This week, filmmaker James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, The Abyss) hopes to go where only two men have gone before, diving 36,000 feet beneath the sea, to the Mariana Trench, the deepest known place on Earth. It’s basically Mount Everest in the inverse. Cameron plans to make the historic solo journey in The Deepsea Challenger, a 24-foot-long vertical torpedo, built secretly in Australia over the last year eight years. (More on that here.) And when he reaches his destination, he’ll spend six hours shooting 3‑D video of the trench and collecting rocks and rare sea creatures with a robotic arm. Or so that’s the plan.
Above, James Cameron describes his mission in a National Geographic video. Below, you’ll find an animation of the Mariana Trench dive created by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You can track Cameron’s voyage on the NatGeo website and find a detailed description of the actual dive right here.
Terry Gilliam’s funny debut film, Storytime, features three early examples of the Monty Python animator’s twisted take on life. The film is usually dated 1968, but according to some sources it was actually put together several years later. The closing segment, “A Christmas Card,” was created in late 1968 for a special Christmas-day broadcast of the children’s program Do Not Adjust Your Set, but the other two segments– “Don the Cockroach” and “The Albert Einstein Story”–were broadcast on the 1971–1972 British and American program The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, which featured Gilliam’s Pythonesque animation sequences at the beginning and end of each show. Whatever the date of production, Storytime (now added to our collection of 675 Free Movies Online in the Animation Section) is an engaging stream-of-consciousness journey through Gilliam’s delightfully absurd imagination. If you’re a Terry Gilliam fan, don’t miss these other related items:
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Between the simple card opening D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance to the vibrating neon first onslaught of Gaspar Noé’s 2009 Enter the Void, Ian Albinson’s A Brief History of Title Design packs in countless iconic, representative, and otherwise fascinating examples of words that precede movies. As Editor-in-Chief of the blog Art of the Title, Albinson distinguishes himself as just the person you’d want to cut together a video like this. His selections move through the twentieth century from The Phantom of the Opera, King Kong, and Citizen Kane, whose stark stateliness now brings to mind the very architecture of the old movie palaces where they debuted, to the deliberate, textural physicality of The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Lady in the Lake. Then comes the late-fifties/early-sixties modernist cool of The Man With the Golden Arm and Dr. No, followed by Dr. Strangelove and Bullitt, both of which showcase the work of Pablo Ferro — a living chapter of title design history in his own right. After the bold introductions to the blockbusters of the seventies and eighties — Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Alien, The Terminator — but before the freshly extravagant design work of the current century, we find a few intriguingly marginal films of the nineties. How many regular cinephiles retain fond memories of Freaked, Mimic, and The Island of Dr. Moreau I don’t know, but clearly those pictures sit near and dear to the hearts of title enthusiasts.
An elaborate work of motion graphics in its own right, Evan Seitz’s 123Films takes the titles of fourteen films — not their title sequences, but their actual titles — and animates them in numerical order. If that doesn’t make sense, spend thirty seconds watching it, and make sure you’re listening. Doesn’t that calmly malevolent computer voice sound familiar? Does the color scheme of that “4” look familiar, especially if you read a lot of comic books as a kid? And certainly you’ll remember which of the senses it takes to see dead people. This video comes as the follow-up to Seitz’s ABCinema, a similar movie guessing game previously featured on Open Culture. Where that one got you thinking about film alphabetically, this one will get you thinking about it numerically.
Google Street View launched in 2007, giving web users the ability to tour neighborhoods with a series of 360° panoramic maps. The technology seemed pretty straightforward … until people realized that it wasn’t. Since ‘07, techies have figured out some cool and unexpected uses for the software, and Google began using it to offer virtual tours of famous historical sites (Pompeii, Stonehenge and Versailles) and then international museums, ranging from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. (More on that here.) And now they’re pushing the limits of the technology just a bit further.
The video above explains how the project got started and how the images were gathered, while also offering a quick demo of the online experience. You can start your voyage to the Amazon here, or head to Google’s blog to learn more about this project created in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS).
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In an old Victorian railway station in the picturesque village of Alnwick, Northumberland, just South of the Scottish border, is a one-of-a-kind bookstore called Barter Books. The New Statesman called it “The British Library of secondhand books.” A model railway winds along a track laid out across row upon row of bookshelves in what was once the departure hall. During the winter months, customers sit and read by a roaring fire in the old waiting room.
One day in 2000, the store’s co-owner, Stuart Manley, was searching through a dusty box of books that were bought at auction, when he found a folded-up piece of paper at the bottom. He took the paper out, opened it and showed it to his wife and business partner, Mary Manley. Neither of them had seen it before. It said: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” As the BBC’s Stuart Hughes later put it, “the simple five-word message is the very model of British restraint and stiff upper lip.”
It turned out that the poster was one of millions that were printed on the eve of World War II but never distributed. The Manleys decided to frame the poster and hang it in the shop. Before long, customers were offering to buy it, so the Manleys decided to print some copies. Then in 2005 a national newspaper supplement recommended the poster as a Christmas gift and, as Stuart Manley put it, “all hell broke loose.”
Since that time, tens of thousands of the posters have been sold, and the slogan has found its way onto t‑shirts and coffee mugs and has been the inspiration of countless parodies like “Keep Calm and Party On” and “Freak Out and Run Like Hell.” Removed from its original context, the wartime slogan has an uncanny resonance in today’s world. “It’s very good, almost zen,” psychologist Lesley Prince told the BBC. “It works as a personal mantra now.”
For the story of this most improbable of 21st century icons, watch the three-minute film above, which was made by Temujin Doran in collaboration with the design and production studio Nation.
What if you took great works of art, stacked them side by side, and had them tell a story? You’d have a decidedly artful video … and a great teaser for the new artCircles iPad app that brings you collections of images curated by well-known figures including Yves Behar (named one of the “World’s 7 Most Important People in Design”) and John Maeda (president of Rhode Island School of Design). The app is free on iTunes, and if you pick up the new iPad with retina display, you can see where the device really excels. Or at least that was my experience when I gave it a spin.
And while we’re on the topic, here’s another free app worth checking out: “The Life of Art.” Produced by the Getty Museum in LA, the “Life of Art” gives users a chance to understand how objects end up in a museum in the first place. Photography, animations, video, and 360 degree rotations narrate the artistic lives of these objects. Find the app here. H/T Kottke
If you’ve listened to the past decade’s conversations about food, you’ll have noticed that eating, always a pursuit, has suddenly become a subject as well. One flank of this movement of enthusiasts has taken up Michael Pollan, a professor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, as its leading light. Whether they agree or disagree with his principles, intellectually engaged eaters who don’t have at least a basic familiarity with Pollan’s books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food can hardly consider themselves conversant in the food questions and controversies of the day.
Both Pollan’s potential boosters and detractors alike can get themselves up to speed with his latest volume, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, which boils down his culinary weltanschauung into a series of simple sentences, including “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature,” “Pay more, eat less,” and, “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.” Pollan also takes positions on entirely gnarlier issues, such as the efficiency (or lack thereof) of agribusiness, and that’s when animators like Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle provide their enlivening services. In the two-minute video above, Jacimovic and Detalle use pieces of actual food to illustrate Pollan’s critique of large-scale food production.
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As the sun’s 11-year cycle of magnetic storms moves closer to peak intensity sometime early next year, people who live at higher latitudes can expect to see colorful auroras lighting up the night sky. But what would it be like to look down at the auroras, or to move through them? In these striking images from NASA, we find out. Astronaut Don Pettit has been orbiting the Earth since December, as a Flight Engineer for International Space Station Expedition 30, and while up there he’s been taking advantage of the increased solar activity by filming some of the fireworks in the Earth’s magnetosphere. “We can actually fly into the auroras,” Pettit says in this NASA ScienceCast. “It’s like being shrunk down and put inside of a neon sign.” To learn more, you can read the article at NASA Science News, and to watch other episodes in the series, visit the ScienceCasts home page. Find more excellent clips in our collection of Great Science Videos.
Bill Murray, surely both America’s most and least approachable movie star, seems for almost everything yet unavailable for almost anything. Rarely granting interviews, limiting himself (mostly) to roles he actually cares about, and famously working without an agent, he tends to pop up in places you wouldn’t expect him to. Well, aside from Wes Anderson films, where he’s remained a consistent presence since 1998’s Rushmore — but remember how startling it felt to see the star of Groundhog Day turn up in such a relatively small-scale, low-concept, genreless production in the first place? More recently, his extended cameo in Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland has become, in the fullness of time, that picture’s very raison d’être. Not long before that, he appeared in a selection at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival: it wasn’t the latest feature from a Wes Anderson or a Sofia Coppola or a Jim Jarmusch, and in fact not a feature at all, but Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca’s short FCU: Fact Checkers Unit.
Karinen and Sacca star as two lowly fact-checkers at Dictum, a publication solidly in the tradition the United Kingdom calls “lads’ mags.” (“SEX WORK OUTS,” insists one cover blurb.) Faced with a draft of an article on celebrity sleeping tips that recommends drinking a glass of warm milk before bed, “like Bill Murray,” the fellows kneel before a shrine to Alex Trebek — their personal god of facts — don their Fact Checkers Unit windbreakers, and go looking for Murray’s house. Sensing their stumbling presence, Murray finds our heroes huddled in the bathtub almost immediately after they’ve broken in. True to his reputation, Murray has not been easy to find, but true to his public persona, he proves placidly willing and able to hang out when found. After an evening of M*A*S*H, martinis, checkers, and lounge singing, the FCU boys discover the truth about Bill Murray and milk. I won’t, er, spoil it.
I can’t help but admire this casting coup; Karinen and Sacca must have gone through just as much hassle as the FCU did to find Bill Murray. (That, or they happened to know him through some coincidental connection none of us could ever replicate.) Even more impressive, in its way, is how they seemingly crafted the structure of FCU: Fact Checkers Unit to accommodate whichever hard-to-come-by celebrity they could have managed to come by. Perhaps a bigger fan than I knows of some deep, long-established connections between Bill Murray, lad’s mags, M*A*S*H, and warm milk, but nothing stops me from imagining the Kevin Spacey version. In fact, I’d like to see the Kevin Spacey version. Insert a new celebrity each week while holding all else equal, and the concept could become an avant-garde web series.
You can find this film listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
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