Delightfully creative. Surely there is at least a bell ringer in here, just in identifying the different logos. For economics and sociology classes, this is a study in branding, done in very interesting fashion.
Can you use it in class, even at 16 minutes? The language may be too edgy for freshman and sophomores, yes?
This is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.
In this film there are two pieces of licensed music, in the beginning and in the end. All the other music and sound design are original. The opening track (Dean Martin “Good Morning Life”) and closing track (The Ink Spots “I don’t want to send the world on fire”) songs are licensed pre-existing tracks. All original music and sound design is by, human (www.humanworldwide.com)
Brilliant little work even if you can’t use it in class.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Still from “We Are Science Probes.” Full clip of movie below.
In animation, a parable about the dangers of being intentionally ignorant of science. In the not-distant-enough future, a probe from another planet arrives on Earth after the demise of human civilization. Unfortunately, the probes land in Kansas, the land of creationism and woo. The plot thickens.
[My apologies — the version I found did not come with a “pause” button. It will play automatically when you open this post. Fortunately, it’s almost perfectly safe-for-work. If you don’t like the music, turn it off. There is no spoken dialogue in the cartoon. If you wish to pause the playing of the cartoon, right click to get to the Adobe Flash Player controls. To pause the playing click the checkmark next to “play.”]
[Update August 18 — Okay, I give up — 100% of comments I’ve been getting ran against the video without the “start” or “pause” buttons. You’ll have to go see it at another site — here, for example.]
Sure would love this group to turn their creative faculties to hard history — say, the Progressive Movement and Gilded Age. (Probably less chance of commercialization there, and perhaps less chance of awe-striking art, too.)
Jeffrey Robbins, a human character in the animated cartoon series, “The Gargoyles”
The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and prisms reflecting all possible futures. Books are lighthouses, erected in the dark sea of time.
“Follow the Money” is a video summarizing the results from the project by Northwestern University grad students Daniel Grady and Christian Thiemann. Using data from the website Where’s George?, they have been able to track the movement of U.S. paper currency. What can you learn from this? That there are natural borders within the U.S. that don’t necessarily follow state borders, and it can also be used to predict the spread of disease because it maps movement of people within the U.S.
From Maria Popova on BrainPickings.org: This may sound like dry statistical uninterestingness, but the video visualization of the results is rather eye-opening, revealing how money — not state borders, not political maps, not ethnic clusters — is the real cartographer drawing our cultural geography. The project was a winner at the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by the National Science Foundation and AAA.
Pleasant to watch, this time-lapse composition highlights the light pollution aspect of increasing urbanization across the United States. The photographer, a Dutch architect, notes that each streak of light represents a city, as he flies across the American Midwest to touchdown in San Francisco (SFO). It’s a visual definition of urbanization, isn’t it?
On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city!
Luckily the flight was half empty, so I was able to set up an improvised stabilizer mound made up of my bags, pillows, and blankets for my camera to sit on.
We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.
Technique: 1600iso; beginning – 1 (30sec) exposure / 45secs; end – 1 (4sec) exposure / 10 secs; total elapsed time: around 3 hours?
One of my favorite comedy routines from the Master of Voices, Mel Blanc, and his accomplice Jack Benny:
We were talking about this old routine today, and sure enough, we could find it on YouTube.
In 1974, they repeated it for old times’ sake, on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson:
Note: May 22 is the anniversary of the last time Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show, in 1992. George Bush the elder was president then; the Soviet Union had been out of existence only five months. Osama bin Laden was a little-known, former ally of the U.S. in the Russo-Afghanistan war. E-mail was just coming on, cell-phones were rare and expensive, as well as analog, wireless broadband hadn’t been invented. Apple was still making computers far, far behind the IBM-compatible PCs — new chips like the 486 promised a revolution in computing. A lifetime ago.
Why is this post tagged “animation?” You remember, don’t you? Blanc was the guy who did almost every voice in the Warner Bros. cartoons from the classic era. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn . . . as someone noted, remarkable to think Yosemite Sam and Tweety Bird are the same guy.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 