An open letter from Pixar animator Austin Madison released earlier this year. via Animator Letters Project (more…)

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I’m raising a glass to Paul Baran.

50 years ago he dreamed up what became the fundamental architecture for the internet. He went to AT&T to sell his vision. They didn’t get it. He was telling a digital story in an analog world. Here’s the story he told Wired in a 2001 interview.

“I went over to AT&T headquarters — one of many, many times — and there’s a group of old graybeards. I start describing how this works. One stops me and says, “Wait a minute, son. Are you trying to tell us that you open the switch up in the middle of the conversation?” I say, “Yes.” His eyeballs roll as he looks at his associates and shakes his head. We just weren’t on the same wavelength…They didn’t understand digital. It was mostly generational, but there were young analog guys who had the same problem. “

His vision 50 years ago is such a part of our modern world, that it’s tough to imagine life without it. Real innovation is scary to the status quo. Big ideas can be threatening. It can also difficult to tell the difference between out-of-this-world innovation, and insanity. Ed Wood was a dreamer and had big ideas just like the young patent clerk Albert Einstein. Sometimes it’s tough to tell who you are. Plus, timing is critical. If you have a vision, you have to believe. Test your ideas… be as scientific as you can about it. But when the status quo dosen’t know what you’re talking about, don’t assume they’re right. It may be a good sign you are onto something.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” Decca Recording Co. in a 1962 rejection letter to the Beatles.

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The eminently talented Masashi Kawamura and the gang from Sour have released this interactive music video to follow up their highly acclaimed Hibi No Neiro.

Driven by passion, this team fearlessly breaks down the conventional boundrys of what a music video can be. No video embed here. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. Like the Wilderness Downtown project from Chris Milk and Arcade Fire, these projects challenge the conventional ideas in media and certainly in Masa’s case are driven by a passion to innovate regardless of what they have for resources. These past couple of projects I’ve posted, have been an enormous inspiration to me, and I hope will be to you.

If there’s one thing to take away from all this, it is that passion and motivation, not the abundance of financial resources is the only real currency. By using the resources you have, and combining them with passion and drive, you can make something truly powerful and inspiring.

That’s all they did. You can do it too.

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I love what’s possible these days with some passion and sweat equity. Here’s some brilliant work from a UK filmmaker, which as he put it was, “Made with no money, just a little time and a lot of passion.”

And here’s the peak behind the scenes:

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There are some incredibly cool and innovative experiments coming out of the Kinect. There’s an wonderful spirit of alchemy here and I can’t wait to see the projects born out of and influenced from these experiments.

Creativeapplications.net summed it up eloquently here:

“With new technology come new landscapes. These may appear in the form of users, social groups, tools and work but in some kind of form they are connected, relating to one another and feeding from one another. Kinect is describing a new form of landscape, driven by arrangement of points derived from our physical environment.”

From CreativeApplications.net. For a more comprehensive list of interesting kinect projects, check out their list.

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There’s something extraordinary about this video. Can you guess what it is? The images are lush and beautiful and suggest a passion for cinematography and lighting but that’s not it. Here’s a clue- it’s the latest from Alex Roman, who brought us The Third & Seventh last year. The answer below the fold…

Silestone — ‘Above Everything Else from Alex Roman
(more…)

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“If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other.”

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Oton Bačar shows off the 7D’s slow motion capabilities using Twixtor in After Effects. Everything was shot in 720p 60fps.

Hat tip: @MNS1974

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