Another year, another Indiewire roundup discussion with top cinematographers on their preferred shooting formats. If you think it’s a one-sided argument of digital always trumping film, think again. While it’s true nearly every DP interviewed shoots with mostly digital today, there’s an interesting nuance to their position, one that speaks highly of the natural warmth and grain inherant to real film.
Engineer Kelly Ellis reveals the real fallacy in relying on the “pipeline” argument (that there’s just not enough qualified women available) when it comes to the gender problems the larger tech industry has. As Ellis argues, there’s a larger problem of women leaving the industry early. They can often face a hostile, male-centric culture or dated stereotypes that programming inherently (and falsely) doesn’t match their gender’s “natural qualities.”
Wunderlist designer Timothy Achumba:
As designers it’s our responsibility to create an environment that encourages open communication with developers, as early as possible in the design process as to avoid problems like this. We need to let them into our world, help them understand what we’re trying to achieve and allow them help us to achieve it in the most efficient way. This constant stream of communication should continue right up to the launch of what you’re building. It keeps everyone involved aligned with the vision, it helps to form a strategy best for achieving the goal and creates a friendly, open and honest culture in the workplace.
Words to live by.
One positive byproduct of the fairly unremarkable (in the eyes of most film critics) Unbroken from late last year: a few solid interviews with legendary DP Roger Deakins.
Avenir and Proxima Nova still rank incredibly well.
As part of Stripe’s “Speaker Series”, the founders behind the popular prototyping tool Framer talk about their product. There is a standard introduction here you can find elsewhere online, but I especially appreciated Bok’s and van Dijk’s breakdown of how Framer fits into the increasingly crowded prototyping market.
I find many designers tend to place a tool like Framer as an either or proposition for prototyping (e.g. “I use Framer instead of Invision”). Yet it depends heavily on both the product and what kind of interaction you’re looking to test. And in the case of Framer, there’s also the importance of basic JavaScript code familiarity. That learning curve can scare some away, while attracting others like me with a more formalized development background.
Developer Rami Ismail, writing an opinion piece for Polygon:
And what is there to gain on mobile anyway? The race to the bottom has pushed the prices down so far that it’s almost impossible to keep making games at all. The people that can buy seats on the gravy train buy more seats than ever, and those still believing you can board the gravy train after it passed their station are left with the illusion that they simply missed the train, instead of understanding that unless they got exceptionally lucky, there wouldn’t have been seats for them anyway.
Rami’s piece is about a lot more than just iOS and Android gaming, but I feel the above paragraph perfectly sums up my reservations about the platforms. With rare exceptions, it feels like the space is dominated by shady in app purchases with a lot of tired gameplay tropes.
The praise gets arguably hyperbolic, but as written in this profile and interview by Vulture’s chief critic Matt Zoller Seitz, it’s hard not to love Michelle MacLaren’s work. An exceptionally strong director, she’s one of the rare TV names that I recognize (usually in the credits on Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones) immediately and know we’re about to get something special.
Time Out’s David Ehrlich made one of the definitive video roundups of the best in cinema for 2013, and for 2014 he nails it again. The blend of music cuts (all of David’s selections are exclusively from his top 25 list) and stellar editing really makes this something well worth the video’s full twelve minutes of your time.
Gareth Damian Martin writing for Kill Screen Daily on Destiny’s latest expansion pack:
But, more importantly, this careful titling dodges the usual DLC label, meaning The Dark Below stays away from the word “content” as far as it possibly can. This is because, unlike in the traditional video game paradigm, where locations, characters and items equal content, The Dark Below is entirely structured around the idea of enterprise as content…
…In this way, The Dark Below seems to centralize a symbolic exchange of reward for labour, but in reality treats labour as a product in itself.