I’m not a filmmaker, nor do I have any intention of starting down that path, but I found these series of videos from lightsfilmschool.com pretty fascinating. The first video breaks down the 180 degree rule, a key guideline with two character film scenes. The second looks at various distances to shoot characters, introducing some terminology and motivations behind each distance.
Designer Nathan Ford’s responsive grid workflow can be boiled down to this quote:
You should design a grid based on your content’s constraints, not design your content based on a grid’s constraints.
It’s rather brilliant when you think about it. It’s also one of the most succinct descriptions of a shift in methodology I’ve been after for a while now, having worked for over a year professionally on responsive web designs. I generally lean heavily on the Skeleton grid system, but something about landing on break points for existing iOS hardware just feels wrong. I’ve got to research Gridset more.
Great series of images from Bond’s latest spawned from this Reddit thread. I’m rooting for Deakins, the look of that film honestly is at least half the reason I’d place it in my top five Bond films of all time.
The FontFeed‘s Yves Peters looks at typographic choices made on poster art for recent Hollywood releases. Interesting to see the ubiquitous Helvetica Neue put to both great (Zero Dark Thirty) and not so great (Django Unchained) use.
The A.V. Club‘s Todd VanDerWerff:
But I’ll still miss the idea of everybody watching everything together. With every new freedom comes a kind of loss, and sometimes, those can’t be quantified. We’ve been consuming content in serialized fashion for centuries now—people made weekly visits to theaters long before the novel was even a glint in Cervantes’ eye—and that habit will likely die hard. And maybe I’m being a stick-in-the-mud here, tied to a method of TV watching that was already in its death throes when I was a child. But when I can watch a great episode of TV with my watercooler—real or virtual—around me, that increases the value of it to me, increases the sense that I’m a part of something.
This is a long, long read, but it’s the smartest breakdown I’ve read of what’s really going on in Shane Carruth’s cult time travel film. Makes the wait for Upstream Color a lot harder.
I really enjoyed watching Jason’s talk. He starts out illustrating how the right font face matters. Pay special attention to last twenty or so minutes where he runs through a few quick tips on font selection (e.g. when in doubt between two font sizes, bigger is better.)
If you’ve got twelve minutes and dig science fiction films, watch this Vimeo video essay by Steven Benedict. It jumps around in its coverage, but on a surface level it illustrates why Blade Runner still holds up as one of my favorite films.
Columbia professor Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker:
That doesn’t mean the cable industry has no prospects. But this year or next, cable companies will have to accept that they are no longer the gatekeepers for the best content. It means, eventually, that the industry will probably have to embrace the idea of simply carrying the content of others (which was its original business model), and essentially function as what used to be called an “Internet-service provider.”
Wu is a very smart guy, and his points about the potential impact of House of Cards are argued well. But I’m not as optimistic that the ‘best content’ will move as rapidly away from cable as he predicts.
You can read endless speculation on Valve’s upcoming Steam box on almost any gaming or tech site. But for a one stop, comprehensive look on what we really know, T.C. Sottek piece over at The Verge is stellar. If you’re at all mildly interesting in the future of gaming you should read this piece.