things and in my searching for more and more details, I found the pic below [click on it to see it larger] – those fellas sure didn’t go wandering off into the Earthlight too far while they were there…
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