Pixels
Short animation by Patrick Jean and the French VFX studio “One More Production“:
The idea is not that new, for example there has been a Röyksopp music video (“Happy Up Here”) featuring space invaders a while ago. But the compositing on “Pixels” is really nice and there are a lot of great ideas from arcade-style start to finish.
(via “No Fat Clips“)
Algorithms
Adobe demonstrates a future Photoshop feature called “Content-Aware Fill” that is the healing brush on crack. It’ll “extrapolate” image patterns to remove unwanted elements or extend landscapes.
Looks pretty amazing in this youtube video:
It’s probably based on some Siggraph paper. For example, the content-aware-resizing that Photoshop has since CS4 was also demoed at Siggraph first:
The algorithms that are currently developed in this field are simply amazing. Here’s the one that will put me out of work in a few years: automatic image composition based on a simple doodle:
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
Or this one on image stabilisation:
And finally this all-time favourite from 2007 (!) that apparently still hasn’t made it into a commercial product: An algorithm that seamlessly inserts high-resolution photos into a low-resolution video. Or removes unwanted elements. Or removes reflections. Or seamlessly changes what was behind those reflections.
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.
Tilt/Shift
Sometimes an advertising idea is pure genius. The kind of “that’s so cool and easy, why didn’t anybody think of this before?”. Like this German telecom commercial with a tilt/shift lens.
And then you find out that indeed somebody thought about it first and that the ad is at worst a rip-off and at best a commissioned piece of work. But pretty to look at nevertheless!
Here’s a piece of an Australian photographer who utilized that look on a number of clips:
Nochmal Feuerwerk
Am 4. Tag des neuen Jahres geht nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit das Böllern wieder verstärkt los. Eine gute Gelegenheit für ein Video vom Neujahrsspektakel am vergangenen Wochenende:
(movie by Max Chan)
How To Report The News
A spotlight on the visual language of TV news and a funny template for almost every damn report on BBC and CNN nowadays.
I love the youtube comments that pick up the tone of the video:
This is an immature comment using various words related to genitals to insult a random person for no particular reason.
Childhood Memories
I still fondly remember a book I had when I was a child. It was about dogs running and driving towards a big tree where they had a party. I couldn’t remember the title though.
Not anymore! I recently stumbled upon its original English version on the internet. It was called “Go Dog Go” and it’s still in print although I couldn’t find anything about a German version. Not even Amazon seems to have it.
But here’s the video version I found on a Chinese video portal. It’s a bit hypnotizing (and probably not by Dr. Seuss at all) but contains all the small details I couldn’t remember anymore (or rather overlooked when I was a child, like the recurring boy-meets-girl-theme).
