Here is my entry for the just-completed M60, the Montréal 60-Second Film Festival. The festival, in its inaugural year, was a big hit, with tons of great films and far too many people being turned-away at the door.

My entry is really more of a tech demo than a film. It was done entirely with a flatbed scanner, an idea that quickly lost its luster as my cheap $100 scanner slowly imploded under the strain of about 400 scans in the space of a few days, getting ever slower and showing ever more lines and other artifacts of wear.

Shepard Fairy Style Dion Poster

Jack Dylan has his own version of the famous poster. I don’t agree with this sentiment, but it seems a whole lot of people aren’t Dion fans.

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Humans Matter Less

Creator of The Wire, David Simon, gives a lengthy lecture on some of his beliefs that influenced the best show on television in a long time.

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Movie Credits History

A peek into how the movie industry has changed via its credits.

Athens Olympic Venues Unused

Living in a former Olympic City with an unused main stadium we only managed to pay off two years ago (the Montreal Olympics were in ‘76) I’m not at all surprised to see this video showing the unused state of the venues from the Athens Olympics. There’s something about the Olympics that seems to make architects think they can just drop their stadiums and athletic facilities in the middle of a field of concrete with no regard for how they’ll be used for the decades after the games. There’s little wonder that they’re often abandoned and somewhat depressing as soon as all the crowds leave.

The planning committees should have retrofits in mind when they build the facilities to keep them functional when they’re done with - including covering up some of that ugly and barren concrete with something practical.

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Elevator Group Behavior

A classic clip from Candid Camera which shows just how easy it is to get people to bend to group behavior.

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HP Packages New Laptops in Messenger Bags

A simple solution to reducing packaging, so long as those messenger bags are at least somewhat decent in quality.

My Photos of Port in the City

Yesterday, Montreal’s port had an open house. There were tours by train, bus and boat which carried visitors into the heart of the city’s port operations. It was great to see the inner workings of a system which is easy to take for granted. We saw ocean-going freighters being unloaded, and the much smaller lake-going ships readying themselves to take cargo to the great-lake cities of Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Thunder Bay.

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Time Fountain

A relatively simple little fountain that ingeniously seems to bend time.

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Zoom into Concrete

A powers of 10 style video that shows the structures of concrete in great detail, down to a molecular level. Like the original poster, I would love to see this done for other materials.

10 Beautiful Data Visualizations

Some of these are great, but some are pretty purely aesthetic.

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Smashing Telly

A great site of well-curated documentaries, most of them full length. Recently featured: Air Guitar Nation, The Vice Guide to North Korea, Saul Bass, and a documentary about Stanley Kubrick. Of course there’s lots more too.

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Thoughts on Seeing Leonard Cohen Live

Sean of Said the Gramophone with his first article for McSweeney’s - a very Montreal-y take on one of Montreal’s favourite musicians.

Ignore That Logo Under the Tape

Apparently the authorities in Beijing are banning all corporate logos in the olympic venues, except for those of the official sponsors. This means that all sinks, toilets, fire extinguishers, security systems etc. have ugly bits of white tape on them.

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Shipping Container Hotel

A hotel made from stacked shipping containers, which comes out looking like a somewhat conventional hotel. It was apparently much cheaper, faster, and caused less waste on site.

Unfortunately, however, the shipping containers, which form the rooms, are put together in China and shipped halfway around the world. So basically they’ve figured out how to outsource the construction of buildings.

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Amazing Shadow Performance

Looks like it’s from the Conan O’Brien show, but I don’t know anything about this.

I might be late with this one, but it’s still fantastic news. The Canadian National Film Board is getting some of their films online. I don’t know their reputation outside of Canada, but in it they’re particularly known for their work in the fields of animation and documentary.

Pictured is Pas de Deux, by Norman McLaren (Who I coincidentally mentioned this morning). Other notables include Walking by Ryan Larkin, The Log Driver’s Waltz, and my childhood favourite, the very goofy The Big Snit.

Via Matt Forsythe, who worked on the site, and who does nice drawings.

I recently took part in a study for McGill University, where among other things they had to do an MRI of my brain. Seeing as this doesn’t happen too often for me, I politely asked me if they could email me a copy of some of the images when they were done. I thought they had forgotten, but a week or so later some amazing images popped into my email inbox - portraits of my brain.

A slice of my brain as taken horizontally straight through my eyeballs.

One of my heroes, the late, great animator Norman McLaren, once decided to turn an x-ray of his head into an art project by drawing on it. McLaren was an animator, and much of his work was stream of consciousness doodles, so this made a lot of sense. I put my images through photoshop, my tool of choice as a designer, in an effort to make the various structures pop out a bit more and add a little colour.

Here is McLaren’s head compared with mine:

Stewart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, is one of the best design/architecture books I’ve ever read. It rails against the spartan, impractical, and wasteful aesthetic of “magazine architects” — those designers whose buildings are conceived more as a piece of art than a functioning building, like the MIT Media lab by IM Pei pictured on the right.

It’s a study of buildings and spaces after being built, an important and oft neglected facet of the architectural field.

The accompanying BBC series is similarly down to earth and practical. It takes someone with a particular straightforwardness and insight to interview the men who wash the windows on Frank Gehry’s Prague-based Dancing House, rather than the superstar architect himself.

The whole 6-part series has been put on Google Video. Watch parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six, all for free, of course.

Via Kottke.

&$@#*!

Hoefler and Frere-Jones have a post on their blog about those random strings of non-letter characters used to denote swearing. Apparently there is even a name for it:

The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, OED Editor-at-Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.

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House of Cards

Radiohead’s new video is pretty neat. It was done without cameras, using laser-based 3d scanners instead.

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Schwartz’s & Roadsworth Movie Trailers

One makes smoked-meat sandwiches, the other does street art. But both are institutions in my home town of Montréal, and both are now getting documentaries.