video – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:34:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Getting lost in the world of Laputa http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2011/09/02/getting-lost-in-the-world-of-laputa/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:27:13 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=1063 I am certainly not an anime expert – but after being in Japan for a couple of months last year I started developing an appreciation for this form of art. In particular, I fell in love with the work of Studio Ghibli, the Tokyo-based animation film studio which includes award director Hayao Miyazaki.

The other day I watched for the first time “Laputa: Castle in the Sky” [wikipedia | imdb], the first film created and released by Studio Ghibli in 1986. I found the cartoon so inspirational and touching that I though I’d post something about it.

Laputa 3

The themes that emerge are not at all new in Studio Ghibli’s anime: the love for a primordial dimension where nature still remains untouched; the celebration of the human values of honesty and respect for others; the relationship between technology and ecology; the fascination with sci-fi, futuristic worlds. All of this conveyed in two hours of Indiana Jones-style adventure..

[check out this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3AN0eDxE7E I couldn’t embed it due to copyright violation in some countries!]

Other information and reviews are available on this site, including:

  • Washington Post
    “Miyazaki’s world, so full of color and life, is always just across the borderline of imagination”
  • Stomp Tokyo’s Review
    “Although the basic storyline (intrepid young hero rescues princess) is as cliche as can be, the world Miyazaki has created here is unlike any you’ve seen in any animated film, especially one made by Disney. Vaguely post-apocalyptic, this (mostly) pre-industrial society has produced a mix of simple farm life and fabulously complex propeller-driven flying machines. Laputa itself is wondrous.”
  • Anime World
    This story is one of the best I have ever heard and it is what makes this film really stand out. Twisting and turning, never giving you any clues as to what will happen next and keeping you constantly surprised and engaged, Laputa is a magnificent tale, the likes of which only Miyazaki could create.

    • Laputa 1

    Laputa 2

    ]]>     2189     The Digital Story of Nativity and other inspiring stuff http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2011/01/08/the-digital-story-of-nativity-and-other-inspiring-stuff/ Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:31:58 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=975 The Digital Story of Nativity. This is quite amazing, make sure you go full screen!

    …

    Smories.com: original stories for kids, read by kids. It’s kind of cute for adults too btw..

    Screen shot 2011-01-08 at 00.14.55.png

    …

    Visual art by Helmut Smits. After seeing the picture below I hurried to my desk looking for some mask tape!

    Screen shot 2011-01-08 at 00.15.27.png

    …

    Deviant Art Muro: a drawing application that works in all browsers – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to create cool looking sketches!

    Screen shot 2011-01-08 at 00.22.46.png

    ]]>     975     A video that may convince you that LISPers are a bit crazy http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/10/29/a-video-that-may-convince-you-that-lispers-are-a-bit-crazy/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:25:26 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=860 Actually it’s not just a video, there’s a book too:

    Land of Lisp, Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! by Conrad Barski, M.D.

    …

    ]]>     860     Gong – How To Stay Alive video clip http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/07/05/gong-how-to-stay-alive-video-clip/ Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:52:51 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=793 Never really listened to Gong before, although I knew they’ve been part of that british psychedelic movement that includes, among others, Ozric Tentacles… well I really loved the clip below, looking forward to know them better.

    ]]>     793     DjangoCon Europe 2010 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/06/30/djangocon-europe-2010/ Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:58:45 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=725 >>]]> Picture 1.png

    DjangoCon returned for its second year in Europe; the first as a wholly community-supported conference. The conference website contains a lot of info and interesting links (even an iPhone app), but in my opinion the coolest thing is the freely available videos of the conference!

    >>>

    ]]>     725     Back to iMovie HD … http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/06/10/back-to-imovie-hd/ http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/06/10/back-to-imovie-hd/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:35:31 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=711 Have you ever edited a movie using the new iMovie 7 or 8? Well I tried a couple of times, and it’s a dreadful experience.

    I’m not the only one who noticed it.. (actually probably among the last ones). This article from the NY Times is from 2007…

    Last week, Apple released a new version of its iLife suite—its $80 package containing iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. The suite also comes preinstalled on every new Mac.

    The enhancements in iPhoto, iWeb and GarageBand are great. But iMovie ‘08 is an utter bafflement.

    The new iMovie was, as Apple admits, designed primarily for throwing together movies quickly. It lets you scan through a clip to see what’s in it, isolate the good parts, and rapidly drop them into a sequence.

    But iMovie 6 was just as good at those tasks; you could scrub through, chop and drag its clips just as easily. Meanwhile, iMovie ‘08 is incapable of the more sophisticated editing that the old iMovie made so enjoyable.

    The new iMovie, for example, is probably the only video-editing program on the market with no timeline—no horizontal, scrolling strip that displays your clips laid end to end, with their lengths representing their durations. You have no indication of how many minutes into your movie you are.

    Enough complaints. The good news is, you can time-machine iMovie and get back to the previous version even if you’re running OS 10.6. Two simple steps:

    1. download a copy of iMovie HD6 from here. If the url is no longer valid, just google it and you’ll surely find another mirror.

    2. Open up the iMovie package using the ‘show package contents‘ command (by right-clicking on it), double click on the ‘Archive.pax.gz’ file so to extract its contents, then finally look into the new folder for the familiar iMovie icon. Copy it somewhere else on your HD and get rid of all the other files. Now you’ve got iMovie 6 too!

    Screen shot 2010-05-07 at 08.09.25.png

    …

    ]]>     http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/06/10/back-to-imovie-hd/feed/ 1 711     Finally some more livecoding http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/04/02/finally-some-more-livecoding/ Fri, 02 Apr 2010 04:55:11 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=656 I’ve been experimenting a bit with picking random notes from a scale using various voices simultaneously, so to create interesting sounds textures… and what came out is maybe a bit too random at the beginning, but getting more interesting towards the end imho …

    Oh yeah, the song is called ‘My Misty Morning’.

    ]]>     656     Understanding Google’s BigTable http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2009/06/18/understanding-googles-bigtable/ Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:34:46 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=212 BigTable is google’s proprietary data storage system – and that’s what you’ve got to learn if you want to work with the Google Application Engine (a web application environment by which you can make use of Google’s powerful IT infrastructure free of charge).

    The talk below (from Google-IO 2008) helped me a lot in understanding the core modeling concepts needed to work with BigTable apis….

    …

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