A stop motion film made for the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective screening on Dec. 4, 2008. It was screened along with about 25 other films at Glasslands in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Whoopie!

Music: Nattapoom and Lam
Producers: Daniel Paul Ross and Lam Thuy Vo

Mono – Follow the Map

Amazing work by Shinichi Maruyama

KUSHO, the Japanese word for “writing in the sky” features ten large-scale photographs that represent the midair interplay of black Indian ink and water. The phenomenon that Maruyama captures—two liquids colliding the millisecond before they merge into gray—is the result of various actions and devices. The resultant images, which appear to be more painting than photograph, literally deconstruct the material elements of ink drawing and calligraphy, allowing the viewer to see in extraordinary detail chemical and physical processes invisible to the naked eye. The split-second timing necessary to photograph these pictures is made possible by recent advances in strobe light technology, allowing the artist to capture phenomena to within 7,500th of a second. As the art historian Maurice Berger writes of the Kusho series: “Maruyama’s photographs both document and formalistically play on the chance effects of these processes, exemplifying the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. ‘Not knowing what you are going to get impresses me strongly,’ Maruyama observes of the Kusho pictures. ‘We do not know what we have until we look at the actual photograph. If these images are fundamentally graphic, even painterly, they are also a meditation on the material properties of photography. In its spatial illusionism and meticulous detail, the photograph inevitably points to a world outside of itself, a world of visual forms and sensations, always reminding us of its origin in it. Maruyama’s work, however, reminds us that the medium operates on two visual levels simultaneously: the illusionistic, the external realm of spatial depth and perspective, and the abstract, the light, shadow, and texture that resonate on the surfaces of things, including that of the photograph itself.”

Check out more of his work at http://shinichimaruyama.com/

In simple terms, Photosynth allows you to take a bunch of photos of the same scene or object and automagically stitch them all together into one big interactive 3D viewing experience that you can share with anyone on the web.

Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

I found out about Photosynth a couple years ago on TED an I’m hoping it becomes much more popular in the years to come. From Microsoft Live Labs this project was co-created by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. It’s really an amazing application. Photosynth takes everyone’s photos off the internet such as Flickr and compiles similar photos of a specific place together to create a 3D render of the space.

On Google Earth, you are able to view 3D models of some of the greatest cities around the world. Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about.

These 3D models are great but they lack detail and I think that Google Earth and Photosynth should work together to create an amazing user experience. Not only will users be able to see these amazing places but they’ll be able to experience them in great detail. Imagine being able to explore the greatest works of architecture.

Check out more on Photosynth here.

(n) browser, web browser – a program used to view HTML documents
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and many others.

(n) search engine – a computer program that retrieves documents or files or data from a database or from a computer network (especially from the internet)
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Such as Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Ask.com and many others.