Blog posts tagged as 'printing'

SubMap is a visualisation for time and location data on distorted maps. The example above is a point of view map — a projection on a sphere around a particular point.

Planetary Resources is uncloaked this week as a company set up to mine the asteroid belt of our solar system. Yeah. We live in the future.

Planetary Resources is backed by, amongst others, James Cameron, the film director, and Larry Page, CEO of Google. Personally I am somewhat keen on getting society into space. But I didn’t expect it to be done by the International Legion of Billionaires. Brilliant that they’re doing it. Thanks, billionaires!

We are very much in love with Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera, which instead of a picture produces a text description of what you shoot, printed on a thermal printer!

Corner of a wood floored room with a tool chest, bike, stack of books, box leaning against the wall, an open door with a bag hanging off the doorknob, and a pair of closed double doors with cables hanging on the handles.

Gorgeous.

It gets better: the text descriptions are produced by anonymous individuals distributed around the world, and compensated for their work through Amazon Mechanical Turk. I love imagining the crowd of the internet all teeny tiny, all inside the camera.

Let’s wrap with a bit of self promotion.

The Lytro lightfield camera is one of those WHOA products — photos that you can refocus at any time. It’s magical. When I ran into them last week, they took a photo of Little Printer. Check it out! You can click to refocus (requires Flash).

There were an awful lot of photos taken for the Making Future Magic video that BERG and Dentsu London launched last week; Timo reckons he shot somewhere in the region of 5500 shots. Stop-frame animation is a very costly process in the first instance, but as the source we were shooting was hand held (albeit with locked-off cameras) and had only the most rudimentary of motion-control (chalk lines, black string and audio progress cues), if a frame was poorly exposed, obscure or fumbled, it left the sequence largely unusable. This meant that a lot was left on the cutting room floor.

In addition, we amassed a stack of incidental pictures of props, setups, mistakes, 3D tests and amphibious observers during the film’s creation.

Clicking through these pictures, it was clear that a book collecting some of these pictures, offering little behind-the-scenes glimpses alongside the finished graded stills used in the final edit, was the way forward. As well as offering a platform for some of the shots that didn’t make the final cut, the static prints want to be pored over, allowing for the finer details and shades (the animations themselves had textures and colours burnt into them in prior to shooting, so as to add a disruptive quality) to come through.

Our copies arrived today from Blurb. The print quality and stock is fantastic – especially considering it’s an on-demand service – and for us it’s great to have a little summary of a project that doesn’t require any software or legacy codecs to view it and will remain ‘as is’. We’ve made the book available to the public and in two formats; you can get your hands on the hardcover edition here, and the softcover here.

More images of the book are up here.