Sundance Channel

Re-creating a BACK TO THE FUTURE scene for BACK TO THE FUTURE II

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:17:29 +0000

This is great: Someone has done a side-by-side comparison of two identical scenes in the first two BACK TO THE FUTURE movies. As I Want Stuff explains, In the years between Back to the Future and Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox visibly aged and the actress playing his girlfriend was replaced by [...]

Great public-art project: Repairing bomb damage with Legos

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:09:10 +0000

For a project he calls Dispatchwork, the German artist Jan Vormann has traveled to Israel, Italy, and Berlin to plug wartime bomb damage with… Legos. As Vormann told Wired UK, “Essentially what I love is the contrasts they deliver: Artificial against natural; colourful, shiny and perfectly shaped against matte, grey and organic.” See more images [...]

What it looks like to go really fast

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:33:44 +0000

Jason Kottke has a great post that compiles a bunch of videos of people and things going exceptionally fast, including BASE jumpers in wingsuits, a French TGV train, and two skateboarders on powder-blue suits, below: Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo. [more at kottke.org.]

Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen, 1986

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:55:05 +0000

In this 26-minute mini-documentary from 1986, the great French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen. This is from the days when Allen was still making important, hilarious movies, so it’s well worth watching. Meetin’ WA (1986)by Tomsutpen [via Khoi Vinh.]

MIT’s Sixth Sense, a wearable interface straight out of MINORITY REPORT

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:54:54 +0000

On his excellent blog, the user-experience expert Nick Finck shares a TED video demonstration of Sixth Sense, a wearable gestural interface that grabs data from the Internet and allows you to interact with it in countless real-world ways. You can draw a watch onto your arm to check the time; pull up Amazon ratings for [...]

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, electronica-style

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:25:00 +0000

The YouTube user Fagottron is a hugely talented musician and video editor who’s been putting out amazing rhythmic edits of classic-film footage and putting a dance beat underneath them. His latest is the one below, based on the original CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. It’s not quite as good as the incredible MARY POPPINS edit [...]

Visualizing Twitter

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:33:22 +0000

Mashable, the blog about social media, has compiled a list of cool Twitter visualizations. Below is a video example of Just Landed, a geo-visualization of tweets containing the words “Just landed in…” As Mashable explains, “It finds the tweets containing the phrase, checks for the location they¹ve landed in, and the location they were sent [...]

Stop-motion Post-Its

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:14:22 +0000

The great stop-motion video below was the senior project of a Savannah College of Art and Design student named Bang-yao Liu. The music is by one of my favorite groups, the Norwegian electronica duo Royksopp:

Century-old color photography from Russia

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:36:02 +0000

The blog Socyberty has collected a bunch of amazingly vibrant century-old photos by a Russian photographer named Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. “With the blessing — and funding — of the Tsar, Nicholas II,” Socyberty writes, “[Prokudin-Gorsky] embarked on an extraordinary journey to capture the essence of Russia in full color photographs. Many of these pictures look [...]

A rare glimpse of Stephen Colbert out of character

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:27:51 +0000

Josh Marshall of the great Talking Points Memo just posted this excellent behind-the-scenes video, which was filmed as he accompanied John Kerry to a taping of The Colbert Report in April 2007. As Josh points out, it’s a rare and fascinating thing to see Colbert break character, because he almost never does:

Street criminals foiled by Google Street View

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:25:13 +0000

When two crooks in the Dutch town of Groningen decided to separate a teenager from his bicycle last September, they had the misfortune to do it when a Google Street View car was passing by. The Sydney Morning Herald has a great slide show of the moments before the theft. The images allowed the police [...]

Trailer: Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White in IT MIGHT GET LOUD

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:27:44 +0000

Scheduled for release on August 14, IT MIGHT GET LOUD chronicles a showdown among three generations of guitar heroes: Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White. As a onetime guitar-hero-worshipping adolescent, I can’t wait to see this.

Bike tricks from 1899, filmed by Thomas Edison

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:01:47 +0000

At the tail end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Thomas Edison filmed men doing bike tricks that seem surprisingly contemporary today. The description of this film at the Library of Congress reads: “‘Neidert,’ of national fame, does stunts on his wheel that are simply wonderful. Makes his bicycle rear up, [...]

Was 30 Rock inspired by The Muppet Show?

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:00:15 +0000

In a surprisingly convincing analysis, blogger Brian Lynch points out a number of major structural parallels between 30 Rock and The Muppet Show. The similarities are so great that they almost seem like they were intentional–however unlikely that might be. Liz Lemon is Kermit, Jenna Maroney is Miss Piggy, Kenneth is Scooter, and so forth. [...]

Rare footage of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:00:18 +0000

At archive.org, the online home of The Prelinger Archives, you can watch hundreds of so-called ephemeral films: advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur movies that were never intended to have a long shelf life. Rick Prelinger, the founder of the archive, has spent much of the last three decades rescuing these amazing artifacts, many of which [...]

The amazing app wall at Apple’s WWDC

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:00:03 +0000

At this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple announced the new iPhone models, among other things, a big array of monitors displayed an “app wall”–a giant matrix of iPhone app icons that pulse when they’re downloaded from the App Store. The effect is monumental and hypnotic. Visit AppleInsider for video of what the app wall [...]

The “T” is for totalitarian

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:30:59 +0000

Webnewser’s Hunter Walker made an interesting find: North Korea’s repressive regime is apparently selling T-shirts and other kitschy propaganda through Cafepress, the online custom gift store. Promoted on the official website of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the store features stylish offerings like this one: More at Webnewser. [via Gawker.]

Character’s-eye view: Classic follow shots

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:30:25 +0000

For the website of the Brooklyn-based publication The L Magazine, the film critic Matt Zoller Seitz assembled a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment,” as he writes in his introductory essay. “I love this shot,” he explains, [...]

These business cards are cooler than yours

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:30:28 +0000

Did you know that there’s an entire blog devoted to business-card design? Of course there is. What isn’t there a blog for? But Card Observer is particularly great: It’s a repository for tiny graphic-design masterpieces in a wide range of styles and materials. Business cards have little room for extraneous information, so they’re a perfect [...]

Why bad design often wins out over good design

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:31:34 +0000

Fast Company's Cliff Kuang has a great post about Dustin Curtis, a web designer who was so appalled by his experiences with the American Airlines website that he redesigned it and posted it online as an open letter to the company.

Check out Curtis's take on the American Airlines site...

The book industry’s slow farewell

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:00:14 +0000

In an excellent long essay in The Nation entitled “The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and its Woes,” the legendary editor Elisabeth Sifton writes about the decline of the book industry from her perspective as a towering figure in the literary world over the last several decades. Sifton has edited dozens of books you’ve either [...]

White conservatives can’t rap

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:45:45 +0000

A couple of young conservatives put together this rap video to “promote constructive debate and tolerance”: [via Talking Points Memo.]

Trailer: What would you do to reverse the aging process?

Andrew Hearst — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:45:21 +0000

In YOUTH KNOWS NO PAIN, her upcoming semiautobiographical documentary, my friend Mitch McCabe takes a funny and highly personal look at the anti-aging industry. The film is populated by a number of odd, obsessive characters, including a plastic-surgery-obsessed housewife from Texas and guy in late middle age who, with the help of scalpels and a [...]

An inside look at an IMAX camera

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:30:01 +0000

Mark Wilson of Gizmodo was given a rare tour of the IMAX offices, and he’s posted an in-depth, image-filled post about IMAX cameras and how they work. There are only 26 IMAX cameras in the world. Here’s one of them: Much more here.

Amazing fan-made trailer for imaginary GREEN LANTERN movie

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:08:48 +0000

This is excellent: It’s a fake trailer for a nonexistent (but wished-for) GREEN LANTERN movie starring the Serenity and Dr. Horrible actor (and geek fave) Nathan Fillion. YouTube user jaronpitts grabbed footage from a wide range of contemporary and classic science-fiction films, including PLANET OF THE APES, SERENITY, GALAXY QUEST, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD [...]

Short film: Your life in 42 seconds

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:40:37 +0000

This lovely short, LAST DAY DREAM, takes 42 seconds to explore one man’s entire life through his own eyes. The film was written and directed by Chris Milk for the 42 Second Dream Film Festival in Beijing. Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo. Full credits are on the Vimeo page. [via Daring [...]

2001‘s monolith in VHS format–literally

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:44:43 +0000

Cue Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”: Using Styrofoam, Plexiglas, and latex paint, the artist David Herbert created this monolithic tribute to the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. It appeared (or is appearing?) at the Saatchi Gallery in London. If I were rich and had a gigantic apartment, I would totally buy this. [via Looker.]

Amazing Tokyo time-lapse

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:25:30 +0000

In this gorgeous ad for the watch company Citizen, buildings implode and explode, lights dance in complex arrays, and shadows engulf entire parks. The ad was created by the Japanese agency WOW for a watch- and jewelry-industry trade show called Baselworld.

Font-clone wars

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:01:18 +0000

This one’s for the typography nerds: In a follow-up to last year’s excellent short “Font Conference,” the loopy gang at College Humor gives us “Font Fight!,” a violence-filled showdown between two typeface gangs–one led by Helvetica, the other by Helvetica’s “shameless impostor,” Arial. The ending features a surprise cameo by perhaps the most evil font [...]

A peek inside nytimes.com’s research and development lab

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:08:29 +0000

A guy from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab paid a visit recently to the R&D studio at The New York Times, where the paper’s “design integration editor,” Nick Bilton, gave a demonstration of all sorts of cool future-of-media technologies, including electronic ink, flexible screens, and highly customizable newspaper apps built on the Adobe Air platform. Nick [...]

DIRTY DANCING, David Lynch style

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:55:09 +0000

In the spirit of this month’s Sundance Channel spotlight, here’s one of the better movie mashups I’ve seen recently: a DIRTY DANCING trailer edited in the style of David Lynch. Pretty excellent:

The English language as a first-person shooter game

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:14:22 +0000

Check out this amazing ad for Inlingua, an international language-training company. It's a spot for the company's Business English service, and it presents the English language as a literal battlefield. This is some of the best motion typography I've ever seen:

Social TV: Watch online with your Facebook and MySpace pals

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:44:52 +0000

Mashable, the site devoted to coverage of the social-media industry, posted a cool report about SplashCast, a widget that adds revolutionary commenting capabilities to offerings from Hulu and other online video providers. It's easy to add a comment to the discussion thread on, say, a YouTube page, but SplashCast, or "Social TV," as they call it, is different.

Trailer: Meryl Streep as Julia Child

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:57:31 +0000

Via the excellent cooking site Simply Recipes, here’s the trailer for JULIE AND JULIA, Nora Ephron’s upcoming film based on Julie Powell’s book by the same name. Subtitled “My Year of Cooking Dangerously” and inspired by a blog she maintained during the project, the book was Powell’s memoir of reinventing her life by cooking every [...]

David Hockney’s iPhone paintings

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:07:08 +0000

The Daily Mail tells of how the celebrated artist David Hockney has been creating mini-paintings on his iPhone and emailing them to friends. Pretty tech-savvy for a 71-year-old: [via TUAW]

Van Halen’s iconic logo was almost not so iconic

Andrew Hearst — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:30:54 +0000

As Idolator reports, someone on Ebay is selling the original cover proof for Van Halen’s eponymous 1978 debut album. Compared to the actual cover, which introduced one of the truly iconic rock-band logos, this discarded version is underwhelming indeed:

Jazz history in iTunes U

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:05:20 +0000

I’ve been using the iTunes Music Store pretty much since the day it launched, but I’ve never really spent any time poking around iTunes U, the section of the store devoted to podcasts, videotaped lectures, and other content from universities, museums, and similar institutions. Participants include the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the [...]

President Obama, furniture mover

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:19:19 +0000

There are lots of great images in the just-posted Flickr set by White House photographer Pete Souza, but this is my favorite: In preparation for a meeting about the economic recovery plan, President Obama and Vermont governor Jim Douglas shift a couch in the Oval Office. The set is filled with lots of casual, revealing [...]

Bob Dylan, Blondie and Radiohead, Modernist-style

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:46:41 +0000

In a similar vein to the vintage book cover mashups posted here last month, an Australian designer has created a series of Modernist reimaginings of classic album covers by Depeche Mode, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, and others. They’re excellent. Here’s R.E.M.’s: [via Jason Kottke]

Product-placement pioneers: the hair-metal band Autograph

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:17:36 +0000

Jon Fine of BusinessWeek has a great post about one of the earliest-known examples of product placement in a music video: the pen company Paper Mate’s sponsorship of Autograph’s 1984 video for “Turn Up the Radio”: Yes, this actually happened: In 1984 Paper Mate found an unknown poodle-rock band called Autograph, gave ‘em some bucks, [...]

Newt Gingrich and Joe Biden channel T-Pain

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:18:29 +0000

For this video, some excellent goofballs ran a bunch of news clips through Auto-Tune, T-Pain-style, and the results are hilarious: Part two is no less comedy gold: [via Boing Boing.]

Garry Trudeau on “journotwits”

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:47:51 +0000

Mediabistro’s Webnewser blog has an exclusive interview with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau about the media world’s obsession with Twitter. Trudeau, who generally thinks the microblogging service is a useless time-suck, devoted a recent series of strips to the Twitter experiments of the hapless journalist Roland Hedley. Here’s what Trudeau has to say about real-life tweeting [...]

John Lithgow reads a previously unpublished essay by Mark Twain

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:26:25 +0000

In this video for Who Is Mark Twain?, a new HarperStudio collection of previously unpublished Twain essays, John Lithgow reads a short excerpt over lovely animations by Flash Rosenberg: Who is Mark Twain? from Flash Rosenberg on Vimeo.

What’s the Matter With Kansas is now a film

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:01:16 +0000

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas was one of the smartest and most provocative books to appear during the George W. Bush presidency. Kansas, the author’s home state, tended to vote Democratic until a few decades ago, when Republican strategists started figuring out how to exploit social issues for electoral gain. According to Frank, [...]

A vintage ad campaign for the Dharma Initiative

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:50:51 +0000

Flickr user Hot Meteor recently made a series of brilliant faux-vintage print ads for the Dharma Initiative, the shadowy, mysterious organization whose activities are central to the plot of Lost. Here’s one of the best: Click through for a larger version (with readable text). [via Jason Kottke.] By the way, if you’re a fan of [...]

You won’t find these records in Guinness

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:19:07 +0000

Calling itself “the definitive site for human achievement,” The Universal Record Database is a droll and very funny repository for video of record-setting feats like “Most Times Unzipping Pants in 30 Seconds” to “Most American Quarters Fit Inside a Belly Button” and “Most Nose Flares in One Minute.” The best intro to URDB’s deadpan shenanigans [...]

Addled Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t know what you’re talking about

Andrew Hearst — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:33:56 +0000

Actor and part-time musician Billy Bob Thornton appeared on the Canadian radio show Studio Q last Wednesday morning to promote the latest album by his band, the Boxmasters. But he wasn’t in the mood to speak in complete sentences, let alone promote anything–and the result was this, the best celebrity meltdown video since Joaquin Phoenix [...]

Duncan Jones’s indie MOON looks like excellent sci-fi

Andrew Hearst — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:13:05 +0000

The movie site firstshowing.net has the excellent new trailer for MOON, an indie sci-fi film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and hits theaters, in limited release, on June 12. Starring Sam Rockwell as a solitary astronaut preparing to head home after a three-year stint on the moon, the film appears to be a [...]

Siftables: artificially intelligent toys

Andrew Hearst — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:38:35 +0000

In this excellent short TED talk, an MIT grad student named David Merrill demonstrates the capabilities of Siftables, biscuit-size toy blocks that interact with each other using complex sensors. Siftables can be used to solve math problems, generate electronic music, create art, and tell stories: The technology used in Siftables is interesting on its own [...]

Salvaging the reputation of Howard the Duck (the comic book, not the film)

Andrew Hearst — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:30:45 +0000