skandalon

technology art design movie film computer pixels

✖ Via I Am Paddy: “4 Pixels or Less” by Paddy Donnelly

About the project:

“Well, feeling inundated with the amount of fonts, brushes, images, patterns, gradients, drop shadows and copy I generally squeeze into each day, I set myself a little minimalistic design challenge. The challenge : represent a range of movies in 4 pixels or less.” (more)

About Paddy Donnelly:

“Anyway, I am an Irish web designer, blogger, interviewer and illustrator currently living in Belgium. My official title over at Nascom is somewhere between ‘user experience designer’ and ‘information architect’. I’m a big fan of my own little mini projects and I generally spend way too much time on the Internet. I learned most of what I know from my degree in Interactive Multimedia Design, my Masters in Multi-Disciplinary Design and Wikipedia.” (more)

↳Share Mar 09 link notes technology art design movie film computer pixels

art design movie film credit title still font typeface

✖ Via

idsgn (a design blog) – Now and then: How film titles have evolved

“Before the cinematic title sequences of today’s films, pioneered by the likes of Saul Bass and (more recently) Kyle Cooper, film titles were once a motionless work of art. In this ‘Now and then,’ we are pressing pause and exploring the art behind the film title.

Since the early days of cinema, artists have carefully designed film titles to captivate audiences and set the film’s mood. To bring attention to this often overlooked art form, Dutch graphic designer (and movie lover) Christian Annyas has put together The Movie Title Stills Collection. The website collects and neatly organizes film titles by decade, from the 1920’s to present. To illustrate how film titles have evolved over the years, we’ve chosen some of our favorites from the collection.”

↳Share Mar 07 link notes art design movie film credit title still font typeface

art communication hoax media news journalism america television documentary film movie filmmaker

✖ Via Abel Raises Cain, Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett, 2004

About:

“ABEL RAISES CAIN is an unprecedented glimpse into the life and bizarre career of infamous underground media prankster, Alan Abel. Over the past half-century, Abel has made a name for himself several times over with stunts that are just ridiculous enough to be believable, especially to a media that feeds on salacious, far-fetched stories. Alan’s daughter, Jenny, tells her firsthand account of what it was like growing up with this lovable but slightly demented prankster for a father.”

Watch the trailer. Learn more on Wikipedia.

↳Share link notes art communication hoax media news journalism America television documentary film movie filmmaker

✖ Via Diabologum: musical arrangement for an excerpt of Jean Eustache’s film La Maman et la putain (1973)

About Diabologum:

“Diabologum is a french band from the 90’s, they released 3 LP’s and several Ep’s between 1993 and 1998. Their 3 albums were radically different, the first one was an arty lofi collage of sounds and songs, the second was a collection of Rock-pop song, the third was their manifesto: noise rock and cold hip hop. The band split in 1998, the last show was in NY Knitting factory. Today the members have other musical projects : Experience, Programme, Nonstop, Panti will, the Overnight Project, Kapla…”

↳Share Mar 01 notes art music film cinema movie BW boy girls love loneliness sex

The plea bargain is the moment when the case pivoted from the story of what Polanski did to Samantha Gailey to the story of what the system did to him. Polanski’s detractors focus on the first, his supporters on the second, but the two are interwined, and both were shaped by the influence of Polanski celebrity.

✖ Via The New Yorker: “The Celebrity Defense. Sax, fame and the case of Roman Polanski” by Jeffrey Toobin, Dec. 14, 2009, p. 57

Excellent article on the subject : Toobin makes an explicite effort to restrain himself to the presentation of hard (legal) facts.

Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer to The New Yorker. He is also “the author of five books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, which won the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize” (TNY). Check his official website.

↳Share Feb 26 link notes journalism celebrity film filmmaker law justice United-States culture sex girls

― I know it’s hard, Miles, but try to think of this experience as a miracle of science.
― A miracle of science is going to the hospital for a minor operation, I come out the next day, my rent isn’t months overdue. That’s a miracle of science. This is what I call a cosmic screwing. And then where am I anyhow? What happened to everybody? Where are all my friends?
― You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly two hundred years.
― BUT THEY ALL ATE ORGANIC RICE!

✖ Via Sleeper, Woody Allen, 1973

Full script available over at Script-O-Rama.

↳Share Feb 25 link notes art movie film filmmaker future science fiction food health life death past evolution

Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention,” says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans.

✖ Via New Scientist: “Solved: The mathematics of the Hollywood blockbuster” by Ewen Callaway, Feb. 18, 2010

Professional website of James Cutting, author of the study. Full PDF of the study (James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film” Psychological Science, XX(X) 1-8, published online on Feb 5, 2010).

Interesting study (it’s far from being the first scientific attempt at explaining box office success), VERY BAD TITLE from the New Scientist. Nothing was “solved”, for at least two reasons.

1) Some common aspects were observed in 150 movies, after the fact. Therefore, the study could have the value of a good but limited deduction. Its inductive and predictive potential still needs to be demonstrated.

2) More importantly, one won’t be able to find any satisfactory description of what a “blockbuster” is in this study. In fact, there isn’t any mention of the word “blockbuster” in it. Instead, one will notice a normative effort to classify a number a films according to a certain number of criteria :

“We chose 150 films, 10 released in each of 15 years, every 5 years from 1935 to 2005. The Supplemental Material available on-line provides the complete list. Assembled from information in several on-line databases, the films from 1980 onward were among the highest grossing of their year and the earlier films were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; http://us.imdb.com). The films were also chosen, as best we could, to represent five genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy, and drama— although their distribution could not be uniform because of vagaries in Hollywood production and changes in social milieu and viewers’ taste. Genres were defined by the first-designated category for each film on the IMDb.”

Same problem with the title Neatorama chose for the post they published about the story : “The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters”. But Neatorama is no weekley international science magazine…

↳Share Feb 21 link notes reblogged from AUSTIN KLEON : TUMBLR art communication film movie blockbuster science critic mathematic study identity

communication philosophy society logic movie film humor comic illustration illustrator

✖ Via XKCD: “Honor Societies”

Previously on Skandalon : XKCD

↳Share Feb 17 link notes communication philosophy society logic movie film humor comic illustration illustrator

PLAYBOY: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?
CAMERON: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals. I designed her costumes based on a taparrabo, a loincloth thing worn by Mayan Indians. We go to another planet in this movie, so it would be stupid if she ran around in a Brazilian thong or a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.

✖ Via Playboy : “James Cameron: Playboy Interview” by Stephen Rebello, Dec. 2010.

↳Share Feb 15 link notes filmmaker movie film girls sex humor

The problem with loners is that they’re never alone.

✖ Via Boy Meets Girl, Leos Carax, 1984

Watch the sequence here (quote @ 6:30). Read an article by The New York Times about this film.

↳Share Feb 11 link notes art film movie filmmaker lost loner loneliness BW