A guy in Boston took 3,000 photos over the course of three days and then stitched them together into this excellent stop-motion video:

The music is “Dry Lips,” by Lightspeed Champion.

[via The Big Noob, again.]

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categories: TV and Video

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Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I’d never seen anything like it. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren’t in the movie. Quaint, I know.

According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn’t want the outtakes to be included in the movie, “since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers’ failure to win that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.” I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows.

[via Coudal Partners.]

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categories: Film, TV and Video

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Brad Smith of The Big Noob went to Hawaii for a vacation in January, and his Flickr set has a bunch of excellent photos from the set of Lost. He was there during the writers’ strike, so production was shut down, and he was able to wander into or near locations that have played a major role in the show, including Jacob’s shack, the main beachfront camp, and the pier where Kate, Jack, and Sawyer were captured at the end of season 2. Here is Mr. Eko’s church:

I hadn’t seen a single episode of Lost until last November, and then I watched the first three seasons in three weeks. It was fun, and now I’m all caught up. Here’s my little Lost obsession, and I haven’t seen any major analysis of this anywhere: What’s with the whole doppelgänger thing involving Juliet, Penny, and Jack’s ex-wife? They all look very similar, and it’s clearly not an accident. The resemblance has been noted in a few places, even on the show itself, in passing, but the larger issue of what this means has not been deeply explored, as far as I know. What does it mean?

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categories: TV and Video

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A Brooklyn-based photographer named Izaz Rony is offering a new kind of portrait service: You tell him where you’re going to be on a particular day, and what you’ll be wearing, and he shows up in the general vicinity and snaps your picture, without you knowing exactly where he is or when he’ll be there. “Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject,” he writes on his site, MethodIzaz. “The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.”

[via Khoi Vinh.]

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categories: Art and Design

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Here’s an excellent treat, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake that two Mississippi kids made over the course of eight years in the 1980s. A few weeks ago a complete copy was floating around on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. Here’s the first ten minutes. (The audio level is low throughout, so you may have to turn up the volume.) Enjoy.

Jim Windolf wrote about the remake in the 2004 Vanity Fair feature “Raiders of the Lost Backyard.” That same year, the producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to the boys’ story, and Daniel Clowes is apparently working on a script (or he was at one point, anyway).

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categories: Film, TV and Video

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For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It’s long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer’s voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else.

To name just one application of this technology (and I’m sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles’ “Because” from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles.

Celemony’s (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

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categories: Music and Audio

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Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz:

More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra!

Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

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categories: Music and Audio, TV and Video

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After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio, Science and Technology

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From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—“the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

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categories: Art and Design, Film

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This hit the web a few days ago and hasn’t gone wide yet, which is a surprise, because it’s hilarious. It’s the latest top show at Channel 101, the L.A.-based web-video operation also responsible for such brilliant goofballery as House of Cosbys, Yacht Rock, and The ’Bu. This is by excitable House of Cosbys creator Justin Roiland, the funniest writer-actor-animator-director-pervert-scatologist working on the web today. Ladies and gentlemen, 2 Girls, 1 Cup: The Show.

(If you’re unaware of the 2 Girls, 1 Cup phenomenon, make sure you read this Wikipedia entry before deciding to watch this.)

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categories: TV and Video

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A music video featuring “trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects.” Filmed in one take. I can’t stop giggling when I watch this.

[Not sure where I found this; Design Observer, I think.]

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categories: Art and Design, TV and Video

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Here’s a nice little short film about Paul Rand (1914-1996), the brilliant graphic designer most famous for designing logos for IBM, UPS, and other major corporations:

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categories: Art and Design

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Hello. You may notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to Panopticist over the last month or two. I’ve widened the layout, locked many page elements to a grid (thanks partly to the awesome Blueprint CSS framework), and upgraded Movable Type to version 4, among other things. If anything seems horribly awry, you might email me at hearst [at] nyc.rr.com and let me know.

I’ve also turned comments on, starting with this post, so chime in if you feel like it.

And now, a post:

After a couple of years of occasional YouTube searches, I recently found one of my favorite old Sesame Street songs. It’s called “Lower-case N,” and it’s a melancholy but ultimately redemptive ballad about a lonely letterform.

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categories: TV and Video

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