Swim Until You Can’t See Land

We salute at the threshold of the North Sea in my mind And a nod to the boredom that drove me here to face the tide and swim (Whoaaaa) I swim (Whoaaa) oh swim (Whoaaa) Dip the toe in the ocean. Oh how it hardens and it numbs. And the rest of me is a…

Temple Grandin: The World Needs all kinds of Minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works — sharing her ability to “think in pictures,” which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of…

Sean Hayes: Garden

The Garden When the morning breaks We will be out walking We will watch the sun Rise above the wall We will ask ourselves What road to take We will catch our hearts You and I decide Where to take our journey How high to fly Love to love our turning You and I Take…

slowly, very well

These were the words spoken by one of my young, student directors as she attempted to motivate her 3rd grade counterparts appropriately during one of our practice shoots:

Art of the CSA

CSAs require 90 seconds or less of our time and, when done well, can be artful while they make great impact. This is a particularly good example, thankfully tipped off by Julian Gough, who we tip our hat to for it:

Education at its Finest

BFIS and Habitat for Humanity in Senegal A small window into the experience of students from the Benjamin Franklin International School in Barcelona who spent a week near Dakar, Senegal in Keur Mbaye Fall, working in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity. “If we wish to teach fish to swim, it helps if we put them…

The Irony of Beauty

This is an astounding metaphor for our culture and the gravity of our situation as lifeforms on a planet we know next-to-nothing about: enveloped by the inelegance of our current technology, with wires and all kinds of ugly schwack running up and down the walls surrounding and protecting him, Ed Lu is aboard the International…

5D Mark II test

My first test of 5D Mark II using 50mm/1.8 II lens. Converted to 24p thanks to Philip Bloom’s (via Denver Riddle) excellent example. Compressed to mobile-friendly format here via MPEG Streamclip limited to 1400kbps with music by your’s truly.:

Go Malamud

Cory Doctorow writes the following about Carl Malamud: Carl is the beloved “rogue librarian” who has done so much to liberate tax-funded government works, from movies to court rulings to the text of laws themselves, putting these public domain works on the Internet where they belong. By the People is an inspirational and education piece…

Neil Postman

From Wikipedia: Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, media theorist and cultural critic, who is best known by the general public for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University. Postman was a humanist, who…

Xuggler

If you’ve ever fumbled around with ffmpeg and other tools, there is a superior alternative I was turned onto today by Paul Gregoire via his blog: Xuggler! The Media Tools are particularly of use to folks like me – how suhweeet is this?

On Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing: Sound as Image

translating information from one sense into another, especially sound to image, is one of the things technology does well case in point is Close Encounters of the Third Kind is this captivating? in the case of Close Encounters it is. however, personally, i can only say that in other cases, such as the one below,…

Maurice Sendak : Where The Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze worked with Lance Bangs on this new documentary about Maurice Sendak, who wrote and illustrated Where The Wild Things Are, which is in post-production having been directed by Jonze. Click on the image to see the trailer for the documentary.