The NFB (National Film Board of Canada) has just released a new free iPhone app that lets you watch hundreds of their films. You can use the app even while you’re away from hotspots by downloading films for viewing during a 24-hour period. The NFB is one of my favorite places on the web for film. They just do it the right way. They make it easy.
This is an excellent way to distribute their huge collection of ground-breaking films.
You can get the app at the iTunes store.
A science fiction web serial! The Mercury Men. This is amazing. I love stuff like this. A group of filmmakers are producing a series of cliffhanger shorts just for the web. The trailer looks very interesting, well-shot, exciting, and perfect for web viewing. These people seem to really know what they’re doing.
The director is Chris Preksta who made the Captain Blasto series. The producer is Kati Lightholder. Mark Tierno, who acted in George Romero’s Day of the Dead and will appear in the upcoming feature, The Road, plays the lead role.
I know it’s going to sound silly, but the Mercury Men Pictures logo with the light bulb is one of the best movie production logos I’ve ever seen. I also love the way the trailer clip uses light and shadow to maximum effect. And the alien is really creepy and looks amazing.
They even have this wonderful poster.
When people do this kind of work on the web they do it with limited means that require them to use real creativity in order to bring their vision to fruition. It lends a sense of adventure and excitement to the endeavor which translates directly to the viewer. This is something that is mostly lacking when you turn to a television. Science fiction is going to have a fantastic golden age because of the web. Keep watching.
Two French photographers, Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier, spent weeks in the desert highlands of Chile, and a week in the Canary Islands, taking photos of the stars. Using a Nikon D3 digital camera, they took thousands of photos of the night sky and then stitched the photos together to make a panoramic view of the Milky Way Galaxy as seen from Earth. The pictures are extremely high-resolution because the photographers took them from some of the darkest spots on Earth, giving unsurpassed clarity of view.
You can see an excellent interactive zoomable version of the image at photographer Serge Brunier’s web site.
You can also see a zoomable version of the image at Gigagalaxyzoom.
The University of Texas has an excellent program online called The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection. They’ve got digital copies of Poe manuscripts, letters, early editions, books that he owned, newspaper clippings, and photos. This image shows an edition of collected poems owned by Poe in which can be seen his handwritten notes and corrections for the publisher. Look at how pissed off he was about the word ‘Raven’ consistently appearing with a lowercase ‘r.’
Halloween is coming. What better way to prepare than by reading some Poe?
Via Boing Boing
Smith Magazine has another Harvey Pekar comic with drawings by Sean Pryor. It’s called Searchin’. I buy every book Pekar publishes. His collected editions keep me fascinated for weeks because I try to read them slowly to make them last.
Pekar makes comic books out of the ordinary. Of course they are much more interesting than anything Marvel has published in forty years. He’s actually one of America’s finest short story writers. No, wait, he is America’s finest short story writer.
I don’t think there is a more significant American comic book writer than Harvey Pekar. Now he is making comics on the web. Smith Magazine offers the first installment of what promises to be a series. It’s called The Pekar Project.
The first story is Pekar & Crumb: Talkin’ ’bout Art. It’s drawn by Tara Seibel.
This might be the best thing on the web today.