Stephan Tillmans’ photographs of tube televisions the moment they are switched off.
Mad Men set photos. Someone really ought to do a gallery of ‘laptops from the future’ in stages and film sets. Previously. (via Boing Boing)
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A ten-minute montage of great quotes from The Wire. Half of which are totally incomprehensible without subtitles. Shiiit…
As you probably know, since the 50s that most films are shot for a 1.85 or even narrower (2.2, 2.35, 2.85, etc) aspect ratio, meaning an image much wider than the 4x3 (1.33) aspect ratio of ordinary television sets. So while films on television should obviously be letterboxed (meaning the addition of black padding outside the film frame), stupid viewers everywhere (I’m sorry, there’s no other way to put it) demanded the ‘stolen’ area of their TV sets back, which gave rise to the practice of doing ‘pan and scan’ reedits of the films, with the frames (and many times the actual editing) readjusted for 4x3 screens.
I absolutely hate watching pan-and-scan films. You keep all of your TV set’s pixels in use and instead it’s the actual film that’s being stolen (as if advertising breaks weren’t annoying enough). This video pretty much explains it all.
I’ve watched the entire series of Tim Hunkin’s The Secret Life of Machines (page includes torrent links, you can also stream it here). Not only it is a example of really good television that is entertaining and educational, it’s also a reminder of a simpler, gentler era when TV documentaries could be concise, without all those constant “later on… but first”, “after the break…” that are the scourge of cable television documentaries. Despite being twenty years dated, SLOM does a great job at explaining the fundamental building blocks of today’s technology. When technology is deliberately mystified and made to seem like magic (I’m sick of those docs that promise to tell you How It’s Made and then just show you some assembly line without explaining much), The Secret Life of Machines may very well be essential viewing.
I’ll now watch Why Things Go Wrong, which also seems pretty interesting.
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