New Visual: Digital Cinema, Fincheriffic

Okay, so years ago I saw Dancer In The Dark, and the story was pretty moving, but of course the quality... done with a bunch of Canon GL1s or something... well, Dogma95 was an interesting idea that pretty much accepted crappy cameras.

Fast FFWD to Fincher's latest, Zodiac. I remember walking out of the screening I saw and remarking to my girlfriend that everything that Fincher had been working towards finally came to fruition with Zodiac. I mean, the entire picture is pretty much frame-perfect. Holy Jeez, it even made me take another look at Panic Room, just to see what the master does when he stumbles a bit. Guess I needed to remind myself that David Fincher isn't some cinematic omni-driod.

And then... I'm reading American Cinematographer about the look they got... and IT'S ALL ON DIGITAL. UNCOMPRESSED 10 BIT. Holy hell. The revolution just quietly, finally happened. Forget about the paperless office... this is the emulsionless worflow. FINALLY!16534654!!

Dude... if you wanna make movies and the like.... go see Zodiac. Let it stew in the lizardy nether-regions of your visual cortex for a few months... then read this article.

New Visuals: Sparklines

Something that I stumbled upon while trying to stretch Google Spreadhseets to its graphical limit (I wanted to make a graph and had to find this clever repeating character trick) is a new approach to intra-spreadsheet graphics: Sparklines. I included a choice pictorial samples below.

New Visuals: Flickr Bot Eats Facebook

Why have people tag your face when a robot will hunt your likeness down? This dude wrote a robot that looks for people's faces on Flickr and then makes a book. The invasion has begun.

Check out the boing-boing permalink here.

New Visuals: James Fung

For a brief time, I had the good fortune to work with James Fung. Fortunately, Mr. Fung has found time to start The Glogger Community. He is a really, really interesting guy. Here's a little window into what he wants the world to see...it might be, literally, through his eyes.

Also, check out eyetap. It is not the most commercial site in the world, and it
seems scary at first, but remember, so was text messaging.

New Visuals: E-Book and PDA

Electronic Books are cool. They have the same reflective value as paper (they actually ARE paper and ink) and they don't need much power at all, because each image simply stays and doesn't need constant refreshing like a normal PC monitor.

Apparently, this new company has made the first e-ink tablet device.

New Visuals: Total Immersion

A French company is doing really interesting things with real-time viz (as opposed to pre-viz) so that you can look at effects live, in camera, and compose your shot according to effects that are rendered on the fly to look almost as gorgeous as what you would get with a huge effects budget and lots of post-production time. An exciting point to note is that the virtual objects that are placed in the camera's eye know how to interact with the real world.

It is very difficult to describe the potential of this approach without sounding nuts, so check it out and decide for yourself: