Errol Morris: Photography as a Weapon.

A very interesting article in which Morris analyses photo manipulation, not just the Photoshoppery of propaganda but also a very powerful but often overlooked tool: suggestive captioning. (via Boing Boing)

BMX mounted soundsystems: Made In Queens. This looks like a pretty interesting documentary - be sure to check out the trailer at the end of the page.

There were one or two guys in Porto that were urban legends because of their bike-mounted car radios, but this is just way, way out there…

Twenty Archetypal Images. I had no idea there was a set of archetypal images chosen for their ‘blandness’ that are used for testing of digital imaging techniques. The above cropped Playboy centrefold is apparentely in use by computer graphics developers since 1973!

Anyway, now I understand why there’s a teapot in every 3D app! (via Kottke)

While cleaning up after finishing my latest work, the HD remake of Words and Thoughts in RGB, I came across this: the sheer volume of data involved in editing and finishing a six minutes project.

Granted, I did a number of things that required a lot of storage space: Since I did most of the work in a five year old computer (incidentally I upgraded midway), I had all of my HDV captures converted to DV proxies for speedier editing (roughly duplicating the space required by the source material). Then, all of the effect and color timing sequences were rendered as Uncompressed 4:2:2 (and DV proxies). And since the client (the Coimbra Science Museum) required two slightly different versions of the final film (the differences being in the credits), I did render a title-less ‘internegative’, again Uncompressed 4:2:2, that weighted at 33GB alone.

Anyway, this just shows how much storage a small project can take. A slightly bigger project would require very careful workflow planning, since I’d probably be using lossier codecs. Think your brand new 1TB hard drive is enough space for anything? Think again.

So I did go watch The Dark Knight. Is it the best film ever, as according to IMDb?

No, it is not. It is, though, a damn good superhero movie (and one of the best ever at that). It appears that Chris Nolan gets what Tim Burton won’t: adapting comic books (or children literature, or operas) to the big screen needs a lot more than style emulation. By setting the characters in a realistic world vision, Batman feels a lot more like the Batman you imagine while reading the comics. And this feeling like should take precedence over the looking like. The director’s idea is made very evident by the performances: the late Heath Ledger’s Joker did scare the shit out of your 29-year old narrator (a lot more, in fact, than the over-the-top facial prosthetics of Aron Eckhart’s Two Face), while I found Jack Nicholson’s somewhat amusing when I first saw Batman at age ten.

Ledger’s impressive performance is reason enough to award this film with five stars, and then there’s the great pace, the gritty plot and the ultra-ultra violence. It is indeed Heat reinterpreted as a magical-realist film, rather than being a ‘superhero movie’.

On the other hand, it’s Heat to the point of sharing the same fundamental flaw: by the point you get to mid-movie you’re so blown away that the last third feels a bit anti-climatic, and I left the theatre wishing the anarchy had continued - more Joker, less Batman.

Anyway, five stars alright. But c’mon, it’s no Godfather.