Great breakdown of the cinematography basics behind Breaking Bad over at The A.V. Club, as dissected by Scott Kaufman (expect spoilers through Season 5 part 1 in the full article):
Breaking Bad relies more heavily than most shows on what are called “tight singles,” or shots in which a single character occupies the majority of the frame in shallow focus. The background is usually out of focus because it’s unimportant—if you’re watching a show set in a coffee shop, you don’t need the background in focus to remember where the characters are—but in Breaking Bad, the relationship between the planes of focus (foreground, midground, background) typically matters.
With my current job I’m on a very small web team, with little delineation between developer, designer and QA. When you’re banging out code for an impending web release, it’s an environment that can be ripe for regression errors if you’re not careful.
Traditionally one of the best ways to combat regressions are with unit tests (ask any Rails developer.) But for front end developers and designers, there’s often limitations. Sure, you might get valid data from the back end, but how does it actually look and feel? That’s why so many of us rely on lots of repetitive, by hand testing.
Enter CasperJS, a framework perfect for front end unit testing. With a single Unix command running in the background a “headless” Webkit browser that runs through several core actions on my web app, taking screenshots along the way. As long as it stays updated, it’s a great way to check the basics before making any big commit. Great syntax and documentation too. If you’re a front end developer or QA, take a look.
I’ve written here earlier on how amazing the PS3 game The Last of Us is, on both a narrative and cinematic level. So there’s a sense of validation when Art of the Title, which usually focuses on classic film openers, highlights the game’s title sequence. It’s a bit nuts to hear what the creative directors went through to get what’s basically a time lapsed fungal growth captured on film. In the words of title sequence director Kevin Joelson:
So I found some slime mould stuff and some YouTube videos and hacked something together. Within three days we had our foundation…I ended up taking it to my house and growing some there with my wife watching the cameras. We shot everything camera raw so that we had the most to work with. By the end of those two weeks I had a pretty severe cold, I think from all the spores and slime moulds, but it had to get done.
“Stanley Kubrick”, writing in McSweeneys (with a little help from Chris Okum):
If the heat is not at it’s absolute lowest, the crust on the French toast will turn a darker shade of brown, almost black, and while it is perfectly acceptable to eat a piece of French toast with slightly blackened crust marks, it is not aesthetically pleasing, at least not to my eye…You must care about the French toast. If you don’t care about the French toast, then perhaps you don’t care about anything is my train of thought on the matter, and if you don’t care about anything, then working for me doesn’t seem feasible, as I have an insatiable desire to be surrounded by people who care as much as I do.
It’s time for us to treat performance as an essential design feature, not just as a technical best practice.
Some may interpret Brad’s post as a shot against a traditional web design workflow. It is, and rightfully so. Too often, both in my own career and in talking with other developers, designers run off the Photoshop deep end without a lot of developer collaboration. They create something that is gorgeous, groundbreaking but in the end really slow. Or a team’s focus is just on shipping new web functionality without considering the performance impact.
Successful teams consider and optimize for performance. As Brad emphasizes, get into prototype form earl and if it’s too slow revise immediately.
This guest post by free-to-play consultant Ethan Levy on Kotaku was interesting, but I’ve flip flopped on my feelings on it. I planned to first link to it pointing out some of Levy’s strong arguments, but at rereading it a few times he comes off harsh and defensive with his audience.
Levy makes a fair point about changing economics and tastes of the audience, and how a free-to-play model can lower the risks for developers:
On the development side, a free-to-play game lowers the risk involved in making a game. A developer is able to release a high quality game that represents a fraction of the total vision, and if players think it is fun and justify it by spending money, the developer can continue to improve the game for months or years on end.
But at the same time, there’s a “business first” tone in the article; a lack of financial support for traditional games forces studios to jump to free-to-play. But I think there is a lot of support for more traditional gaming, especially on mid budget indie releases. Furthermore, many genres of games, especially those with a longer, single player narrative (e.g. The Last of Us) just can’t adapt to free-to-play. We need a strong market for these games as well. If gaming markets sees dollars only around free-to-play, we could lose a lot of gaming diversity. We’re seeing these problems already seep heavily into EA’s latest game releases along with mobile gaming.
Emmet LiveStyle is a Chrome extension paired with a Sublime Text plugin that transforms your CSS workflow. Install both tools and you get no BS live bi-directional CSS editing. To put it another way, either tweak in Chrome DevTools, your Sublime Text CSS file or both, and the changes immediately take effect on your page.
Admittedly LiveStyle isn’t perfect. First you have to be committed to Sublime Text as a text editor (which I’d highly recommend, but it isn’t for everyone). Setup can be sometimes annoying; when you switch to the tool in DevTools you’re often forced to assign CSS files you’re editing manually. Also it’s in beta, so expect occasional stability problems. But for the most part when you start getting in a CSS editing groove it’s pretty awesome.
If the time of the game console is not yet at an end (handheld or otherwise), then Nintendo has a lot of work to do. It needs to get better at all of the game-related things that iOS is good at. It needs to produce software that clearly demonstrates the value of its hardware—or, if that’s not possible, then it needs to make new hardware…
…Nintendo needs to do what Nintendo does best: create amazing combinations of hardware and software. That’s what has saved the company in the past, and it’s the only thing that will ensure its future.
I agree with Siracusa; Daring Fireball’s John Gruber and others that disagree I think are missing the potential of the current market. We may be clearly moving in the direction of multi functional platforms that can do more than play games. But, as Siracusa points out, as long as there’s a strong market for dedicated gaming devices that offer a richer, more immersive experience (I think next-gen console sales will reflect this), Nintendo still has a shot with its hardware and software combination.
Keeping the trend from yesterday on bad work practices, designer Murat Mutlu:
Ahhh working til 9pm several days a week, it’s just the agency way of life right? Wrong, it’s bad management.
Tell your account managers (or yourself) to stop selling things that can’t be completed unless we work ourselves to death. I’ve seen people strain their health, relationships and family lives for what? So a deodorant can get more brand awareness? So that we can meet the unrealistic deadline you promised whilst trying to win a pitch? Or so a client can get dozens of mockups before they go on holiday?
This is advertising we’re talking about, not some higher calling. Everything we make is forgotten about in 6 months. Who gives a shit?
This is a mantra that could be extended to a lot of other industries as well, especially web and tech agencies.