SKAGGS

This is TV advertising at its best.

The artist and animator Blu proves that with enough patience, time and skill, you can make moving art anywhere.

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

How long does it take to create a complex illustration? Chad Pugh documented the process and put it all together in a very cool video.

The video is a condensed time lapse of screenshots over a several month period. Total physical drawing time is close to 40 hours and I’d add an equal amount of time for concept time and readying the print.

It’s not often that nonsense emails make it past my mighty spam filter, but when they do, I’m reminded of this wonderful series of animations by the Brothers McLeod. They take the semi-sensical text found in the filter-busting portion of spam emails and then create a semi-sensical visual to go with it.

This one’s a monster spam dramatised for your non-sensical pleasure…

I met and interviewed Marjane Satrapi in October of 2003, when her graphic-novel memoir Persepolis was already a bestseller in France. The comic, the first part of which had recently been translated into English and published as Persepolis: The Story of A Childhood, was the focus of my undergraduate dissertation.

At the time, a major exhibition of her original artwork opened in Ravenna, Italy, where she also taught a comic art workshop. There was a real sense that Persepolis had the potential to push quality comic art into the cultural and critical limelight in Britain and the United States.
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I’ve found a new home at Barnes and Noble TriBeCa. Ahhhhhhhh books, books and books galore!!! I honestly can’t remember the last time I was so excited about books!! I’ve been there at least 4 times in the past week and it was on my last visit that I discovered that the “Creature” book by Andrew Zuckerman was finally out. I came across his brilliant website about 2 months ago, where he has a video documenting the book making process and if you go to the production section of his site documentation of the actual photoshoot (again brilliant).

The book is a definite must have but unfortunately most of the Barnes and Nobles in New York City have sold out. It’s on back order at Amazon too
For now though you can get your fix here . Enjoy!

I recently came across a showroom in LA that combines fashion, art and design and is one of the main stockists of a very cool jewelery brand (that I’ll blog about later).

Ani Tzenkova over at Cyana Lab pointed me in the direction of their blog, where I came across this post — Prometeus: The Media Revolution by strategic net consulting firm Casaleggio Associati, I’ve reposted the footage below…it’s a must watch and definitely got me thinking…
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Sony Bravia ads are doing “it” again. What’s “it” you ask‚Ķ well “it” is being awesome. Check this awesomeness out.

This has to be one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Photosynth, a rather new technology from Microsoft Live Labs, (honestly though, they bought it…) takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes the photos for similarities, and then displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space. The results of which are amazing. Notice how Photosynth is able to pin point the location of photos taken of Notre Dame from a collection of images found on Flickr, then use them to construct the facade! Very cool. Watch this and think about the implications of such technology. Meta data to the max!

Watch Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo at TED.

More on Photosynth can be found here. Windows XP SP2 and Vista only required to view the technology preview, unfortunately.

Former President Bill Clinton is a 2007 TED Prize winner for the efforts of the Clinton Foundation. The video of his speech and his TED Wish, can be seen below. It’s well worth watching.

For more information the the TED Conference and more videos of past talks, see www.ted.com. You can also subscribe to the TED podcast in iTunes and you’ll get each new video as they are released. Great stuff!