a quality education

Probably a better promo for the Yale MFA program than anything marketing could have come up with:

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

But let’s be honest, shall we? Real men don’t need cameras to dance in front of.

I wish I was an MFA at Yale. The different environments on display are so alluring.  And I’m just jealous of those dancin’ skills, which seriously improve over the course of these 100 days.  A great playlist, too, which is available if you click through the link at the top.

an interview with the creators of ‘Escape from City 17′

An interview with the creators of the $400 viral Half-Life 2 short film, as cross-pollinated all over the internet by now:

So what’s the exact breakdown of that C$500 figure? “The equipment and software isn’t included in the budget because we already owned it from previous projects,” David Purchase told me by email. Rather it refers to the money spent on live-action elements, like the authentic-looking uniforms worn by the brutal Combine enforcers. “The costumes, and used/broken airsoft guns made up the bulk of the budget. There was no crew. We weren’t paid for the hours of time we put into it.”

If you haven’t seen this ridiculously cool short video, check it out:

This is the sort of thing I’d love to work on.  Which is why I’m learning After Effects.  But how long until I can make something like this? Ekkk.

The Credit Crisis, Illustrated + More

I found this to be an excellent and enlightening summary.  Only, what do I know, I’m just some dummy.  Perhaps someone more involved in finance could tell if this truly represents reality?  Only, I’m not quite convinced they know what’s going on, either:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo. (via Sullivan)

Makes me want to dig up After Effects and get to work.  This sort of type-heavy visualization is always a treat to watch, but I wonder if it’s already jumped the shark.  After the intro to the 2007 film The Kingdom (apologies for the crappy cam video, youtube was mostly turning up Kingdom Hearts 2 cinematics), how much longer until this is as big a cliche as the fully justified, multiple-weight all-caps Gotham type made famous in Obama campaign pronouncements?

But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and before we burn it I know I’d like to dance a few jigs – because it does look like an awful lot of fun.  Anyway, design nerd-ism aside, what are some other topics that could be more fully brought to life or better explained with animation like this? Maybe, I don’t know, dating?  I know there are a lot of people out there that could use some pointers…

[We could get really down into detail there, including topics to avoid in conversation (star wars), tips for initiating and sustaining conversation (not beginning with star wars), physical intimacy tutorials (kind of like that part when Luke shot the photon torpedo down the ventilation shaft...), et cetera.  Then we could really start making money hand over fist when we released another illustrated tutorial explaining the phenomenon of Star Wars to the uninitiated.  Excellent.]