Ray Harryhausen: modern Prometheus

By admin | Published: May 10, 2013

Creative Review’s art dir­ector Paul Pensom, pays trib­ute and looks back at the career of spe­cial effects genius Ray Harryhausen ➝, who died at age 93 this week:

It was this that made Harryhausen a Modern Prometheus; this abil­ity to make us care, to breath a real spark of life into his pup­pets of clay, steel and rab­bit fur. Time and again when I rewatch Ray’s films, it’s the small things I notice. The way char­ac­ters shift their weight from foot to foot if they’ve been stand­ing a while; an absent minded scratch of the thigh; the brief, anti­cip­at­ory lick of the lips, as the Cyclops pre­pares his din­ner of spit-roasted sailor.

The skel­eton battle sequence of Jason and the Argonauts (1963) blew me away the first time I saw it, in the late eighties. Masterful anim­a­tion artist.

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Danny Yount Interview (Iron Man 3 Titles)

By admin | Published: May 7, 2013

Iron Man 3 TitlesArt of the Title has another great inter­view with the tal­en­ted Danny Yount apro­pos his titles for Iron Man 3. Yount is one of those motion design­ers that really undest­ands how to marry form to concept and “feel”.

Check the inter­view here ➝      Past inter­views here ➝

Update: The Iron Man 3 art­icle is off­line , for now, as @artofthetitle explained in a tweet:

Unfortunately we’ve been asked by @Marvel to put our “Iron Man 3″ art­icle on hold tem­por­ar­ily. Hope to resolve this quickly.

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À Bout de Souffle –Trailer

By admin | Published: April 3, 2013

Cool trailer for the 1960’s Jean-Luc Godard film with story by François Truffaut.

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Hipocrisy, Media and Politics

By admin | Published: November 16, 2012

Hypocrisy is a messy part of human life. In Politics and media it seems to mul­tiply. Great art­icle by David Simon (and its follow-up) on the hipo­crisy of news media deal­ing with polit­ical sexual scan­dals (triggered by the Petraeus scandal).

Hypocrisy will never go out of style in American journ­al­ism or American life. But sit­ting there and watch­ing the rewrite and sports desk mobil­ize to sur­round the sexual wan­der­ings of a sports­caster, I remem­ber mak­ing a decision: Enough. This is just sex. This is noth­ing more than the odd, not­able penis or the odd, not­able vagina stag­ger­ing off the marked path and rub­bing against the wrong tree. This is just people.

For those who don’t recall, David Simon is the cre­ator of the great tv series ‘The Wire’ and former journ­al­ist for the Baltimore Sun. (via John gruber at Daring Fireball)
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Shameless — Main Titles

By admin | Published: November 13, 2012

Great open­ing title sequence for Shameless (TV series, US ver­sion). Simple and extremely effect­ive por­trait of the show’s essence. A great example of how mov­ing pic­ture and sound (the song ‘The Luck you got’ by The High Strung is awesome,by the way) can match so per­fectly.
Not new but never got to post it before. Superb work by Sarofsky.

Update:
Meanwhile, Showtime net­work released new Shameless spots (with a fairytale vibe) in ante­cip­a­tion of sea­son 3:
— The Story of Shameless
— Fiona’s Fairytale Ending (Shameless Spot)
— Shamelessly Ever After: Fiona and Jimmy
— Shamelessly Ever After: Lip and Frank

On a side note: the new role for the drug lord char­ac­ter is per­formed by a por­tuguese actor whose first steps in ama­teur theatre I wit­nessed quite a while ago. Who would’ve thunk it?

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Apple’s Fusion Drive Performance

By admin | Published: November 10, 2012

Macworld tested the fusion drive (ssd flash drive + hard drive) in one of the new Mac mini mod­els. The res­ult: it’s about as fast as Phil Schiller said in the last Apple spe­cial event.

Besides the num­bers in Macworld’s art­icle, this video pos­ted by TechfastLunch&Dinner shows what that kind of speed and per­form­ance really feels like.

I also recom­mend read­ing Ars Technica’s art­icle on the sub­ject with a more detailed ana­lysis on how this “fusion” per­form­ance is achieved.

Although a few more months may be required to fully under­stand this technology’s per­form­ance in daily use, this is great news. And, not just for buy­ers of the fresh new edi­tions of the iMac or Mac mini, as Tumblr user Jollyjinx found out. It seems that one can recre­ate the Fusion Drive in older Macs (spe­cially on old Mac Pros with addi­tional hard drive bays) and ‘reju­ven­ate’ those machines quite a bit.

Right now, these res­ults were achieved using ter­minal com­mands, but I see how a soft­ware developer could cre­ate a util­ity to ease the pro­cess for less adven­tur­ous users. I would not recom­mend try­ing this on your work machine as all of this will become clearer in the com­ing months. Great prom­ise though.

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Angry Birds Star Wars — Gameplay Video

By admin | Published: October 29, 2012

Rovio released the first game­play video of Angry Birds Star Wars.
Birds using lightsabers and the force? It seems to change the game­play prin­ciple of the ori­ginal ver­sion a bit. We’ll see how well it fares when it is released on November 8.

Posted in Android, App Store, games, iOS, iOS games, iPad, iPhone, iPod, trailer/teaser, trailers, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

How To Report a Problem With iOS 6 Maps Data

By admin | Published: September 25, 2012

iOS 6 Maps has revealed quite a bit of teeth­ing troubles. Apple says the sys­tem will improve with use and time. Well, there’s a way to help speed  up the pro­cess. How? Good ol’ human input can surely play a big part in the solu­tion. MacRumors.com shows what to do when an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch user encoun­ters a glitch in the Maps ‘matrix’:

Like Google Maps, Apple also allows users to sub­mit error reports and cor­rect POI data. Last week, Apple said that “the more people use [Maps], the bet­ter it will get.” Reporting errors in inform­a­tion is surely part of how Apple plans to improve the product.

Check the MacRumors ‘how to’ here.

Posted in Apple, Apps, blog coverage, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Mobile, software, Tech, Tutorials | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Video of the Apple Special Event, Sep 2012

By admin | Published: September 13, 2012

Apple pos­ted the stream­ing video of today’s Special Event where it announced the iPhone 5 and new iPod mod­els. You can watch it here.
— I’ll update this post when Apple releases a video pod­cast ver­sion of the event.

Update:  The video is now avail­able as a Podcast on the iTunes Store. You can get it here in dif­fer­ent screen res­ol­u­tions: Apple Keynotes, Apple Keynotes (HD), Apple Keynotes (1080p).

Posted in Accessories, App Store, Apple, design, event, Hardware, iOS, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Media Event, Mobile, press, product design, software, Tech, video | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Apple announces iPhone 5 and new iPods

By admin | Published: September 12, 2012

Apple just announced new mod­els of their iPhone and iPod lines.

The long rumored iPhone 5 was offi­cially revealed and has a taller screen size, thin­ner and lighter design, an A6 pro­cessor (twice as fast as the pre­vi­ous A5 chip), bet­ter cam­era for low-light situ­ations, LTE broad­band and bet­ter FaceTime HD front-facing cam­era. It will be avail­able in black and white.

There are also new iPod Touch mod­els with a new screen (same size as the iPhone 5), an A5 pro­cessor (the cur­rent 4th-gen still has the A4), a 5-megapixel cam­era with flash (ƒ/2.4 aper­ture and cap­able to record 1080p movies), Bluetooth 4.0, FaceTime HD cam­era. It will be avail­able in five dif­fer­ent col­ours and a (Product)RED version.

The iPod nano was com­pletely refreshed. Gone is the ver­sat­ile clip to hang the nano to clothes. It has a big­ger 2.5-inch widescreen Multi-Touch dis­play (240-by-432-pixel res­ol­u­tion at 202 pixels per inch) and bluetooth 4.0 built-in. It will be avail­able in seven dif­fer­ent col­ours and a (Product)RED version.

Also announced: new Lightning con­nector replaces the old 30-pin dock con­nector; new EarPods (head­phones) come with all announced mod­els; and Lightning to 30-pin Adapters.

On the soft­ware side, Apple announced a new iTunes ver­sion built from the ground up with a new inter­face (avail­able in October).

In the U.S. the iPhone 5 starts at $199 (16GB), $299 (32GB), $399 (64GB) with a two year con­tract.
The iPod Touch 5th-gen costs $299 for the 32GB model and $399 for the 64GB model. The old iPod Touch (4th-gen) is being kept as an entry-level model ($199 for 16GB and $249 for 32GB).
The iPod nano (16GB) will be avail­able at $149.

Apple’s offi­cial product pages:
iPhone 5
iPod Touch 5th-gen
iPod nano 7th-gen

Posted in App Store, Apple, design, event, iOS, iOS games, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, media, Media Event, product design | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed