travelling matte

Via Kottke, we are acquainted with the artistry, which while far from being overlooked was strictly relegated to the background, of the painters who created the matte panels for the Star Wars trilogy and other franchises in an age before computer generated landscapes and digital photo-realistic manipulation. Of course, the technique does not begin with the 1970s space opera but quite a few wide-angle, panning and establishing shots executed with precision allowed audiences to remain in the fantasies being portrayed and stand alone as iconic, virtual sets.

pitchforks

Dangerous Minds introduces us to the genre and its primogenitor of “Disaster Capitalism” with a profile of Los Angeles-based artist Alex Schaefer, who channels his talent into images of mostly local bank branches engulfed in flames. Because of the police-state that America has embraced, charged with protecting the system that has created and sustains the huge underclass of the 99.99%, Schaefer’s works have garnered the unwelcome publicity of the Department of Homeland Security—accusing him of casing joints for robbery or arson. I am sure that many of us could keep the artist occupied for years with commissions of our friendly neighbourhood financial institutions.

i am pretending not to see them, instead i pour the milk

Boing Boing reports that after more than two decades the Frauenhofer Institute will not seek to renew its licensing programme for the revolutionary but now ubiquitous and in some senses obsolete audio format mp3.
It’s worth taking a look back at the origin story of the one-time industry standard whose encoding relied on “psychoacoustics” to achieve more compact sound files by stripping those background noises that didn’t directly contribute to the listener’s experience. Because the human ear is not so attuned to detecting changes in repetitious sound, engineers sampled a track of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner to calibrate the compression, the approximation of the soundscape and make sure that they weren’t sacrificing too much of the recording quality with their algorithm.

bedtime for democracy or where’s my tab?

Dear Leader reportedly was most impressed—of all the features at his disposal in the Oval Office—with a buzzer that he can use to summon a butler to bring him his soft-drink of choice. Delighted how it makes his visitors nervous, it seems a rather pathetic squandering of resources—something that six-year-old Anthony Fremont who can wish people into the corn-field might demand or a ritual befitting (no offense) Pee-Wee’s Playhouse—I just hope it’s not remotely close to any other placebo buttons.