Blogbook

How Dolby is attempting to hack Hollywood by measuring human emotions. Could measuring emotions be the next big thing in entertainment? Via the Verge:

Dolby Laboratories has been around since 1965, and for most people, the company is synonymous to the white label you see at the end of movies that tells you that the sound and video have been remastered in some way. Inside its headquarters in San Francisco, Dolby has over a hundred technical labs, and over the past five years some of the labs have been devoted to a lesser-known project: watching people while they’re watching movies.

Led by neurophysiologist and Dolby chief scientist Poppy Crum, the company has been attaching biosensors to willing subjects and plopping them down on a couch to settle in for an entertainment session. Using EEG caps, heart rate monitors, galvanic skin response sensors, and thermal imaging Flir cameras, the scientists can observe the biophysical and emotional responses that humans are experiencing via media. They’re trying to figure out what kind of videos and sounds make people’s hearts race, what makes their skin flush, and what makes them cognitively engaged, aroused, or maybe even… bored.

Why would Dolby, of all companies, want to do this — especially since it isn’t making video or audio content from scratch? Basically, it’s using this information to better sell its own technology to its Hollywood content partners. The idea being that if it can prove that HDR, surround sound, or a certain color palette, will elicit an emotional response, then the creative content makers are more likely to want to use Dolby tools. This kind of affective computing has been around for decades, but industry experts say that in entertainment it’s becoming even more common. Case in point: both Netflix and Hulu, already very data-driven companies, have used eye-tracking technology in recent years to get a sense of where people are looking within their app interfaces.

In this short film “Have Heart” by Will Anderson, a looping gif has an existential crisis. Via Short of the Week:

Here at Short of the Week HQ we often discuss the differences between a short film that plays well online and a short film that plays well at festivals. There are some films that instantly feel at home in the festival environment, whilst others feel destined to thrive online. Will Anderson’s latest Have Heart, a humourous and relatable tale of a looping animated GIF in the midst of an existential crisis, has already charmed live audiences worldwide and is now looking to blow a few minds online.

With a healthy festival run throughout 2017 and early 2018, Have Heart has received critical acclaim with a ‘Special Jury’ Award at the London International Animation Festival and a nomination for the 2018 ‘British Short Animation’ BAFTA (Anderson already has one BAFTA for his film The Making of Longbird and another nomination for Monkey Love Experiments). But a surely a film centred around one of the internet’s most popular and shared file formats is destined to feel even more at home online?

“It’s a challenging film I think”, Will explains when discussing how he feels his film will be received on the internet. “Its over 12mins, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes online, particularly as it’s talking about, and testing what our attention spans are these days. In terms of how audiences view them when making, I guess I assumed that with this it would be for online first actually. But as the film grew it became more clear that I wanted it to be viewed more cinematically”.

The one certain thing about Anderson’s film though, is that it’s a dynamite premise. Everyone loves an animated gif right? But how about taking one of the little f*ckers and using it as a metaphor for life. It’s one of those ideas, that when you see it, it feels so obvious you can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. It feels both instantly familiar, yet strikingly original!

Will Farrell attempts to understand conceptual art in this hilarious short film for the Hammer Museum’s new “Stories of Almost Everyone” exhibition. Via Adweek:

Museums are often pretty humorless when it comes to their artwork. It’s rare for them to acknowledge that art can be confusing—particularly conceptual art, where the artist’s choices can seem self-indulgent or bafflingly arbitrary.

But the Hammer Museum at UCLA leans into that confusion in an amusing new short film made by some A-list talent in front of, and behind, the camera.

The six-minute spot stars Will Ferrell and Joel McHale as museum goers who are refreshingly honest—and funny—as they tour the Hammer’s new “Stories of Almost Everyone” exhibition. Viewing piece after piece—guided by Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi—the pair are openly bewildered, sometimes verging on disparaging, by the everyday objects that make up the show.

A pair of socks thrown on the ground? A handful of giant telephone poles lying across the gallery room? The museum’s actual mail, unopened and thrown in a corner? Ferrell and McHale try to make sense of these oddities, and more, in what turns out to be an engagingly counterintuitive way to get more people to visit and see the show.

Jeff Leatham is Instagram’s most famous florist, known for his work for the Four Seasons Hotel, Oprah, the Kardashians and others. Via Teen Vogue:

You may not know Jeff Leatham by name, but you probably know his work. And you definitely know his clients. But you should also know this about the florist: he’s over flower walls.

He’d rather shower clients in flowers dripping from the ceiling, he tells Teen Vogue the day before Valentine’s Day, one of the bigger days of the year for his shop. Christmas, and the OTT installations he creates for Kylie and Kris Jenner, among other clients, is bigger. If you’ve seen Kris’s foyer decorations over the past years — or the gifts Kylie showed off on Snapchat when her daughter Stormi was born — you’ll know what I mean. But even with a holiday like February 14 looming over us, Jeff and his assistants seemed happy to work at their own pace.

And his shop, which is located at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, is everything and nothing like what you’d imagine. For starters, it looks like an average workroom, but there are hints that it caters to anything-but-ordinary clients if you take a peek around. Pop music blares in the background, and everywhere you look, foam blocks wait to be covered in flowers. On a side table are five identical rose clusters in heart-shaped formations. Each of them has a corresponding black envelope, its recipient’s name written in gold ink. (All of the names begin with a K.) These flowers are destined for social media stardom, to be Snapchatted and Instagrammed and tagged with a thank you to the man who is sitting across from me.

This vox explainer tries to explain why we imagine aliens the way we do – largely humanoid, often bipedal, with the same number of eyes etc. Via Vox:

No one really knows what aliens look like, but we all have similar ideas about them. It’s often a creature with a big head, long arms and legs, and big, buggy eyes. We see these common images of aliens depicted in movies, books, and on TV shows — which are made by us.

Science fiction stories often explore the relationship between humans and aliens. So we find extraterrestrial creatures endowed with relatable human features. According to Charley Henley, a VFX supervisor who worked on Ridley Scott’s Alien series, “A lot of [Scott’s] designs are tied in with the human anatomy, and I think that is the common theme. We put a lot of humans into the aliens.” In our stories, we naturally anthropomorphize these creatures — so they end up looking, acting, and feeling just like us.

But when you talk to scientists actually looking for extraterrestrial life — and not imagining it — it’s a whole different story. Andrew Siemion, the director of SETI Research Center at UC Berkely, believes that if there’s any life out in space that’s similar to humans, they’d be using technology in a similar way as we do. So he and his colleagues conduct astronomy experiments to detect signs of technology out in space. But that doesn’t mean he has a better idea of what these creatures would look like. He said:

MQFF – the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is on! Lots of great films on show, including its centrepiece film, the highly acclaimed Love, Simon. Check out the films if you can. Tickets are available here. And a review of Love, Simon, via the NYT:

For the most part, “Love, Simon” is an amiable, slick, silver-tongued teen romantic comedy. Set in a particularly idyllic Atlanta suburb, replete with lifestyle wish-fulfillment production design, it’s the kind of movie in which the filmmakers signal their exquisite taste by proxy. (Said filmmakers are the director Greg Berlanti and the screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker, adapting a novel by Becky Albertalli.) For instance, when Simon, the lead character, needs to choose an email address from which to send a series of love letters to an anonymous subject, he adapts a lyric from the Kinks’ classic album “Something Else by the Kinks.” Which Simon enjoys on vinyl, of course.

The reason for the anonymity is that the high schooler Simon is, like his correspondent, gay. He hasn’t come out largely because he’s not sure how to go about doing so, and his continuing reluctance gets him enmeshed with a thoroughly obnoxious weasel of a blackmailer. The blackmailer’s aim is simple: He wants to gain a romantic advantage with one of Simon’s female friends, and while Simon is in a sense too smart for this nonsense, he reluctantly complies.

Cowboyland is a funny, animated Wild West short about a sheriff whose horse has broken down. Who will uphold justice now? Via Short of the Week:

Originally given the brief of ‘animal dressage’ for a school project at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Stumpf decided to turn this theme somewhat on its head by creating what he describes as an “anti-dressage” about a drunken cowboy unable to realize the steed he’s trying to ride is actually a child’s wooden horse. “Since I had little time to prepare, so many things were improvised and I handled them step by step”, he reveals. “Most of the ideas were based on my notebook, full of drunken cowboys, naked women, bandits, and hens”.

With digital 2D animation his usual method of animation, Stumpf decided to challenge himself with Cowboyland and create his drunken cowboy narrative by animating with pencil on paper. With production taking 6-months – 4 months animating, 1 month coloring and scanning and 1 month of post-production – the director admits the process wasn’t without its problems. “After the first version of the film was finished, I was not happy with it”, he says. “It was too long and unclear. So I made some changes, I cut of lot of animation off and reanimated some things”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pF5bV6bFOU

Apple’s new Unlock ad shows a high school girl going on a jailbreaking spree through her school when she realizes she can unlock everything just by looking at it. Via Adweek:

The lead actor plays the role perfectly, and in some ways the story is a tribute to her character’s imagination. Just think about all the things a person could do with such power. But it’s also a savvy way to reinforce a key underlying pitch for the product. A smartphone isn’t just a device. It’s a window to the world, social and otherwise. That’s especially true for younger populations, like the girl in the ad, no matter if that relentless utility might come at the expense of their mental health.

Unintentionally, it’s also a bit disconcerting for what it says about privacy, or the lack of it, in a world ruled by always-connected smartphones and behemoth corporations built on the monetization of consumers personal data. The ad starts with the protagonist casually bursting open spaces designed to safeguard other students’ belongings—a bit of an unnerving metaphor in light of the fishbowl nature of teenage life in the social media age, and the heightened opportunities for bullying that it presents.

That kind of subtext, though, is easy to gloss past in the context of the ad’s upbeat, carefree mood. And the anxieties it represents will fall secondary to convenience, even despite historical high-profile breaches of private photos from Apple accounts (e.g., Jennifer Lawrence), and more recent news about the way a Trump campaign consultancy misappropriated vast reams of personal information from Facebook to create psychographic profiles—with broad political implications.

Enter the Room is an unsettling, immersive AR experience created by Nedd for the Red Cross, about a child’s room during war time. Via Global News:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has launched an augmented reality app called Enter The Room that transports people into the room of a child in a war-torn city.

“There’s something always hard about getting people who don’t experience it on a daily basis to really understand it and, we hope, to empathize with what people experience there,” said Ariel Rubin, who’s in charge of digital content with the ICRC.

“Augmented reality was really an opportunity to try something new and to try to get people to really see something we unfortunately see far too often.”

The app, which is free and available through the Apple App Store, accesses your smartphone’s camera and invites you to walk through a door. What you see on your screen is a child’s room that you can explore by moving your phone around.

The visuals span several years and the environment gets increasingly worse for the child. Lights flicker on and off and bombs and gunfire can be heard. The window and walls of the room are destroyed and a wheelchair appears in the child’s room.

“This idea of being able to create a portal — quite literally a door — where you can walk through and you’re in an really idyllic childhood bedroom — that really could be anyone’s childhood bedroom, mine or yours — and the slow kind of disintegration into a different world, which is all too real for so many people around the world, is that really transformative, really powerful aspect,” Rubin said.