The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Amazing, but terrifying at the same time.

Spike Jonze, director of upcoming novel-to-movie Where the Wild Things Are speaks about Max Records, the young boy who plays Max in the film. With it being Max’s first acting job at the age of nine, Spike had to come up with unique ways for him to bring his emotions to the surface, including having members of the set stage lightsaber fights off screen.

Robert Clayton Miller has devised a brand new concept for human-computer interaction with the invention of 10/GUI. He has identified the potential in multi-touch screens and has addressed the health and safety aspects that currently plague users today. This is achieved through separation of the touch surface from the screen itself (01:45), opting for a multi-touch surface on the desk where the fingertips are naturally positioned.

He has also devised new gestures (05:54) that are both local to programs and global to the operating system. This allows the user to performing tasks quickly and seamlessly with no effort.

His con10uum concept attempts to organise program windows into a 1D plane (03:45) in order to facilitate the new gestures, but this might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Power users have often devised their own ways/habits of laying out window tiles to group processes together, so being forced into a rigid workflow might be a turnoff. Robert’s concepts have addressed all the needs of the project, but he must ensure the system is as customisable as possible.

Bullet impacts in super slow-motion. At one million frames per second, both the power and weakness of a bullet can be seen. It pierces through vulnerable materials as if nothing is in its way (00:13) and completely liquefies on impact of resistant materials (06:20). Perhaps the most interesting is when piercing glass – even before the full diameter of the bullet is passing through the sheet of glass, an explosion of cracks appears creating an instant firework effect (03:03).

Winner of 2009 and 2008 Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, Mad men has received critical acclaim since its premiere in 2007, and this mini documentary by the guys at FilmFreakCentral.net showcases some examples of the cinematography techniques used by Matthew Weiner and his directors.

Being a period drama set in the 1960s, the directors avoided steady-cam and hand held cameras, opting for dolly shots, as these newer methods did not feel appropriate to the show’s time period.

The use of the pull-outs and push-ins are used heavily to fit the characters into the context of the scene, especially so with the main character Don Draper. The pull-outs are used quite often to box the characters into the angles of the set, such as door frames, walls or mirror reflections, giving a sense of loneliness.

Perhaps the most effective are the numerous shots from behind Don Draper, where the camera is looking over his shoulder at the rest of the scene. This shuts the audience out which builds on his mysterious character, only revealing his face in full camera in times of chrisis.

Bonnie Bassler talked about her research at the TED conference in February revealing how bacteria live in a democracy. They vote on whether to carry out a task based on how many of them are in the same vicinity, tasks like defending our bodies against disease.

Leo Murray and the folks at wakeupfreakout.org have created this animated film about climate change. Using a simple chalkboard feel they manage to send a powerful message about feedback loops within our climate.

This really isn’t about polar bears any more. At this very moment, the fate of civilization itself hangs in the balance.It turns out that the way we have been calculating the future impacts of climate change up to now has been missing a really important piece of the picture. It seems we are now dangerously close to the tipping point in the world’s climate system; this is the point of no return, after which truly catastrophic changes become inevitable.

Researchers at GRAIL, the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory of the University of Washington, are finding great ways to enhance the video quality of a static scene using still photographs.

The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene). Efforts are being made to lift this restriction in future work.

A joint research project between Adobe and the University of Washington have produced fascinating tools to manipulate video. Most interesting of all is the drag tool, shown at 02:34, where the user is able to pull a person’s head in different directions while the video plays. To achieve this an image analysis is performed and different points in the video are tracked, after which the objects are then distinguishable away from the rest of the scene. The person’s head is turned to the side at a different point in the timeline, only the drag tool takes these frame segments and copies it to the current segment of time line. The tool can only manipulate the objects in the video in ways that occur at any point in the time line. You could not, for example, make the character poke his tongue out, as this doesn’t happen at any point during the video. Nevertheless, these are great breakthroughs in video manipulation.

Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.

Their demonstration video shows how fast the process actually is. Once they model the SUV you can tell which is the copy as the real SUV has a reflection from the sun on the windscreen. It is an amazing software.