Monthly Archives: June 2011

Project Idea: A story illustrated with Cinemagraphs

Animation, Art, , , , , ,

Cinemagraphs are beautiful little pictures where most of it is still and some of it is moving.

Let me show, not tell:

Cinemagraph from If We Don't, Remember Me

Yes, this one is moving. Patience.

Our vision works by making comparisons to what it last saw. This is why we are best at seeing things that are in motion. This is why advertisements always have things zooming at us and flashing. Your whole visual system is designed to detect big differences and motion. They are what prey and predator look like.

This is why the best cinemagraphs are subtle, so very subtle.

A Cinemagraph from Ghost World, where only the record and her chest move.

My first thought was: Oh, like Harry Potter.
And then I thought – wouldn’t that be so boss to write a story and have these little gems in it?

So far, I’ve written a story that illustrates itself anew every viewing by grabbing pics from flickr and a poem with moving tentacles. If I have another story, and it fits, I’d like to illustrate it with something still and small and wonderful like these.

Some places I’ve seen great cinemagraphs:From Me To You and If We Don’t, Remember Me.

The Colophon

Books, Design, ,

Entering the Fjord
A special thing in this world: the little note at the end of a book about the typeface. Sometimes there are little stories. At the end of Carl Hiaasen’s “Star Island” you find this:

A Note on the Type

This book was set in Janson, a typeface long thought to have been made by the Dutchman Anton Janson, who was a practicing typefounder in Leipzig during the years 1668-1687. However, it has been conclusively demonstrated that these types are actually the work of Nicholas Kis (1650-1702), a Hungarian, who most probably learned his trade from the master Dutch typefounder Dirk Voskens. The type is an excellent example of the infulential and sturdy Dutch types that prevailed in England up to the time William Caslon (1692-1766) developed his own incomparable designs from them.

Composed by Creative Graphics Inc.,
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics,
Berryville Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan

What a tale! Kis, who travels from Hungary to study under Voskens. The conclusive evidence produced by some painstaking type researchers that establishes the true founder, long forgotten.

These stories at the end of stories are like swimming in a river, then hearing on shore the history of the water, the movements of the glacier that the water flows from, the land that it traveled over.
Approaching the Glacier after a Stormy Sunrise

Book Review: “Star Island” by Carl Hiaasen

Books, Reviews, ,

You have a friend who you see rarely, but always in a time loop. You tell the same stories, the same jokes, you laugh and drink the same beers. It sounds lame, but really these are some of the best friends to have.

Every Carl Hiaasen book is the same book and they are all great. They have righteous rage at evildoers and they have a strange hero that stands strong where others cower. They have a few good people and many many scum. They are funny as hell and they are full of violence and tragedy.

In Star Island you see Skink, the ex governor who lives in the everglades again, but he isn’t at the center of the book. He’s barely in it. There is a good woman, named Ann, and she’s in danger, sort of. There are a bunch of scum, and they behave poorly to each other and the world. A real estate developer has a sea urchin strapped to his scrotum. It’s a Carl Hiaasen book, how could that not happen?

 

Let’s call it a night after this beer, I’ve got to get going. But I hope to see you again next year, buddy.