This noir-style short film, directed Arev Manoukian of Spy Films, contains some extraordinary post production work as documented in this making-of video. It takes the feeling of love at first sight, and presents it in a visual form.

Nuit Blanche explores a fleeting moment between two strangers, revealing their brief connection in a hyper real fantasy

Sean Stiegemeier travelled to Iceland during the most intense volcanic ash activity and produced a beautiful and powerful timelapse. The inclusion of the aircraft serves as a perfect metaphor of what the volcano threatened.

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

The guys at Adobe have released a sneak peak of a new feature they are developing for Photoshop CS5 called content-aware fill. It is quite impressive in what it can achieve; users are now able to fill areas of an image that are otherwise blank, or replace objects in a photo entirely, with one press of the delete key. The program then analyses all the surrounding pixels and fills the selected area with an approximation of what it thinks should go there.

Users of GIMP are not that impressed as this feature has been possible for quite some time using a GIMP plugin called Resynthesizer, created by Paul Harrison. Professional Photoshoppers are also wary that, while contnet-aware fill will reduce workload greatly in the future, it will probably cause hundreds and thousands of amateur Photoshoppers to add “Graphic Designer” to their resume. Clients already think computers do all the work in design.

A highly imaginative stop-motion animation by Riccardo Crocetta using clay sculpting. The chess game evolves into a full on battle involving Pawns with swords and spears, and even flying unicorns.

The position after 13…Bh3, and the ones that follow, were used in Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the game between Frank Poole and the HAL-9000 Super Computer.

Theo Tagholm has devised a new style of stop-motion animation whereby each photograph seamlessly morphs into the next to produce an eerie, almost ghostly drifting motion. He calls it Still Moving – a combination of stop-motion photography, tilt-shift photography and motion tracking. He hasn’t given much away about the technique, but it uses After Effects.

This is Immersive Media’s 360° interactive video of earthquake hit Haiti. This amazing new concept has been in development for years and uses a multi-lensed camera to capture all angles which are then processed later using their own post production suite. This will revolutionise the way we capture footage.

Immersive Media’s patented flagship, the Dodeca® 2360 camera system, captures high-resolution video from every direction simultaneously. It delivers 100 million pixels at 30 frames per second (2400×1200 pixels/frame) and supports a number of video formats. And at 2.5 lbs., the Dodeca camera head is highly portable and by using available accessories it is easily attached to automobiles, helicopters, backpacks and rigging equipment for any filming requirement.

This picture of a hunting wolf has won Jose Luis Rodriguez the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 award. The picture took years to plan, and he spent long hours patiently observing the movements of packs of wolves. He even sketched his idea out on paper. Speaking to the BBC, Jose said:

I wanted to capture a photo in which you would see a wolf in an act of hunting – or predation – but without blood. I didn’t want a cruel image.

This featurette exposes the immense planning and pre-production work that Wes Anderson and his crew have undergone to bring Roald Dahl’s beloved novel to the big screen. The use of real hair, custom made clothes (01:01) and sets (01:16), coupled with on-location sound recordings (02:00) will give a very authentic look and feel to the final movie.

PhotoSketch is an emerging technology that has been creating a buzz lately. It allows users to sketch a scene that they require, which is then created in photo format using images from the web. The application is able to do this thanks to an array of various algorithms that selects appropriate images, discards unwanted ones and then blends them together to produce a composite, much like an artist would using Photoshop.

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Visit the site (if available) here. Read the paper here.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have extended Microsft’s Photosynth algorithms to produce 3D renders of cities using thousands of Flickr photos. Previously, the algorithms could only handle specific landmarks made from a few hundred photos. This has been improved, so the program can handle more – 4,600 photos are used to produce this 3D render of The Old City of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Venice involved 250,000 images, which took 27 hours to match and 38 hours to reconstruct.

It is hoped that these renders will become more detailed over time, and the characteristics of these ancient cities preserved in case reconstruction is required due to earthquakes or flooding.