Linked List: July 3, 2008

Thursday, 3 July 2008

Scenes From a Franchise 

Khoi Vinh:

In case you didn’t realize it, three years ago, Christopher Nolan brought our long, national nightmare of bad Batman movies to an end. Let’s hope The Dark Knight keeps us in the clear.

TripLog/1040 

Check out the UI on this upcoming iPhone app from Palm OS developer Stevens Creek Software. This is not a joke. (Via Macworld.)

How Pixar Created the ‘Wall-E’ Visual Style 

Fascinating Animation World Magazine story on the steps Pixar took to make Wall-E look and feel like a traditional film by mimicking the limitations and optics of real-world cameras. Director of photography Jeremy Lasky:

We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away. It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with Panavision lenses. We looked at lens flares and how to focus lights in the background. There’s that shot in the truck [his home] when EVE’s looking at the lighter for the first time from WALL-E’s POV and you see the bouquet stretched in the background. And this is the kind of thing we discovered doing those tests.

(Via Daily Kos.)

Gus Mueller on Adobe Reader 9 

Craptacular.

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner 

I don’t see how this will ever catch on with kids — there’s no dialogue.

Judge Orders Google to Turn Over YouTube Records 

Miguel Helft, reporting for the Times:

A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

The order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.

Regarding ‘Wall-E’ and Kids 

Tyler Cowen (via Kottke) on Wall-E:

Better than better than good.  It is, however, not recommended for children.

I have no idea why not. My four-and-a-half year-old son loved it. Rapt attention the entire time. That large stretches of the film have no dialog whatsoever does not make it difficult for children to follow. If anything, I’ve found that Jonas is much better at following stories which are told cinematically than those which are told verbally. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best film for small children that Pixar has made since Toy Story 2.

The film is so good overall that it makes me wonder whether the Academy will have the balls to nominate it for Best Picture, rather than relegating it to the ridiculous and artificial “Animated” ghetto. The odds that there will be five better films released this year are slim.

‘Walkman Phone Nails Form, Fails Function’ 

Danny Dumas reviews the Sony Ericsson W350.