TED Talk: The Truly Soft Side of Software

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference is a place where Big Thinkers gather annually to inspire and be inspired. I’ve been going through their online archive of talks for my own amusement and education, and sharing with you ones I found to be particularly interesting.

Back in June, I highlighted Jakob Trollback’s talk on Rethinking the Music Video. This time around, I want to highlight a “music video” that’s considerably in the more abstract domain. In this presentation, Golan Levin discusses the custom performance software he writes which allows him to improvise music with accompanying visuals. We’re strictly in the experimental realm here (the soundtrack is 60s-era avant-garde electronic music - listen with your speakers on to annoy your cubemates), but sometimes, great inspiration comes from the very fringes of an art. Note: The visuals are initially very simplistic (the piece is titled “Scribble”), but become much more complex about 4:40 into the video.

Aside from Levin’s TED Talk, I strongly recommend you check out the Flong Interactive Art site (pictured above) which contains a number of interesting audiovisual works by Levin and his friends - there’s lots of cool interactive visual pieces on there.

TED Talk: The Web and TV, a Sibling Rivalry

A parallel conference to TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is the EG (Entertainment Gathering) conference, whose goal is “making information entertaining & entertainment informative.” This talk from last year’s EG gives a history lesson on the development of both television and computers, which are of roughly the same age. Although it gets bogged down at times (you could skip ahead from the 5 minute mark to 11 minutes, unless early computers gets your geek up), it does contain numerous interesting nuggets, such as the interview with tweeners where they explain why thing think television is “optional” in their lives, parallels between the tech and messianic movements, how TV was supposed to kill radio, how crayons were used to create a proprietary media platform, Microsoft’s initial pooh-poohing of the information superhighway, and other amusing anecdotes as well as important lessons in the different business models between the web and television.

(While blogging on a web site about media creation, I can’t help but note technically that they failed to removed the interlacing from the video reference materials, and that the audio equalization is fatiguing to listen to. Plus not all technologists understand pacing in entertainment. Fortunately, the medium isn’t the entire message.)

The Art of the Opening Title

One of our favorite motion graphics design jobs is creating the opening title sequence for movies and television shows (a few of the projects we’ve worked on can be seen here). Title design is a place where typography and animation meet to both convey a story and set a mood.

I’ve recently stumbled across a lovely web site called Art of the Title. Every week, the writers dissect an opening title sequence with still frames and a large (typically 800x336) QuickTime movie of the title, plus the ability for visitors to leave comments and carry on the discussion. It does not contain just recent titles; they will often reach back a few years or even decades to show off a design that particularly resonated with them in either a good or bad way. There is also a well-organized index down the left side of the dozens of titles they reviewed in the past.

By the way, in the next couple of weeks we’ll be adding an article to our CMG Keyframes blog on type resources (including links to numerous type foundries), plus writing an article for Artbeats.com with common typesetting tips and errors - so stay tuned!

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