The Filming of Children of Men

I’m a sucker for extended single takes, and this scene from Children of Men is absolutely riveting. It’s provoked praise for its technical prowess and criticism for being technically show-offy, but regardless of what camp everyone is in it’s pretty much impossible to talk shit on how plain awesome this scene is.

The cinematography in this movie has always given me a hard on, and today I stumbled across a few links that shed light on the astounding lengths and ingenuity used to create this magic.

Fix Your Tools

Toothpicks, 2008 by Chris Jordan – Depicts one hundred million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees cut in the U.S. yearly to make the paper for junk mail.

Lately I’ve been especially conscious on the build and quality of the things I buy. This article nicely summarizes why we need to go back to making good, strong products that will last. Have been having a lot of fun visiting MEC and army surplus stores lately just to check out the design of things.

As for the article’s philosophies. Even if you take away their ‘it’s for the environment’ argument, the benefits still outweigh this cluttered, non-nonsensical form of disposable consumer culture we’ve created.

 

Physical Storage v.s. Digital Storage

Cool poster on mozy.cam I saw on ffffound. See full size after the jump.

Google Sauron

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View is a really great essay by Jon Rafman. If you are interested in photography, coincidences, art theory, morals and ethics, culture, the streets, kids in ireland giving cameras the finger, general facts, cool points of view, and even just Google, definitely check this one out.

how to be charming with notes

Might as well learn from the best. That second excerpt is from here. And if you want to read more on Capa (you must!!), click here.

On Pandemics and Pandemonium

90 people get the swine flu and everybody wants to wear a mask. [Millions of] people have AIDS and no one wants to wear a condom. – Jessica Chu

via Robyn Esau

How Photographers are Launching Their Careers

Stuart Kennedy sends me so much stuff it’s gotten to the point where I now surf the internet vicariously through him. Half the time it’s a link to some incredibly gorgeous redhead (his ffffound is usually evidence of this obsession), but sometimes he’ll link to stuff without a redhead in sight.

This is one of those times. Here is a fantastic survey by PDN which sheds some light on how emerging photographers are launching their careers, complete with some great charts. Here’s a quick exerpt-

Most of the respondents (62 percent) earned four-year college degrees in photography, and a significant proportion (38 percent) also spent time assisting part of their training. Most respondents (75 percent) went into debt to fund their educations, relying on their credit cards more than any other source of funding (including student loans). Some of those who borrowed went heavily into debt: the average amount borrowed to pay for schooling was $44,435.

Definitely required reading. Check out the full article here.

Brad Troemel Blogs

Really fucking good post by Brad Troemel – Failure.

Words of the Wise

weren’t the 00’s really fucking weird? i mean, we had Uggs and American Apparel. honestly, honestly, honestly dude, what the fuck. theres going to be a whooooole generation of kids born in the last 9 years that have an affinity to Sasquatch Whores™.

- BonerParty

bash.org

Just check out bash.org after years of sad not visiting. So great how a lot of the stuff that was funny back then (bash = super 56k friendly!) is still funny now. Posted a few of my fav quotes after the jump (most of them conveniently stolen from the ‘best of’ list). I miss IRC…