Working on a low-budget indy project and need a dolly shot, but would rather hack something up than spend funds on expensive gear? Maker J.G. Pasterjak’s DIY camera dolly built from scrap angle, skateboard wheels, and allthread might do the trick.
Although I can’t say I cared much for the recent Indiana Jones movie that sparked their latest vogue, nor for the aura of new-agey-ness that generally surrounds them, nor for the outright chicanery that originated the trope in the first place, there’s no denying that crystal skulls are cool. And Lego is cool. You can probably see where this is heading.
While we’re on the subject of great Maker-movies, I feel obliged to mention Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which is a survey of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose métier is finding beauty in the midst of environments radically altered by human activity. If you watch no further than the first shot, you will have seen one of the most amazing takes I’ve ever seen in any movie, ever: It’s an eight minute tracking shot of a Chinese factory floor that just goes on and on and on, and you keep thinking “This place can’t be that big; this shot has to end soon.” And it doesn’t. And the images of the ship-breaking beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, are like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game. Beautiful and frightening.
No person who thinks of him- or herself as a “maker” should miss Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which is loosely based on Judi and Ron Barrett’s eponymous 1972 children’s book. I don’t have kids, but I loved it, and this movie kind of made me want to have one, at least for a day, so I could watch it with her. The scene where Flint is curled up in a waste barrel, lamenting all his failed inventions (“Spray-on shoes!” “Ratbirds!”), while his relentlessly uncreative father looks on helplessly, is particularly choice.
Skynet Symphonic, music composed entirely of audio FX from the movie Terminator 2, Judgment Day. [via io9]
All the buzz about the movie Avatar has me reminiscing about the Optics issue of MAKE. In Volume 14, award-winning filmmaker and digital artist Eric Kurland showed us how to build a 3D dual-camera rig, and make a live 3D video monitor and PSP stereoscope to go with it. Here’s Eric’s intro and backstory, and […]
901 documents the dismantling of the offices of famous U.S. designers Charles and Ray Eames following Ray’s death in 19XX. The Eames office was a kind of maker fantasy-land, with finished and unfinished projects scattered about, meticulously organized tools and supplies, and wonderful little gewgaws in every nook and cranny.
The first few minutes of the film feature a delightful bubbling xylophone soundtrack that is eventually revealed to be coming from these prototype toys designed by the Eameses themselves, and installed in their office for their own amusement.
The towers are wooden boxes six inches square and about 15′ tall, fronted with acrylic, and having sides slotted to accept metal xylophone keys which fit loosely enough to allow free vibration and easy rearrangement. The slots for the keys are angled toward one another, slightly, so that the surfaces of the keys present a series of alternately-sloped platforms for a small hard plastic ball which, when dropped from the top of the tower, will plunk its way slowly down to the bottom, playing a little tune as it goes. The balls are injected using a manual pneumatic piston which shoots them up a pipe to the top of the tower.
