Shop Vac (kinetic typography animation)

This kinetic typography music video incorporates familiar brand shapes without really stepping on the brands themselves. Adobe people noted it, as it was created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere and Toon Boom Animate. A labor of love by Jarrett Heather, it took somewhere between 500-1000 hours to finish.

For tutorials and other examples, see Kinetic typography as storytelling.

Unlogo: computer vision to erase logos [x2]

Peter Kirn posted on a new service in Unlogo Uses Computer Vision to Erase Logos from Your World at Create Digital Motion. Here the intro from Unlogo by Jeff Crouse:

Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo.

Update: PopSci discusses something similar from Germany (“Diminished Reality”) in Voodoo Software Removes Objects From Video In Real Time,

Update: see also Brad Larson on object tracking on the iPhone in GPU-accelerated video processing on Mac and iOS.

Idiocracy kool-aid -- red or blue?

FreshDV notes reports (Spout Blog, Guardian UK) that "Fox had struck a deal to produce real-life Brawndo, the fictional energy drink that threw the Earth into chaos in Idiocracy, a film that Fox barely released and all but refused to promote." Perhaps part of the reason for all this was that the Fox News brand remained pretty much intact (though more muscular) in the movie's dystopian future.

And as The Chutry Experiment notes, Fox and pals are "going full steam ahead to market Brawndo using viral videos on YouTube, a Brawndo website, and other social networking tools. And, yes, you can 'friend' Brawndo on Facebook and MySpace." Sort of reminds me how The Merry Pranksters kool-aid was re-branded by the SF People's Temple at Jonestown. The Brawndo episode also comes from San Francisco, this time from Omni Consumer Products LLC which borrows its name from Robocop.

By the way, design in Idiocracy was fun; see "The graphic design of Mike Judge's Idiocracy" at SpeakUp and Idiocracy is Reality at graphpaper.com (which notes the "flat buns" burger commercial). Seen at the left is the movie's US President -- a porn star and wrestling champ -- at the "House of Representin'", which is sponsored by Pepsi. The Cabinet is sponsored by Carl's Jr, which devolved a new tag line, “F$#k you! I’m eating!” Video segments can be found via YouTube and Google.

At this point you really can't be sure who's zooming who. As shown at FreshDV, the Brawndo attempt to go viral mimics both Ideocracy and this viral video (one viewing is more than enough):

And here's a segment from The Daily Show on Brawndo's sister 'Cocaine Energy Drink':

al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters = 850

Meeting Resistance is a new documentary making waves about the nature of the resistence to the US invasion of Iraq. It debuts as our American president warns of WWIII if Iran tries to build a nuclear power electricity plant -- though at the same time India is to be given actual nuclear material even after refusing to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty along with Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. But what can you expect when the UN Security Council, the world's top arms dealers, is really a protection racket? Penny-ante games by regional drug lords and other gangstas pale in comparison.

Bush's only excuse for the war on Iraq is al-Qaeda, whose leaders roam about in other countries while we attack relatively innocent people at a high cost to soul and treasury. Or at least the American children's treasury, which Asian and European lenders will be waiting to demand when most manufacturing and programming jobs are finally offshored. Maybe the idea is that nothing matters but short run profit now that oil production has peaked.

In this light, globalization makes no sense, especially for the food security, since by the time the New World Order is in place, electric power and shipping resources to run it will be scarce. Too bad we didn't put that cool trillion into alternative energy resources!

Anyway, it's interesting to note that the "estimated number of full-time al-Qaeda-in-Iraq fighters is 850 or 2-5% of the Sunni insurgency, according to Malcolm Nance, author of The Terrorists of Iraq, who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq." (from Launching Brand Petraeus). There more on this at Washington Monthly's The Myth of AQI: the military's estimation of the threat is alarmingly wrong by a former Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes newspaper (interviewed on Counterspin). There are additional details in Dan Froomkin's Washington Post article Bush's Baghdad Mouthpiece.

There's more video of Meeting Resistance at Crooks and Liars and Democracy Now.

To put the threat in perspective, if all the suicide bombers blew themselves up at once they still would not pose a threat to the survival of the USA. The real danger is that our fate is almost entirely in our own hands in the form of arms and poison-making capability. Reminds me of a scary old song by the well-designed Savage Republic: "The Crisis of our Country is not caused by External Forces... The Danger Lies Within..."