Cartoon Brew has an interesting post about a animator who has used After Effects, a post-production effects editor and video compositing tool, to add balloons into well-known films. The results are very well done and very funny. I have added them all below:
My wife and I just celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary recently and it is hard to believe that during a sizable chunk of our married life the US has been at war in Iraq. My daughter is as old as the war and just celebrated her 4th birthday. (If the war was a child it'd be jumping on the couch, and telling potty jokes)
It is interesting to see how, beyond the daily potpourri of images of violence and political talking heads, we visualize the war, the costs of war, the other, and, really, how the visual becomes a playground where we think through all facets of our situation trying to make sense of nothing less than our political reality.
Here are two illustrations of that:
The Iraq Veterans Memorial is a video tribute to fallen soldiers in the vein of the Vietnam memorial or the AIDS quilt project.
Rageh Inside Iran is a BBC documentary that gives the viewer a very complex, nuanced view of Iranians.
UPDATE:
Additional videos to check out: Hometown Baghdad follows several young Iraqis as they struggle to survive in Baghdad.
My wife Lipi sends this one: Normal Room is social media/design culture taken to its breaking point. The premise of the site is this: upload pictures of your house to share it with a global audience.
That's it.
What results is, as Lipi describes, strangely fascinating. What I find interesting is that people make no attempts what-so-ever to clean or organize the rooms they are showing and a meta-reading of the whole experience of viewing several hundred pictures of various rooms in homes all over the world is that we, as citizens of that giant condominium we call planet Earth, pretty much all have really bad taste.
There are, of course, some anthropological investigations begging to be done. How, for instance, does the Irish family squeeze into that teeny bathroom, get the door closed, pull down their pants, and successfully navigate to the toilet without falling into the shower? Or what is wrong with the Brazilian kids? Why is their bedroom so frighteningly clean?
Billed as an inspirational interior design resource, Normal Rooms does little to inspire thoughts about design but instead is the internet equivalent of driving through the neighborhood on a winter's evening and peering the windows of your neighbors' homes.
If some of the web 2.0 has been about getting the average person to share their creative enterprises with an international crowd of like-minded people then I think it is important to note that what seems to matter to most is not cutting-edge aesthetics or the latest design fashion. It is, instead, comfort and the grind of everyday life.
And piles of books and magazines, apparently.
