The Story of Stuff

What is the Story of Stuff? ... a movie from from Annie Leonard, Free Range Studios, and the Tides Foundation who say:

"From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world."

They produced a Flash move with nice interactive features and a QuickTime version. Here's the teaser on hidden costs:



Update: and a TED talk, via John Nack who has additional input...

"Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness."

FCPUG Network Supermeet January 16

Tickets are on sale for the Macworld FCPUG Network Supermeet on January 16, 2008.

The raffle has over $40,000 in prizes so far--and the first 250 people arriving receive a valuable reusable "goodie" bag. What else is on the agenda?

Apple presents: Something formerly known as Super Secret
Adobe presents: DV Rebel Stu Maschwitz
Blackmagic Design presents: Alex Lindsay
Sony presents: Noah Kadner on the XDCAM EX
Plus: Vendor demos, Show and Tells from Bay Area filmmakers, FCS tips and tricks, and MORE!

Update: Apple's "secret" presentation caused a minor stir as the secret aspect amplified the importance of the event for the Apple Insider. This was clarified a bit in The Edit Blog comments. What Apple might be presenting still isn’t known -- so they could still bring the sex as Stu Maschwitz might say.

AE Users blinkx

A new After Effects site from David Basulto called AEUsers.com has appeared. So far it there seems to be no practical information there, just press release feeds with a whole lotta ads. There was a blinkx video search engine box:



BlinkX seems fun but needs a better format for search results. As discussed earlier in Another blinkx in the wall and Video search interviews, the main focus seems to be on ad insertion. Here's a blinkx wall made from a search of "After Effects tutorials":

'Special effects' of consciousness

Here's an excerpt of a review of The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, in the SF Chronicle:

"Ekirch kept finding references to something called 'first sleep' in medieval texts. The term was never defined, suggesting that contemporary readers were already familiar with it. But Ekirch was at a loss.

Meanwhile, Wehr was bringing people into the Maryland woods and putting them to bed at dusk, wondering how the absence of artificial light would affect their biological clocks during long winter nights. As his experiment went on, an unexpected pattern emerged. Subjects were getting the eight hours of sleep long thought to be normal, but it came in two shifts. In between was a period of unusual wakefulness lasting an hour or two. Wehr characterized it as a sort of 'altered consciousness.' Subjects typically reported feeling something like bliss.

Fragmented sleep is typically viewed as a disorder, and as Warren points out, there are now medications designed to provide eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. But as Ekirch realized upon learning of Wehr's experiment, segmented sleep may actually have been the norm for humanity until the invention of the lightbulb.

Warren repeats Wehr's protocol to give his account of this forgotten state of mind, and also delves into the practice of lucid dreaming - in which the dreamer awakens just enough to control the proceedings.

Gradually, his pursuit for neurological 'special effects' morphs into a penetrating inquiry into the nature of consciousness itself."

Update: here's a talk by the author and an interview...

Santa voice over session

Some, like The Church Lady, may suppose that Santa deserves to work for producers, given his past. For more see Santa’s Crimes Against Humanity by Robert Anton Wilson, The psychedelic secrets of Santa Claus, Santa is a Wildman!, and Is Christmas From Christianity? a video lecture by Abdullah Hakim Quick.

Update: due the uncertainty around Santa, Mr Spock was called in for a mind-meld (starring Mickey Hart and Jerry Garcia).

Video on the Web & Adobe

Here's a basic overview of video on the web & Adobe with a few twists I hadn't heard; and comments from John Dowdell:

"W3C: Lynch on video: A 20-minute video interview with Adobe's Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, at the W3C Video on the Web Workshop earlier this month. I haven't listened to it yet, but it likely follows the Adobe position paper submitted to the conference: video needs extend beyond HTML browsers; we need improvement in metadata, search, quoting, text tracks, distribution controls, and delivery to multiple devices; and Adobe has no objections to a VIDEO tag if the browsers change to invoke the user's choice of video engine that way: "[It would be useful to] establish video as a top level element in HTML, and support mapping to player technology. This could be approached even more generally, to enable better integration of technologies such as Flash Player with the HTML document object model." More position papers are here, and there are additional video interviews with the W3C's Steve Bratt and Doug Schepers."

Update: NewTeeVee has some rather involved posts with and about video, including: What Will Happen to Online Video in 2008?, NTV Predictions: Mobile Video, and NTV Predictions: Video in the Living Room.

Type casting

As noted on Typographica, before Kirby Ferguson's rant Trajan is the Movie Font (see his links to comic red and DVD art) there was Etched in Stone, a little movie that made the same point with some other detail. This movie was noted quite earlier on the AE-List, along with Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black by the same creator.






The Snog Blog has a nice interview with Cheshire Dave, the writer/director of Etched in Stone and Behind the Typeface.

Helvetica, however, gets a big balanced treatment with a touring film, now at The Roxie in San Francisco (thanks SF Chron review). There's also a DVD, which you can rent at finer video stores like Into Video (Upper Haight & Hayes Valley). Here's a sample: