A PHOTOGRAPHER FINDS ABANDONED SETS USED IN THE STAR WARSFILMS CRUMBLING IN THE DESERT.
In Star Wars (or Episode IV if you want to be like that), Luke Skywalker spends the first 15 minutes whining about his misfortune for having been born on Tatooine. He can’t go to Beggar’s Canyon to shoot womp rats with pals because he has to work his uncle’s moisture farm. Then he has to clean the new droids before suffering through a perfunctory family meal that ends in a storm-out, his ego bruised and dreams momentarily crushed.
An image from Rä di Martino’s 'Every World’s A Stage' set among the remnants of films sets used in Star Wars (Click Image To Enlarge)
The second half of 1 diptych from "Every World’s A Stage." (Click Image To Enlarge)
The photo set consists of 3 diptychs, with 2 black-and-white anagogic prints depicting the same subject but from different angles (Click Image To Enlarge)
Of course, fate (or destiny, in Lucas’s lexicon) would provide Luke with an escape. The cost would be tragic, and the 17-year old Jedi-to-be would never see his home again. Neither would the filmmakers. Lucas and his crew left the Lars Homestead set to rot after filming wrapped more than 35 years ago. In that time, the domed shell of the homestead sat unprotected from the desert winds, its location known to only a few locals. That is, until recently, when Luke’s erstwhile home was rediscovered by New York-based photographer Rä di Martino.
From "Every World's A Stage" (Click Image To Enlarge)
The Lars homestead - From Rä di Martino’s "No More Stars," which documents the ruins of Luke Skywalker’s home on the fictional planet Tatooine (Click Image To Enlarge)
The sets were abandoned after filming wrapped. Located near Tozeur in central Tunisia, near Algeria, the alien structures are virtually unknown by locals, and some can only be found with coordinates (Click Image To Enlarge)
She found it by accident, she tells Co. Design. A few years ago, when Di Martino was working on a project on the Chott El Jerid, a salt lake in Tunisia, she was scanning the site on Google Earth.
"I saw a tourist photo on Google Earth of a ruin used for the Star Wars films that was attached to the location."
She tracked the structure to somewhere near Tozeur, an oasis city in the country’s central region close to the Algerian border.
Di Martino spotted the sets in the Tunisian desert while scanning Google Earth (Click Image To Enlarge)
Di Martino calls the sets "strange archeological sites," fortuitously preserved by sand and a hot, arid climate (Click Image To Enlarge)
She traveled to the site and documented what had happened to the homestead in Luke’s absence (Click Image To Enlarge)
Tozeur and the surrounding region, it turns out, have served as the backdrop to many Hollywood’s memorable epics, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, another Lucas romp, and The English Patient. Yet, there’s little glamour to be excavated at these abandoned sites. They sit in perfect stillness, at the crest of the Sahara Desert, eaten away by dust and sand.
"No More Stars" (Click Image To Enlarge)
When she traveled to Tunisia in September 2010, Di Martino had only a printout of a satellite image with imprecise markers indicating where the mysterious ruin was supposed to be. Upon arriving, however, she found it nearly impossible to track it down.
"I ended up having to ask some frontier guards close by [in Tozeur] and showed them pictures of the site."
Luckily, one of the guards recognized it and delivered her to the doorstep of the Lars Homestead.
Di Martino found the fictional birthplace of the Rebellion’s savior in tatters. She preserved Luke’s humble digs for posterity in a series of photographs entitled "No More Stars." Di Martino discovered several more Star Wars sets, which she documented in "Every World’s a Stage." In the latter, Di Martino’s lens finds a nomad in the rubble of Mos Espa, a circle of mud-hewn habitations--really, cement-covered MDF--whose walls are festooned with coiled aluminum probosces signifying high-tech gadgetry. Passing through these non-ruins, di Martino says, was surprisingly moving.
"These places have existed only in our imaginations for so long for a lot of us, yet here they were,only now biologically decayed."
COMMENTARY: I wished Di Martino had posted the Google Earth coordinates so I could locate the Tatooine movie set site. I think it's incredible that it is still is fairly good condition in spite of the sand storms of the Sahara Desert.
Paperman is an Oscar-winning short, directed by John Kahrs (Click Image To Enlarge)
DIRECTOR JOHN KAHRS HAD A VISION FOR HIS ANIMATED SHORTPAPERMAN. THERE WAS JUST ONE PROBLEM. THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE IT DIDN’T EXIST YET.
A Pixar film is a beautiful thing. Long after Toy Story’s 3-D novelty wore off, artists refined their techniques, so Up could make us cry. But in these computer-generated worlds full of perfect shapes and gradients, we inevitably lost some of that old Disney magic--the nuance of incredible, hand-drawn lines. John Kahrs thought.
“Isn’t there a way we can bring that hand of an artist back?”
At the time, he was working on his storyboards for Paperman--what has since become Disney’s 2013 Oscar-winning animated short. It was going to be “an urban fairy tale in a beautiful world of light and shadow,” showcasing the latest in CG technology like global illumination and radiocity (light-based physics). But another thought had been haunting him. Working on Tangled alongside legendary 2-D animator Glen Keane (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast), Kahrs watched Keane sketch on top of the CG animations during the production process. Software allowed Keane to reshape 3-D figures with his pen strokes, but ultimately, his beautiful lines were lost in the process. It seemed like such a waste.
It tells the story of any two people who share a moment on a train platform, only to never see one another again (Click Image To Enlarge)
Late in the storyboarding process, Keane’s vision for Paperman was born anew. What if it could be a hybrid of the old and new schools of animation? What if it could be 2-D and 3-D at the same time?
But, without spoiling anything, I have a feeling that things may go different, thanks to a healthy dose of Disneyfication (Click Image To Enlarge)
Kahrs began investigating that possibility in the only place he could, Disney’s R&D department. He lucked out when he met software engineer Brian Whited, who had already been working on a new piece of animation software called Meander that specialized in 2-D interpolation (using software to reason out gaps in sketched animations). With modification and refinement, it just might work.
Watch the nuance of each frame. With 117 shots in the film, Kahrs’s team focused on the composition of each shot (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane says.
“You hear people talking a lot about innovation--innovation comes out of necessity. The necessity in this case was we had to figure out how to have a CG underlayer that dragged these drawn lines on top of it.”
Eventually, Meander proved capable of stunning feats. Today, an animator can draw a frown on a protagonist’s hand in one frame, then, several frames later, draw a smile. Meander can both track the position of that hand in 3-D space, and it can fill in the gaps, turning that frown into a smile, naturally. But much of Keane’s emphasis was tweaking the feel. In classic Disney animation, the character outlines do something called boiling, as the imperfections in cel after cel stack up--and they’re important, subconscious cues to the experience of animation feeling authentic.
Also, aside from the narrative plays on light and shadow, each frame has hints of hand-drawn animation (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane says.
“It’s part of the human hand. Those were the sort of small details that we were big on pushing one way or another.”
Following months of preliminary testing, the team had developed two test shots that they thought were compelling. The last step would be to take a meeting with John Lasseter and the rest of Disney studio leadership and sell them on the aesthetic.
What you see is actually built on an entirely new 2-D and 3-D animation system called Meander, which layers drawings on top of 3-D figures (Click Image To Enlarge)
Keane recounts.
“I think John was a little bit skeptical. He’s a smart guy. He’s seen all these painterly effects. His concern was, does it get in the way of the storytelling, or is it a way of immersing you in this world and telling the story of the characters? Once he saw these tests, they all sat up and noticed that this wasn’t just some cheap trick.”
When your brain tries to dissect each frame, reasoning how someone can possibly draw on 3-D in 2-D, you’re bound for a mental meltdown (Click Image To Enlarge)
Indeed, Paperman is amongst the most stunning animations we’ve ever seen. It combines new aesthetics with standing traditions, marrying the tangibility of CG with the human grit of a pen on paper. And in a poetic turn of technology, it was actually the 2-D animators who got to put the finishing touches on each frame of Paperman. All of those beautiful lines that started the animation process would end it, too.
But ultimately, if you just soak in each frame for the visual paradox that it is, you’ll really enjoy the film (Click Image To Enlarge)
Check out all of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films at Co.Create.
COMMENTARY: The "Paperman" is one sweet short animation film. No wonder it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Disney and Director John Kahrs were able to marry 2D and 3D animation into the same film, and the result is just beautiful.
Disney Director John Kahrs (centere) accepts the Academy Award for Best Short Animation Film for "Paperman" (Click Image To Enlarge)
Courtesy of an article dated February 22, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design
Software created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology amplifies variations in video that are imperceptible to the naked eye, making it possible to exaggerate tiny motions. More telling, it could provide greater credibility for products.
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory graduate student Michael Rubinstein designed the software, along with recent alumni Hao-Yu Wu, Eugene Shih and professors William Freeman, Fredo Durand and John Guttag. The researchers initially intended it to amplify color changes, but in their experiments found it amplified motion as well. The software makes visible the vibrations of individual guitar strings, or the ability to see someone's pulse as the skin reddens and pales with the flow of blood. The new technology could assist online agency executives in creating more attention-grabbing advertising based on MIT's research on amplified emotions.
Eric Gulino, an ad executive at Skiver Advertising, said having the ability to see change without computer-generated graphics could increase the credibility of products because it would not require computer-generated art. He said it is not likely to revolutionize the way agencies create content, but it will open the door to demonstrate things not easily communicated and give consumers a whole new appreciation for products.
Take a car manufacturer, for example. Gulino said. "Maybe the manufacturer had trouble communicating the effectiveness of technology in the car that takes over just before a crash,""The seatbelts might tighten. The brakes are applied and the airbag deployed. It's difficult to show it in real-time. It just looks like a crash."
Rather than a simulation, the manufacturer would show the event as it happens, giving the brand more credibility. Simulation would have been the only way to demonstrate a high-speed crash. Gulino said.
"This technology opens up new avenues for creative folks. It removes the fog from a consumer's perspective."
In a set of experiments, the software amplifies the movement of shadows in one frame of a street sequence photographed only twice, at an interval of about 15 seconds. Amplifying motion rather than color requires a different processing. The smaller the motion, the better it works.
Most of the research has been around imaging and monitoring medical conditions, such as in video baby monitors for the home, so that the respiration of sleeping infants would be clearly visible.
Agencies rarely work with universities like MIT. GroupM has begun to look into the idea, but doesn't work with researchers at the university yet. The ad industry already has a host of tools to create special effects, but even Needham Analyst Laura Martin agrees that
"Academic research demonstrates that diversity maximizes economic value."
While Martin refers to the TV ecosystem, her report on "The Future of TV: The Invisible Hand" highlights the need for more creativity in TV and video content.
COMMENTARY: MIT's technical abstract describes the new video amplification technology as follows:
"Our goal is to reveal temporal variations in videos that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye and display them in an indicative manner. Our method, which we call Eulerian Video Magnification, takes a standard video sequence as input, and applies spatial decomposition, followed by temporal filtering to the frames. The resulting signal is then amplified to reveal hidden information. Using our method, we are able to visualize the flow of blood as it fills the face and also to amplify and reveal small motions. Our technique can run in real time to show phenomena occurring at temporal frequencies selected by the user."
Click Image To Enlarge
You can download a PDF file of the technical whitepaper describing MIT's Eulerian Video Magnification technology by clicking HERE.
Courtesy of an article dated June 22, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Publications Online Media Daily
A new app for Lego allows users to create stop-motion movies with DC superhero characters, edit them, and share them--all on an iPhone.
There are few things the Internet likes better than a Lego-based video. This has not gone unnoticed by the people at Lego, who have just released an app that lets users of all ages create mini movies based on the toy.
San Francisco-based agency Pereira & O’Dellworked with Lego to launch the DC Super Hero Movie Maker app, which is now available on iTunes. The app helps kids (and adult nerds) pretend to be Tim Burton and create stop-motion superhero movies on their iPhones.
"We wanted to create an unique experience that helps bridge the gap between the digital world and the physical world of Lego,"
The agency worked closely with the Lego Super Heroes brand team to develop the concept and design of the app and brought in Portland mobile development and design studio Uncorked to bring the idea to life.
The app turns your phone into a functional edit bay, where you can trim down scenes starring DC Universe Super Heroes, and add title cards and music. The odds are you’ll do a better job of it than Joel Schumacher did with Batman & Robin. And since you won’t be ashamed of the finished product, you can use the app’s easy sharing functionality to show it off.
COMMENTARY: The LEGO® Super Hero Movie Maker by The LEGO Group was released April 18, 2012 and is available for FREE downloading through iTunes. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad.Requires iOS 4.3 or later.
The LEGO DC Super Heroes Movie Maker iPhone app helps your child bring their LEGO DC Universe Super Heroes come to life.
LEGO DC Universe Super Heroes are sold separately (Click Image To Enlarge)
This fun, kid-friendly app brings the whole family together to create a LEGO stop motion movie on the iPhone. Simple tools and guides make it easy to shoot, edit, even score your movie with music. Add one of the customizable title cards and share it online and who knows, you may have the next summer blockbuster in your hands…literally!
LEGO DC Super Heroes Movie Maker App Features:
Add & delete frames to your movie
Choose from 5 different soundtracks
Add a color filter to the camera
Customize one of 11 different title LEGO Super Heroes cards
Save your movie to your camera roll then share with your friends
Click Images To Enlarge
I wasn't aware of this, but The LEGO Group has several other iPhone apps available through iTunes:
Life of George(Free) - The world’s first interactive game combining real LEGO bricks with apps for your iPhone/iPod Touch. Rating: 4.5 stars.
LEGO Photo (Free) - What would your child’s smile look like made of LEGO® bricks? Or your pet hamster? Capture your child’s moments of brilliance in LEGO bricks. Rating: 5 stars.
LEGO® DUPLO® Farm Friends (Free) - LEGO® DUPLO® is a new toy every day designed for boys and girls aged 2-5. Let your child explore the DUPLO farm through the Farm application – there is so much to explore from animal sounds to the big farm machines. Rating: 4 stars.
LEGO® Creationary (Free) - How quickly can you guess what’s being built from LEGO bricks? “Roll” the LEGO Dice to find out which of the 4 randomly selected categories you’ll guessing: nature, vehicles, buildings or things. The game starts building an object from that category out of LEGO bricks, and you have to guess which of the four possible answers is correct by tapping the illustration that you think matches what is being built. The faster you guess correctly, the more points you earn. The more you play, the more difficult the game becomes. Guess incorrectly and the game ends. The Creationary board game is an award-winning build-and-guess LEGO game that challenges the imagination, creativity, building and guessing skills of you, your family and friends with more than 300 bricks and accessories. With the LEGO Creationary app, you can guess what’s being built on iPad, iPhone & iTouch! Rating: 4 stars.
LEGO ® Minifigures Collector (Free) - How to play? Slide the LEGO (R) piece to get the minifigures parts rolling. Match all the 3 pieces of a LEGO Minifigure (head, torso and legs) and make it a part of your personal collection! Rating: 4+ stars.
Courtesy of an article dated April 21, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Create
Marilyn Monroe in her famous dress skirt scene from the film "The Seven Year Itch" (Click Image To Enlarge)
L.A.'s Otoy promises a processing and image capture breakthrough that will allow actors to play their current age indefinitely. But the tech also opens up a range of possibilities for other image-intensive applications. If Otoy’s founders are right, Star Trek’s holodeck isn’t far behind.
Legendary talent agent Ari Emanuel, who is encouraging his WME clients to digitally scan their faces with a technology that allows them to act in roles at their current age for the rest of their life says.
"They never get old."
While the technology to digitally archive a celebrity’s face and overlay it on a younger actor has been around for years, the expensive storage and computing power necessary to render the mammoth data files limited the technology to the fleeting needs of big-budget blockbusters. Now, Otoy, a hidden gem of a startup tucked away in Los Angeles, has solved the processing and storage problem with a breakthrough in processing power, making it economically viable to archive the appearances of actors en masse in their own private bank of youth.
How it Works
Capturing a realistic representation of a face isn’t as simple as snapping a picture in good light. says Otoy’s Academy Award-winning technologist, Tim Hawkins says.
"Skin is a unique material. It’s a little bit like a cloud,--a mesh of tissue and blood vessels reflecting light in a way that gives facial complexion a textured luminosity, over patches of bumpy skin and subtle shadows. Indeed, it’s the lack of detail that gives CGI-created faces a suspicious sense of unrealistic perfection, tipping them into the dreaded "uncanny valley."
Otoy’s solution is to bask a human face in 360 degrees of bright light, which allows a computer to recreate the effects of light at any angle and any intensity of luminosity, from an early-morning sunrise to a full moon. Actors step into a large hollow sphere, surrounded by dozens of high-wattage bulbs. Six high-resolution professional cameras stationed in four corners at eye-level snap photos, as a series of light patterns is projected onto the actor’s face. The surreal, eye-tearing experience only takes about five minutes to capture a blank stare expression (see a video of me unsuccessfully trying to keep my eyes still during the process below).
The magic of that capture technology, LightStage, is how a single actor, Armie Hammer, played both Winklevoss twins simultaneously in the Facebook biography, The Social Network (see before and after photos of Hammer’s LightStage-captured face overlayed on his body-double below).
Click Image To Enlarge
Should an actor want to express more than just a blank stare, the LightStage can capture facial expressions of all contortions. Running through the full catalog of human expressions, the Facial Action Coding System, users act out every possible dramatic and silly expression, as LightStage captures facial muscles stretched in enough ways that a computer can "puppeteer" any emotion in the future.
A Brilliant New Technology
The prodigy behind the technology is Otoy CEO, Jules Urbach, a self-taught computer programmer who designed the software that super-charges a cheap graphics card with the rendering power of a supercomputer. Instead of processing tasks one a time, Otoy’s software opens up the computing pipeline like a multi-lane highway, permitting multiple tasks simultaneously (what programmers refer to as "parallel processing"). Without Otoy’s tech, a supercomputer "typically spends dozens of hours per machine to render just a single [frame] on films likeTransformers," explains Otoy President, Alissa Grainger, who first caught up with Fast Company at Singularity University’s executive training conference in Los Angeles. At Otoy’s ever-expanding headquarters in downtown L.A., I witnessed Transformers-quality rendering in real time on a iPad, streaming from their cloud servers over a Wi-Fi connection.
Even with this impressive improvement in processing power, tech-savvy readers will rightly call out that even a blazing fast Internet connection couldn’t possibly download the huge data file of a cinema-quality image in real time. True. So, Urbach also designed a new data compression algorithm that scrunches the data "several hundreds" times smaller than, for instance, what Sony Image Works used to store CGI from the Spider-Man movies, according to Grainger.
Otoy previously made headlines when it proved what was thought to be impossible, streaming an Xbox game seamlessly between different types of devices.
The implications of this technology are far-reaching. For instance, Urbach estimates that his compressed streaming algorithm could cut Netflix bandwidth needs by roughly half. Given that Netflix hogs up to 32% all all U.S. bandwidth, Otoy could potentially free up a sizable chunk of Internet, if it were to partner with the biggest names in video streaming.
A Business of Possibilities
With the processing and storage problem solved, Otoy’s hole-in-the-wall LightStage studio in Burbank has already become a conveyor belt of A-list celebrities and athletes seeking its digital fountain of youth. Though Urbach is insistent that facial scans be the intellectual property of each individual person, clients still need Otoy’s patented technology to store and stream their digital doubles in manageable chunks. As a result, Otoy has, overnight, become the only business in town for this kind of service, and has attracted some of Silicon Valley’s top investors for a trip down South.
But, for the Otoy team, the real magic of digital doubles is yet to be realized. Legendary actors such as Tom Hanks would be able to play younger parts years after receiving their Medicare cards. Young actors could licenses out their likeness to magazines, rather than have to churn out photo shoots and profiles during the grueling promotion of an upcoming film. Even deceased actors could be digitally resurrected.
Otoy’s biggest business potential may not be in serving the Hollywood elite, but in democratizing access to supercomputing power for the growing industry of web, low-budget, and amateur filmmaking. The company recently acquired a popular rendering software, Octane, and revealed to Fast Company that it is offering up its LightStage data and real-time rendering power as a cloud service, complete with plug-ins for the widely used production software of Autodesk, including Autodesk Maya.
Ultimately, the dream for Otoy’s founder is a Star Trek-like holodeck, where a 3-D virtual environment looks as realistic as the analog world. Such a breakthrough would require more than just LightStage. Otoy is tackling this dream one chunk at a time, and we’ll have more details soon as it releases technology that could disrupt the entertainment, app, PC, and video game industries. Stay tuned.
COMMENTARY: Otoy's LightStage digital capturing and data and real-time rendering is quite an incredible technological achievement. The above videos didn't really demonstrate what the final product looks like. Here's one from Siggraph 2009 showing an individual performer being scanned, then his digitized image "duplicated" several times over, and the image rendered onto a real-world scene. The likeness from the original individual is quite astounding.
To be able to extend the youthfulness of an actor and use his likeness in films twenty years from now would be quite incredible. Imagine if Otoy LightStage technology were available 50 years ago, actors like Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Robert Redford, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Gene Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and many other of my favorite actors from that era could appear in today's films and appear just like they looked back in their prime. I don't know how their voices would be duplicated, but it would be a welcome change from some of the actors that appear in some of the films of today.
Click Image to view the first-ever views of the complete remains of the ship in full profile appearing in the April 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine
At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic disappeared beneath the waves, taking with her 1,500 souls. One hundred years later, new technologies have revealed the most complete—and most intimate—images of the famous wreck.
The wreck sleeps in darkness, a puzzlement of corroded steel strewn across a thousand acres of the North Atlantic seabed. Fungi feed on it. Weird colorless life-forms, unfazed by the crushing pressure, prowl its jagged ramparts. From time to time, beginning with the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, a robot or a manned submersible has swept over Titanic’s gloomy facets, pinged a sonar beam in its direction, taken some images—and left.
In recent years explorers like James Cameron and Paul-Henry Nargeolet have brought back increasingly vivid pictures of the wreck. Yet we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights. Never have we been able to grasp the relationships between all the disparate pieces of wreckage. Never have we taken the full measure of what’s down there.
Until now. In a tricked-out trailer on a back lot of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), William Lange stands over a blown-up sonar survey map of theTitanic site—a meticulously stitched-together mosaic that has taken months to construct. At first look the ghostly image resembles the surface of the moon, with innumerable striations in the seabed, as well as craters caused by boulders dropped over millennia from melting icebergs.
Sonar images of the forward (bow) and rear sections (stern) of the RMS Titanic and the entire debris field of the Titanic lying at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean (Click Images To Enlarge)
On closer inspection, though, the site appears to be littered with man-made detritus—a Jackson Pollock-like scattering of lines and spheres, scraps and shards. Lange turns to his computer and points to a portion of the map that has been brought to life by layering optical data onto the sonar image. He zooms in, and in, and in again. Now we can see the Titanic’s bow in gritty clarity, a gaping black hole where its forward funnel once sprouted, an ejected hatch cover resting in the mud a few hundred feet to the north. The image is rich in detail: In one frame we can even make out a white crab clawing at a railing.
Here, in the sweep of a computer mouse, is the entire wreck of the Titanic—every bollard, every davit, every boiler. What was once a largely indecipherable mess has become a high-resolution crash scene photograph, with clear patterns emerging from the murk. Lange says.
“Now we know where everything is. After a hundred years, the lights are finally on.”
Bill Lange is the head of WHOI’s Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory, a kind of high-tech photographic studio of the deep. A few blocks from Woods Hole’s picturesque harbor, on the southwestern elbow of Cape Cod, the laboratory is an acoustic-tiled cave crammed with high-definition television monitors and banks of humming computers. Lange was part of the original Ballard expedition that found the wreck, and he’s been training ever more sophisticated cameras on the site ever since.
Sonar images of the forward half of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the Northern Atlantic Ocean and image of the ship showing the application forward section (Click Image To Enlarge)
This imagery, the result of an ambitious multi-million-dollar expedition undertaken in August-September 2010, was captured by three state-of-the-art robotic vehicles that flew at various altitudes above the abyssal plain in long, preprogrammed swaths. Bristling with side-scan and multibeam sonar as well as high-definition optical cameras snapping hundreds of images a second, the robots systematically “mowed the lawn,” as the technique is called, working back and forth across a three-by-five-mile target area of the ocean floor. These ribbons of data have now been digitally stitched together to assemble a massive high-definition picture in which everything has been precisely gridded and geo-referenced.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) archaeologist James Delgado, the expedition’s chief scientist said.
“This is a game-changer. In the past, trying to understand Titanic was like trying to understand Manhattan at midnight in a rainstorm—with a flashlight. Now we have a site that can be understood and measured, with definite things to tell us. In years to come this historic map may give voice to those people who were silenced, seemingly forever, when the cold water closed over them.”
What is it about the wreck of the R.M.S. Titanic? Why, a century later, do people still lavish so much brainpower and technological ingenuity upon this graveyard of metal more than two miles beneath the ocean surface? Why, like Pearl Harbor, ground zero, and only a few other hallowed disaster zones, does it exert such a magnetic pull on our imagination?
These new photos, shot using state-of-the-are technology by independent research group Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, provide viewers with a greater understanding of what happened on that fateful April 15, 1912.
RMS Titanic bucked as it blowed nose-first into the seabed, leaving the forward hull buried deep in mud--obscuring, possibly forever, the damage inflicted by the iceberg (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern is captured overhead here. Making sense of this tangle of metal presents endless challenges to experts. (Click Image To Enlarge)
RMS Titanic's battered stern, captured here in profile, bears witness to the extreme trauma inflicted upon it as it corkscrewed to the bottom (Click Image To Enlarge)
Ethereal views of Titanic's bow (modeled) offer a comprehensiveness of detail never seen before (Click Image To Enlarge)
Researchers Kirk Wolfinger, top left, Rushmore DeNooyer, and Tony Bacon put together the 100,000 sonar images of the RMS Titanic for a History Channel documentary (Click Image To Enlarge)
For some the sheer extravagance of Titanic’s demise lies at the heart of its attraction. This has always been a story of superlatives: A ship so strong and so grand, sinking in water so cold and so deep. For others the Titanic’s fascination begins and ends with the people on board. It took two hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to sink, just long enough for 2,208 tragic-epic performances to unfold, with the ship’s lights blazing. One coward is said to have made for the lifeboats dressed in women’s clothing, but most people were honorable, many heroic. The captain stayed at the bridge, the band played on, the Marconi wireless radio operators continued sending their distress signals until the very end. The passengers, for the most part, kept to their Edwardian stations. How they lived their final moments is the stuff of universal interest, a danse macabre that never ends.
But something else, beyond human lives, went down with the Titanic: An illusion of orderliness, a faith in technological progress, a yearning for the future that, as Europe drifted toward full-scale war, was soon replaced by fears and dreads all too familiar to our modern world. James Cameron told me.
“The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble. There was such a sense of bounty in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down.”
A portion of RMS Titanic's steel hull that broke off when she sunk. Shows several portals and hundreds of rivets (Click Image To Enlarge)
The mother of all shipwrecks has many homes—literal, legal, and metaphorical—but none more surreal than the Las Vegas Strip. At the Luxor Hotel, in an upstairs entertainment court situated next to a striptease show and a production of Menopause the Musical, is a semipermanent exhibition of Titanic artifacts brought up from the ocean depths by RMS Titanic, Inc., the wreck’s legal salvager since 1994. More than 25 million people have seen this exhibit and similar RMST shows that have been staged in 20 countries around the world.
I spent a day at the Luxor in mid-October, wandering among the Titanic relics: A chef’s toque, a razor, lumps of coal, a set of perfectly preserved serving dishes, innumerable pairs of shoes, bottles of perfume, a leather gladstone bag, a champagne bottle with the cork still in it. They are mostly ordinary objects made extraordinary for the long, terrible journey that brought them to these clean Plexiglas cases.
I passed through a darkened chamber kept as cold as a meat locker, with a Freon-fed “iceberg” that visitors can go up to and touch. Piped-in sighs and groans of rending metal contributed to the sensation of being trapped in the belly of a fatally wounded beast. The exhibit’s centerpiece, however, was a gargantuan slab of Titanic’s hull, known as the “big piece,” that weighs 15 tons and was, after several mishaps, hoisted by crane from the seabed in 1998. Studded with rivets, ribbed with steel, this monstrosity of black metal reminded me of a T. rex at a natural history museum: impossibly huge, pinned and braced at great expense—an extinct species hauled back from a lost world.
The RMST exhibit is well-done, but over the years many marine archaeologists have had harsh words for the company and its executives, calling them grave robbers, treasure hunters, carnival barkers—and worse. Robert Ballard, who has long argued that the wreck and all its contents should be preserved in situ, has been particularly caustic in his criticism of RMST’s methodologies. Ballard told me.
“You don’t go to the Louvre and stick your finger on the Mona Lisa. You don’t visit Gettysburg with a shovel. These guys are driven by greed—just look at their sordid history.”
In recent years, however, RMST has come under new management and has taken a different course, shifting its focus away from pure salvage toward a long-term plan for approaching the wreck as an archaeological site—while working in concert with scientific and governmental organizations most concerned with the Titanic. In fact, the 2010 expedition that captured the first view of the entire wreck site was organized, led, and paid for by RMST. In a reversal from years past, the company now supports calls for legislation creating a protected Titanic maritime memorial. Late in 2011 RMST announced plans to auction off its entire $189 million collection of artifacts and related intellectual property in time for the disaster’s hundredth anniversary—but only if it can find a bidder willing to abide by the stringent conditions imposed by a federal court, including that the collection be kept intact.
I met RMST’s president, Chris Davino, at the company’s artifacts warehouse, tucked next to a dog grooming parlor in a nondescript block on the edge of Atlanta’s Buckhead district. Deep inside the climate-controlled brick building, a forklift trundled down the long aisles of industrial shelving stacked with meticulously labeled crates containing relics—dishes, clothing, letters, bottles, plumbing pieces, portholes—that were retrieved from the site over the past three decades. Here Davino, a dapper, Jersey shore-raised “turnaround professional” who has led RMST since 2009, explained the company’s new tack. Davino said.
“For years, the only thing that all the voices in the Titanic community could agree on was their disdain of us. So it was time to reassess everything. We had to do something beyond artifact recovery. We had to stop fighting with the experts and start collaborating with them.”
Which is exactly what’s happened. Government agencies such as NOAA that were formerly embroiled in lawsuits against RMST and its parent company, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., are now working directly with RMST on various long-range scientific projects as part of a new consortium dedicated to protecting the wreck site. Dave Conlin, chief marine archaeologist at the National Park Service, another agency that had been vehemently critical of the company says.
“It’s not easy to thread the needle between preservation and profit. RMST deserved the flak they got in years past, but they also deserve credit for taking this new leap of faith.”
Scholars praise RMST for recently hiring one of the world’s preeminent Titanic experts to analyze the 2010 images and begin to identify the many unsorted puzzle pieces on the ocean floor. Bill Sauder is a gnome-like man with thick glasses and a great shaggy beard that flexes and snags on itself when he laughs. His business card identifies him as a “director of Titanic research,” but that doesn’t begin to hint at his encyclopedic mastery of the Titanic’s class of ocean liners. (Sauder himself prefers to say that he is RMST’s “keeper of odd knowledge.”)
When I met him in Atlanta, he was parked at his computer, attempting to make head or tail of a heap of rubbish photographed in 2010 near the Titanic’s stern. Most Titanic expeditions have focused on the more photogenic bow section, which lies over a third of a mile to the north of most of the wreckage, but Sauder thinks that the area in the vicinity of the stern is where the real action will likely be concentrated in years to come—especially with the new RMST images providing a clearer guide. Sauder said.
“The bow’s very sexy, but we’ve been to it hundreds of times. All this wreckage here to the south is what I’m interested in.”
In essence Sauder was hunting for anything recognizable, any pattern amid the chaos around the stern. He told me.
“We like to picture shipwrecks as Greek temples on a hill—you know, very picturesque. But they’re not. They’re ruined industrial sites: piles of plates and rivets and stiffeners. If you’re going to interpret this stuff, you gotta love Picasso.”
Sauder zoomed in on the image at hand, and within a few minutes had solved at least a small part of the mystery near the stern: Lying atop the wreckage was the crumpled brass frame of a revolving door, probably from a first-class lounge. It is the kind of painstaking work that only someone who knows every inch of the ship could perform—a tiny part of an enormous Where’s Waldo? sleuthing project that could keep Bill Sauder busy for years.
In late October I found myself in Manhattan Beach, California, inside a hangar-size film studio where James Cameron, surrounded by dazzling props and models from his 1997 movie, Titanic, had assembled a roundtable of some of the world’s foremost nautical authorities—quite possibly the most illustrious conclave of Titanic experts ever gathered. Along with Cameron, Bill Sauder, and RMST explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, the roundtable boasted Titanic historian Don Lynch and famed Titanic artist Ken Marschall, along with a naval engineer, a Woods Hole oceanographer, and two U.S. Navy architects.
Cameron could more than hold his own in this select company. A self-described “rivet-counting Titanic geek,” the filmmaker has led three expeditions to the site. He developed and piloted a new class of nimble, fiber-spooling robots that brought back never before seen images of the ship’s interior, including tantalizing glimpses of the Turkish bath and some of the opulent staterooms.
Cameron has white hair and a close-clipped white goatee, and when he’s wound up on Titanic matters, a certain Melvillean intensity weighs on his brow. Cameron has also filmed the wreck of the Bismarck and is now building a submarine to take him and his cameras to the Mariana Trench. But the Titanic still holds him; he keeps swearing off the subject, only to return. He told me at his Malibu compound.
“There’s this very strange mixture of biology and architecture down there—this sort of biomechanoid quality. I think it’s gorgeous and otherworldly. You really feel like this is something that’s gone to Tartarus—to the underworld.”
At Cameron’s request, the two-day roundtable would concentrate entirely on forensics: Why did the Titanic break up the way she did? Precisely where did the hull fail? At what angle did the myriad components smash into the seabed? It was to be a kind of inquest, in other words, nearly a hundred years after the fact.
Cameron said.
“What you’re looking at is a crime scene. Once you understand that, you really get sucked into the minutiae. You want to know: How’d it get like that? How’d the knife wind up over here and the gun over there?”
Perhaps inevitably, the roundtable took off in esoteric directions—with discussion of glide ratios, shearing forces, turbidity studies. Listeners lacking an engineering sensibility would have extracted one indelible impression from the seminar: Titanic’s final moments were hideously, horrifically violent. Many accounts depict the ship as “slipping beneath the ocean waves,” as though she drifted tranquilly off to sleep, but nothing could be further from the truth. Building on many years of close analysis of the wreck, and employing state-of-the-art flooding models and “finite element” simulations used in the modern shipping industry, the experts painted a gruesome portrait of Titanic’s death throes.
The ship sideswiped the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward watertight compartments to the sea. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty. The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the ship had begun listing to port, they could not reclose the massive door against gravity, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in through the gangway.
By 2:18, with the last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.
Cameron stood up and demonstrated how it happened. He grabbed a banana and began to wrench it in his hands:
“Watch how it flexes and pooches in the middle before it breaks—see that?”
The banana skin at the bottom, which was supposed to represent the doubly reinforced bottom of the hull, was the last part to snap.
Once released from the stern section, the bow shot for the bottom at a fairly steep angle. Gaining velocity as it dropped, parts began to shear away: Funnels snapped. The wheelhouse crumbled. Finally, after five minutes of relentless descent, the bow nosed into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.
The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, descended even more traumatically, tumbling and corkscrewing as it fell. A large forward section, already weakened by the fracture at the surface, completely disintegrated, spitting its contents into the abyss. Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Hull plates ripped out. The poop deck twisted back over itself. Heavier pieces such as the boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off “like Frisbees.” For more than two miles, the stern made its tortured descent—rupturing, buckling, warping, compressing, and gradually disintegrating. By the time it hit the ocean floor, it was unrecognizable.
Sitting back down, Cameron popped a pinched piece of banana in his mouth and ate it. He said.
“We didn’t want the Titanic to have broken up like this. We wanted her to have gone down in some kind of ghostly perfection.”
Listening to this learned disquisition on the Titanic’s death, I kept wondering: What happened to the people still on board as she sank? Most of the 1,496 victims died of hypothermia at the surface, bobbing in a patch of cork life preservers. But hundreds of people may still have been alive inside, most of them immigrant families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America. How did they, during their last moments, experience these colossal wrenchings and shudderings of metal? What would they have heard and felt? It was, even a hundred years later, too awful to contemplate.
St. John’s, Newfoundland, is another of Titanic’s homes. On June 8, 1912, a rescue ship returned to St. John’s bearing the last recovered Titanic corpse. For months, deck chairs, pieces of wood paneling, and other relics were reported to have washed up on the Newfoundland coast.
I had hoped to pay my respects to the people who literally went down with the ship by flying to the wreck site from St. John’s with the International Ice Patrol, the agency created in the disaster’s aftermath to keep watch for icebergs in the North Atlantic sea lanes. When a nor’easter canceled all flights, I found my way instead to a tavern in the George Street district, where I was treated to a locally made vodka distilled with iceberg water. To complete the effect, the bartender plopped into my glass an angular nub of ice chipped from an iceberg, supposedly calved from the same Greenlandic glacier that birthed the berg that sank Titanic. The ice ticked and fizzed in my glass—the exhalations, I was told, of ancient atmospheres trapped inside.
I could still get a little closer, physically and figuratively, to those who rest forever with the ship. A few years before the disaster, Guglielmo Marconi built a permanent wireless station on a desolate, wind-battered spit south of St. John’s, called Cape Race. Locals claim that the first person to receive the distress signal from the sinking ship was Jim Myrick, a 14-year-old wireless apprentice at the station who went on to a career with the Marconi Company. Initially, the transmission came in as a standard emergency code, CQD. But then Cape Race received a new signal, seldom used before: SOS.
One morning at Cape Race, amid the carcasses of old Marconi machines and crystal receivers, I met David Myrick, Jim’s great-nephew, a marine radio operator and the last of a proud line of antique communicators. David said his uncle never spoke about the night the Titanic sank until he was a frail old man. By that point, Jim had lost his hearing so completely that the only way the family could converse with him was through Morse code—manipulating a smoke detector to produce high-pitched dots and dashes. David said.
“A Marconi man to the end. He thought in Morse code—hell, he dreamed in it.”
We went out by the lighthouse and looked over the cold sea, which crashed into the cliffs below. An oil tanker cruised in the distance. Farther out, on the Grand Banks, new icebergs had been reported. Farther out still, somewhere beyond the bulge of the horizon, lay the most famous shipwreck in the world. My mind raced with thoughts of signals bouncing in the ionosphere—the propagation of radio waves, the cry of ages submerged in time. And I imagined I could hear the voice of the Titanic herself: A vessel with too much pride in her name, sprinting smartly toward a new world, only to be mortally nicked by something as old and slow as ice.
COMMENTARY: Everytime I watch the movie "Titanic," I get goosebumps. It's such an incredible love story emersed with the grandeur of the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage that would end so tragically. Let's hope we never have to experience another tragedy like the Titanic.
Director/Producer John Cameron did an incredible job filming the events of that terrible night in the original film "Titanic." Cameron is bringing back "Titanic" in all her glory in 3D this time, and the film will be shown for a limited engagement beginning in April 2012. Hope to see you there. Now the Titanic 3D Official Trailer.
For an authentic history of the RMS Titanic, check out the Titanic Stories , RMS Titanic, Inc and Titanic Historical Society websites. These sites are the best of several and include some incredible content including images and videos of the ship, her passengers, the survivors and many other interesting facts about Titanic.
Courtesy in an article of the April 2012 issue of National Geographic Magazine and an article dated March 9, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail and an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in the Daily Mail
INSPIRED BY "CINEMAGRAPHS," FLIXEL LETS YOU SNAP PHOTOS AND TRANSFORM THEM INTO HIP ANIMATIONS WITH JUST A FEW SWIPES.
If you’re as big a fan of Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck’s animated-GIF "Cinemagraphs" as we are, you’ve probably wondered: How could I make some of those myself? To use Apple’s trademarked-but-annoyingly-useful phrase, there’s an app for that. It’s called Flixel, and it transforms your iPhone’s camera into a Cinemagraph-making marvel.
Flixel co-founder Mark Homza told Co.Design.
"We were so enthralled by Cinemagraphs but burdened by the complexity and time required to create them. With Flixel, we wanted to propose a creative experience that blended simplicity, artistic integrity, and pushed the boundaries of iPhone imagery."
Indeed, part of what made Burg and Beck’s Cinemagraphs so bewitching was their subtlety -- and the technical skill that no doubt went into achieving it. How can you automate and package that process into an app that any schmoe can use?
Flixel animated image of a train moving past a passenger platform (Click Image To Enlarge)
Amazingly, Flixel pulls this feat off. Simply snap a photo just like you would normally, and the magic elves inside the app capture a handful of video frames, process them, and even image-stabilize everything for you. But the real genius of Flixel’s interaction design reveals itself when it’s time to animate the GIF. Rubbing your fingertip over the image animates just that portion of the frame, so you can create subtle effects like a candle flame flickering or a cat twitching its tail. (Note: Flixel didn’t invent this clever interaction, but does refine it in comparison to similar apps like Kinotopicand Cinemagram.) If you want to get fancy, you can choose starting and ending frames for your animation, decide to repeat it or loop it back and forth (the latter avoids distracting "jump cuts"--a nice touch), and even apply Instagram-esque filters (some of which cost money--well played, guys).
The app bungles the "first impression" user experience a bit by displaying a social-network-like feed of other people’s Flixels when you launch the app. (I’d have preferred to see the camera function as the default launch screen--I don’t want to miss capturing any Cinemagraph-worthy moments.) But other than that minor quibble, using Flixel is a delight. The results aren’t as pristine-looking as Burg and Bell’s Cinemagraphs, but the ease of making them with Flixel far outweighs any other concerns. It’s the first photo-enhancing app I’ve seen since Instagram to really add unique value to the cameraphone experience. Your first Flixel might be crude, but you’ll have so much fun doing it that you’ll immediately want to make another one. And another, and another. Cat photos, baby pics, and party shots may never be the same.
Flixel of someone holding a camera and taking pictures while another individual uses his smartphone (Click Image To Enlarge)
So is Flixel just a crass "product-ization" of Bell and Burg’s innovative art form? To their credit, Mark Homza and CEO Phillipe LeBlanc acknowledge right on Flixel’s homepage that the app was "inspired by Cinemagraphs." Homza says.
"The app in a way, is an homage to [Bell and Burg’s] work. The goal is to propagate the art form and make it accessible to a mainstream audience. It would be an honour to work with them and get their feedback."
Despite these good intentions, some will inevitably say Flixel is a ripoff. Others--like me--will say even if it is, who cares? This app is awesome.
Update: Some of our commenters have mentioned that if Flixel is "a ripoff" of anything, it’s earlier apps like Cinemagram and Kinotopic. I checked both of them out and while the interface conventions of these apps are very similar, Flixel’s feels uniquely well-designed. Kinotopic forces you to jump through account-setup hoops before you can even experiment with the camera--a big UX fail. And Cinemagram’s interface, while responsive, is rough and one-dimensional compared to Flixel. Cinemagram is presented as a video app rather than a photo app, so it lets you record long clips--and forces you to throw most of that material away before creating an animated GIF. (Then why let me record that much in the first place?) Flixel’s snapshot-like UX makes more sense: you capture a photo--one moment--and paint video-like effects onto it in a nonlinear, opt-in interface (versus Cinemagram’s card-like interface, which pushes you through every step, including optional afterthoughts like color filtration, whether you want to or not).
Animated image of snow falling on the ground using Cinemagram's app (Click Image To Enlarge)
Animated image of a cat scratching his ear using Knotopic's app (Click Image To Enlarge)
COMMENTARY: That's what I call a cool iPhone app. Wish I could tryout this new on-the-fly GIF-making app. Too bad that I'm a loyal BlackBerry phone user, have been for years.
Courtesy of an article dated March 26, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
Social Media Predictions for the 84th Academy Awards
While you're filling out your Oscar ballots and reading blog predictions for Sunday night's Academy Awards, one site has already put together the list of winners. Sort of.
Flowtown, in partnership with Column Five, compiled this awesome infographic predicting the top Oscar winners for the night using 120,000 messages from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, YouTube and more according to Content Strategist, Kelsey Cox at Column Five.
Click Image To Enlarge
Categories covered include Best Picture, Best Actor,Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress with winners denoted by an Oscar.
The Winners
The three hour plus 84th annual Academy Awards telecast provided few surprises:
Meryl Streep's the Best Actress award (her third) for her role in "Iron Lady."
"The Artist" and "Hugo" both won five Oscars each.
Michael Hazanavicius won Best Director for "The Artist."
Jean Dujardin won Best Actor for "The Artist."
"The Artist" won Best Picture. The first silent film to win the award since the 1920's.
Below is Moviefone's full list of the 84th Academy Award Winners.
Best Picture: "The Artist" Best Actor: Jean Dujardin, "The Artist" Best Actress: Meryl Streep, "The Iron Lady" Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, "Beginners" Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, "The Help" Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, "The Artist" Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, "The Descendants" Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, "Midnight in Paris" Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, "Hugo" Best Art Direction: Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schavo, "Hugo" Best Costume Design: Mark Bridges, "The Artist" Best Makeup: Mark Coulier and J. Roy Helland, "The Iron Lady" Best Foreign Language Film: "A Separation" Best Editing: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" Best Sound Editing: Phillip Stockton and Eugene Gearty, "Hugo" Best Sound Mixing: Tom Fleischman and John Midgley, "Hugo" Best Documentary: "Undefeated" Best Animated Feature: "Rango" Best Visual Effects: "Hugo" Best Original Score: Ludovic Bource, "The Artist" Best Original Song: Bret McKenzie, "Man or Muppet" Best Live Action Short: "The Shore" Best Documentary Short: "Saving Face" Best Animated Short: "The Fantastic Flying Books Of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
Official Movie Trailers
Below are the official movie trailers for the big winners at the 84th Academy Awards:
Slideshow: Highlights from the 84th annual Academy Awards
Click Image To View 84th Academy Awards Interactive Slideshow
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As predicted, "The Artist" won Best Picture at this year's Oscars.
COMMENTARY: Looks like the social media movie fans got most of their Academy Award predictions wrong. The only correct winning predictions were "The Artist" for Best Picture and Meryl Streep for Best Actress. The members of the Academy of Motion Pictures who actually voted for Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Supporting Actor obviously had a mix of opinions.
I did predict that "Hugo" would win five Oscars. But, "The Artist" was a total surprise to me even though the social networks predicted it would win Best Picture. I didn't see the movie, so I can't judge its merits, but the members of the Academy must've thought very highly of the film. The official movie trailer was very entertaining. The fact that it was a silent film apparently did not play any bearing on their voting decision.
I was very disappointed in the performance of Academy Awards host Billy Crystal. He wasn't funny. His jokes missed the mark. He was quite boring if you ask me. He was not "marvelous." I did love the performance by Cirque du Soleil very much. Christopher Plummer, at 82 years of age, finally won an Oscar!! Just love his body of work and surprised he had not won an Oscar before.
When they ran the pictures and videos of filmmakers, editors, music composers, entertainers, actors and actresses who past away last year, they included Steve Jobs. Why? The studios and networks never trusted him, and I doubt they trust new Apple CEO Tim Cook much either. They think that Apple will try to do what it did to music.
Overall, 84th Academy Awards lacked any excitement so I give it a C+.
Social platforms are still in their Precambrian era, with new services emerging and consolidating large audiences almost faster than they can be tracked. Meanwhile the social category as a whole is on the cusp of becoming the dominant form of online content, accounting for 16.6 percent of Internet minutes spent as 2011 drew to a close
A wide-ranging report from comScore found that while No 1 Facebook continues its impressive growth - reaching three out of four U.S. users - relative newcomers like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+ are evolving and growing at a steady clip.
Twitter held the no. 2 spot in the category as of December, when it drew 37.5 million unique visitors. Throughout 2011, it had vied with LinkedIn for second position in social.
LinkedIn's was no 3 as of December, when its audience hit 33.5 million unique visitors, but Twitter was solidly ahead, putting some distance between LinkedIn.
And then you have the upstarts. In six short months, Google+ reached 20.7 million U.S. visitors in December (it claims more than 90 million accounts), while Tumblr hit 18.8 million. Perhaps most impressive of all is Pinterest, which has drawn 8 million visitors - many of them female - without the promotional power of Google's network of products. The site had barely shown up as a blip on comScore's screen last summer.
ComScore expects social activity to overtake portals as the most engaging online activity in 2012.
Facebook, as everyone knows, is the category leader, but its audience size only tells half the story. comScore said.
"The more significant growth trend…was in average user engagement, which jumped 32 percent in the past year to just over 7 hours per visitor in December."
The "2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus" report also touched on trends in digital display ads, video, search and other areas. A few of the juicier bits:
Dramatic Rise in Video Activity
The U.S. online video audience cracked 100 million in December, 43 percent higher than one year ago. The number of video streams grew as fast, rising 44 percent to 43.5 billion in December.
YouTube commands half of this burgeoning market, and many of its content channels displayed significant user loyalty. That bodes well for its big investment in premium channels.
Meanwhile, the volume of in-stream video ads grew 20 percent to 7.1 billion in December 2011.
Google Becomes a Top Advertiser
Many familiar brands graced comScore's roll call of biggest online advertisers. AT&T continued to hold the top spot, delivering 105.8 billion impressions last year. Verizon was also huge, as were brokerage Scottrade and its parent Experian Interactive.
New on the list was Google, which delivered in excess of 40.4 billion display impressions for its own products, including Chrome, Offers, and Google+.
The year also saw more brands deliver a billion or more impressions. ComScore says 145 did so in Q4, a rise of 38 percent compared with the year-ago period. The number of advertisers delivering 3 billion or more impressions also grew - from 26 to 46.
Bing Makes Gains
Bing finally surpassed Yahoo's search market share, claiming the no. 2 spot among search engines. Its market share is now about 15 percent, and it powers about the same percentage for Yahoo.
E-Commerce Blooms
The year saw a big, and by now well documented, bump in e-commerce spending. U.S. travel and retail online spending rose 12 percent to $256 billion. In the fourth quarter alone, retail e-commerce spending reached $50 billion.
Webmail, IM Decline
As social gained popularity, other categories lost. Instant messaging fell 40 percent year over year; online personals dropped 40 percent; and job search sites declined 21 percent, says comScore.
Web-based email also suffered notable declines among certain age groups. Its use was down 31 percent among teens age 12 to 17, and down 34 percent among 18- to 24-year-olds.
Stated the report.
"While the significant decline among teens represents a continuation of a similar trend observed last year, that 18-24-year-olds are now moving away from webmail suggests a larger and more permanent shift in email usage may be occurring."
COMMENTARY: Google+ hit 100 million users on February 1, 2012, but it has a lot of work to do in order to increase site stickiness. The has been in existence for only about nine months, and is still experimental, so it has a lot of upside as Goole gathers data to make improvements to increase engagement and stickiness. I think by the end of 2012, you will start seeing a huge uptick in minutes online.
Courtesy of an article dated February 9, 2012 appearing in ClickZ
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