The film can be best described as a meditation on architecture, photography and the sense of space and depth in the world around us.

Alex Roman recreated several modern buildings as 3D renderings and then uses some quite amazing craftsmanship to give the viewer a sense of depth with very subtle animations where the virtual camera slowly floats through the buildings, with ever so slight changes in focus.

Many of the effects are so subtle, especially in the first half of the film that I didn’t even believe that I am looking at CG rendered versions of the buildings. Alex has a great sense for lighting and clearly must have spent many hours tuning the lighting set ups to create extremely photorealistic settings. Only in the second half of the film, when he introduces surrealistic effects, does it become apparent that we have been looking at computer graphics all along.

Here is a video with some of the scenes as compositing breakdowns in case you want to see a peek under the hood of several of the scenes in the film.

It should be mentioned that Alex also created the soundtrack for the film, making this all around a major tour de force.

Gosfield manufactured the life story for an imaginary 1960s French singer, complete with posters, records, many magazine covers and even a music video and documentary material. All of it done to excess.

I would have loved to see the pieces in real life and really hope this show makes it to the Bay Area sometime – the style of the artwork on the records and the magazine covers captures the feeling of the 60s in every detail and the range of the created evidence of Gigi’s existence is amazing.

Gosfield spent more than a year working on this project and not only must have photoshopped his heart out, he also commissioned songs to be written and created a short film documentary about the life and times of Gigi.

What is interesting to me is that while browsing through the pictures and looking at the videos, knowing all along that this is fake history, every now and then doubt sets in – maybe Gigi Gaston did exist! And if so, where is Gigi now?

Their latest episode – Blood And Fire – has amazing production values way beyond any of the original Star Trek episodes and probably even better than most of what you’ve seen on Next Generation. The torrent site at the link above has both parts 1 and 2 of the double episode.

The story of Blood And Fire is very deep and is based on a script that was originally developed for a never-realized Next Generation episode. It deals in one story arc with homosexuality, and in a pretty action-packed main story line with a rescue from a bloodworm-infested research vessel while the Enterprise is under attack by Klingons.

But what is really standing out is the technical quality of the show – the props, the lighting and the color coordination are spot-on and the special effects are quite impressive.

That was intriguing, since I actually had written about the MJB coffee ads in San Francisco before here and here, and all the research I had done on the mysterious MJB – WHY? ads pointed at a timeframe of after the earthquake until sometimes in the 1910s for these ads… but here was one done before the earthquake of 1906.

I mentioned this to Richard and he pointed me to a book: “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall, who happens to be the daughter of the founder of MJB Coffee. It’s a spirited and very personal biography of Ruth and her parents Mannie and Renee Brandenstein (later Bransten), which begins with a scene just after the earthquake of 1906 and then moves back to the very beginnings of the MJB brand in the 1880s and on through to the 1930s.

Mannie was a born marketer, and he relished in figuratively and literally painting the town with advertisements for his products, which is why even now, one hundred years after he invented the campaign, one can still find MJB Coffee – WHY? painted on walls in the Bay Area.

Many people in the last hundred years must have passed these ads and wondered… why WHY?

Well… here’s the answer…

At one point, the young Ruth asks her dad: “Why the WHY?” and Mannie’s answer is: “What’s the difference, as long as people ask. That makes sales.”

The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away from the current state of the industry and all eighteen points by Bruce Sterling are worth a thought.

I don’t think any of the existing large publishing houses will survive in their current form since even if these businesses want to change at this point (and that’s a big IF), there is preciously little that can be done.

Ditch paper and go online? Yes, but the ebook market is already carpet-bombed by small startups and behemoths like Sony and Amazon.

Make everything a free download to support paid copies? Yes, but that should have been done long ago. That would have been GREAT advertisement before the Internet started to drown in free content, but now?

Go viral? Yep, like everybody else. Doesn’t help with the revenue, though.

At this point traditional publishing is dead, with the possible exception of coffee table books and niche publishers that will sprout like weeds around the edges of the old system. There will still be book stores and new books from many (many!) more smaller publishers, but the times of million-dollar advances for books and monolothic publishing deals will be over for good.

Departures won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and it must have been a close call as best film all around.

Where to begin? It’s a movie about funerals, or specifically about the act of transferring bodies into the casket, which traditionally is often done in a cleansing ceremony in the house of the recently deceased before the undertaker removes the body.

The story is beautifully crafted around the life of the young man who finds himself freshly jobless and uprooted, as he stumbles into the unusual job of preparing the dead, while at the same time trying to hide this new income source from his wife.

It is a testament to the craftsmanship of the film makers that this movie is not just incredibly tasteful around its morbid subject matter, but the sequences with the deceased take on a beauty, elegance and meditative rhythm that makes the experience uniquely emotional for the audience.

The movie opens on May 29th across the US and if you only see one foreign movie this year, I’d make it this one – and maybe bring some tissues.

The film is done in stop-motion and for the first few minutes it seems to be very obvious, almost as if the filmmakers attempted to point out the fact that this is not another mass-produced CGI film of the kind we’ve seen a lot lately. But once the story gets really going that feeling disappears, to be replaced by an overall sense of wonder and awe at the craftmanship of the model builders and puppet animators.

Much of the movie is utterly beautiful and at the same time often infused with a very adult sense of twisted humor that I enjoyed a lot. The movie is rated PG, and I thought that towards the end it turned a liiitle bit scary for younger kids.

But foremost in my mind is the artful design and craft that went into this movie. Here are five short features showing how the movie was made. Update: Doh! Missed the YouTube features while writing this post – don’t miss them if you are into stop-motion animation!

Over the last few years we’ve all been trained to entrust a large number of companies and organizations with a lot of our work – photos, stories, bookmarks, backups, calendars, spreadsheets, texts, movies, GPS data, 3D models, panoramas… you get the idea.

And many of these services are great and offer us a never-before known way to present and share our work with others and to interact with lots and lots of freely available data from all around the world.

But what these services almost never even mention is that fact that if you didn’t back up your data before you uploaded it, or if you in fact created it in the cloud, all the time you’ve spent and all the information out there can disappear in a minute.

As the creator of MapSkip I am myself guilty of creating a sink for your information, and I will actually make it one of my top priorities to add a reasonable option to allow users to export their own stories from the site whenever they want to do so. I’m not sure yet what form this will take, but it will be most likely a one-click download of a text file with all your stories. I’ll try and have that up and running by the end of February.

Maybe this is one of those things that need a name – something like “One-Click Retrieval”  or “Quick Download” with a snazzy logo. This should then be made a standard feature that every self-respecting social network and Web 2.0 data sink will HAVE to have if they want to look serious about your data.

In case you haven’t heard of it before, the idea behind NaNoWriMo – or the National Novel Writing Month – is to write a novel in a month. Yep. One Month. Just get it over with, like ripping off a band-aid.

Now you’d be correct in saying that this is insane, and you are probably right, but it’s a very sweet kind of insanity that I can only recommend to everybody to at least try once. All you have to do is think of a rough idea for the opening of your novel, say, on October 31st, and then around midnight you open a new document on your computer and you start to type. Easy.

To “win” NaNoWriMo, you have to write 50,000 words in 30 days, or about 1666 words every night. it’s not as hard as it sounds, and my only recommendations are:

• write daily
• write without editing
• don’t plot ahead for more than one day’s worth of writing

From my experience with several failed attempts after my first win, I can also tell you that plotting ahead and working along a frozen story arc is deadly for NaNo, since there is no time to think. It’s all about having a strong idea for the opening and then let the characters do whatever they want.

So. Are you up for the challenge? Come on! There’s kids taking part in this – it’s not that hard to write 1700 words a day… it’s probably going to take you about two hours every day for a month. Just cut down on TV and instead of wasting time on somebody else’s fantasy, set your imagination free!

The first three movie reviews are up on his site, and judging from them this could be a very long two years for James, but a very entertaining 100 weeks for his readers…