Back in 2004 NASA pointed the Hubble Space Telescope, with newly installed advanced surveying cameras, at an uninteresting dark patch of the sky – purely for curiosity. After 3 months of gathering light readings, astronomers used the results to create the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light.

NASA has now created the above 3D fly-through simulation of that same image to give people more context to viewing the 10,000 separate galaxies in the tiny piece of sky.

A very short but powerful piece, written and directed by Chris Milk showing the flashback of a person on his deathbed. Chris does so well to capture the most moving aspects of the character’s life – both good and bad – and edit them in time with the soundtrack. Much research has been carried out on flashbacks, or life review, and from the following it looks as though Chris got it spot on:

The perception of time appears to be subjective and has been described as from lasting less than a few seconds to instantaneous, though at least one experiencer described it as feeling like half a minute. Accounts differ as to what phase of a near-death experience a review might take place in [...] Subjects frequently describe their experience as panoramic, 3-D or holographic. During a life review, the subject’s perception is reported to include not only their own perspective in increased vividness, as if they were reliving a given episode itself again, but that of all other parties they interact with at each point being reviewed

This shortfilm was the 2008 winner of Sci-Fi London’s 48hr Film Challenge. Teams were given a prop, a line of dialogue and a title for the short film and they had only 48 hours to submit their final product.

The film entitled ‘Factory Farmed’ was created by the team Rebel Alliance, and features some very creative uses of natural settings (00:51). The pace of the editing creates tension which serves to draw the audience into the story – a story of clone soldiers and their fight for the future. A guess would be that the teddy bear was the prop given to the team, and its use in two scenes to link the grown up clone to the adult clone was brilliant story telling (02:04).

Long exposures of bugs under a street light. 156 photos at 4 sec exposure, edited into 12 fps video. A very original idea, shot by Charlie McCarthy.