CALM attempt to break records and save lives

The charity CALM is trying to raise £50,000 by attempting to break a world record, twice. Two young guys have been asked to try to wear a total of 250 T-Shirts each. The current record is 224 you can watch it here on YouTube. The idea behind the 500/100 campaign, which will be supported by local London paper The Metro and MTV amongst others, is to ask companies to pay £100 to have their company logo on one T-Shirt. Hopefully, this will result in CALM reaching their target (500 T-Shirts=£50,000) and be world beaters at the same time. Check out the teaser film below.

GOOD LUCK CALM!

Lego+Batman=Awesome

It's quite amazing what you can do if you've got a few weeks and A LOT of spare Danish building bricks.... Kudos to YouTube user 'Keshen8' who has matched the trailer for The Dark Knight trailer shot for shot, watch out for the truck flipping over, its priceless.

How to give yourself hand cramp...

I’m currently learning After Effects and I’ve noticed that you can achieve pretty impressive results with even a limited ability but it would never cross my mind to export my movie as an image sequence, print out every single frame (that’s 25 frames per second my friend) cut out all the images by hand and then stitch it back together in the striking way in which Javan Ivey has done.

Pretty awesome.

There's a whole lot of good in those little O's!

Otello, is not just a great name for a breakfast cereal, it’s what Vodafone hope to be a revolution in the way we search for content on mobile devices. The idea is that you could see a poster or read something in a national newspaper, photograph it with your camera phone and then search via the captured image. You would then receive related content via MMS.

This is an exciting prospect and could mark a whole new wave of advertising, that the consumer actually chooses to seek out rather than avoid. Sadly the technology is still very much in its infancy.

Still, to end on an optimistic note, some genius has already cracked it with regards to searching for music . A similar application currently comes as standard on Sony Ericsson handsets.

Emulation is the highest form of flattery...

...Or so it would seem, as some young scamp has created a SNES emulator for their iPhone. By sneakily coding an ap which allows you to use the bottom part of the touchscreen as a SNES remote, with the top part of the phone in 32,768 glorious colours (a la Gameboy advance) allowing us all to Tiger Uppercut our way home on the tube via Streetfighter 2.

Check out the Beta test video, and thanks to Engadget for the heads up.

Become a 3D genius in minutes!

I once tried to teach myself 3D animation, waaaaaaaaay back in University, suffice to say, we didn't get along and i spent the next two and a half years hunched over a light box drawing frame after frame after frame, desperately trying to be the next Matt Groening.

Well now it would seem my months of tracing may finally come in handy. Those crafty antipodeans at ACVT have whipped up some software that allows the user to trace real objects within video footage:

"The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model."

If it's half as quick as the video demonstrates, then it could really help revolutionise small to medium budget 3D projects. No more painful building in Maya, just film it and rotoscope it, job done!

I'd love to know if anyone has used it, please let me know your thoughts.

Jonathan Harris's Whale Hunt

Jonathan Harris is an artist who works out of Brooklyn, New York. He combines anthropology and computer science to tell stories and explore human experiences. He recently went to Alaska to document the hunt of Bowhead Whales by Inupiat Eskimos, by taking photographs at specific times throughout the trip:

"I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat."

The photos themselves are fantastic, however its the system that he has designed for us to view his trip that is most special. You can choose 3 different ways of navigating the story (the mosaic version is really satisfying as a user) and the timeline that has been put in place manages to heighten the experience.

Go to thewhalehunt.org and a good old look, its really well thought out project and i for one have found myself drifting back more than once. Johnathan also has his own site number27.org which has details of his previous work.