Burn, plant, illustrate, video

[undyingking]

• Went the other night to see Burn after Reading, the new Coen brothers film. We thought it was pretty good fun: just a fairly shallow piece of fluff really, but there's nothing wrong with that. The galaxy of stars (Malkovich, Swinton, McDormand, Pitt, Clooney) all put in entertaining turns. It kind of cops out and runs out of steam at the end, but it wold be harsh to resent it for that.
• The Plantbot moves autonomically around in search of light for its precious cargo. Excellent idea! I think ideally you'd want it to also rotate so the heaviest part of the plant was facing away form the light, so it grows evenly, but maybe its drunkard's walk will achieve evenness anyway. (Via curiosity_ips.)
• Last night we were at a get-together of children's book illustrators organized as part of the National Year of Reading, with which T's involved. Michael Foreman, Anthony Browne and Nick Butterworth were the headline names, but plenty of lesser luminaries too, plus some publishers, writers, etc. They mostly talked about the industry, which was interesting for me but may have been deathly for the kids who were present. Also, a bit strange that the three main speakers were all middle-aged blokes, when there are plenty of young people and women in the field. They were all engaging enough guys, but there was definitely a tone of "these young art-school types today, never been taught to draw properly, we had to come up the hard way" etc.
  It was in Suffolk's Council Chamber, which is pretty new and had a rather snazzy mike system, like a sort of automated "speaking object" for those of you who were ever at OUSFG discussions or similar. If you want to speak, you press the button on your mike, but that doesn't interrupt the current speaker until they press their own button to signal they've finished: so only one mike is live at any given time. The good bit though is that there are three big projection screens on the walls of the room, fed by a handful of ceiling of cameras that are slaved to the mikes -- so as the "live mike" changes, the live camera switches to the one with the best view of that mike, which pans and zooms as required, and the projections all automatically go with that so as to display the current speaker most effectively. Maybe this arrangement is commonplace these days, but I hadn't seen it before and thought it was pretty neat.
• I expect everyone's seen this reinterpretation of A-Ha's Take on Me video by now, but just in case you haven't -- you should, it's very very funny.
  

Comments

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

- A well done piece of fluff, though. Yes, the end was a bit anticlimactic as in, "huh, that was it?" but it worked. I certainly left the cinema with a smile on my face.

- The cat in one the plantbot photos looks very suspicious. :o) The bag/hoodie is neat but if you start off with the bag, where do you put the things that were in the bag when you need the hoodie?

- That system sounds rather nifty indeed.
Hm, would T have any contacts in the childrens' book publishing world? ginasketch, an illustrator (and one of those young art school types), is trying to get her foot into the industry but keeps running against walls...

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I wanted to see some video of the cat's reaction...

T is at the public-library end of the Year of Reading, so she doesn't really have any contact with the publishers. (Other than occasionally phoning up their PR depts and asking them to send down some pet authors to do talks.) But her dept does occasionally commission illustrations, so I'll certainly pass on ginasketch's name to her.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Cool, thank you! Her LJ is also currently her point of contact while her website is under construction.

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

Michal Foreman's autobiographical book (War boy) features my Great Grandfather (as the scary vicar whose orchard he raided) although when I showed it to my Gran she denied he'd have been so fierce.

And I'm sure Mr Foreman would be delighted to be regarded as middle aged at 70.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Once you get past 40 you start pushing the bounds of middle-age upwards ;-)

All three guys were past 60, but all seemed impressively fit, well and comparatively-youthful-looking. I guess it's a pretty low-intensity job once you've done the hard bit of making a name.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

That not-Aha video is great!

[ar-gemlad.livejournal.com]

Very nicely done, too. I will probably find myself singing some of those lyrics over the original!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

"This guy's gonna get an assful of pipe wrench" will be my new way to think of annoying customers.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I guess they must have used a karaoke backing track, but it's impressively closely synced with the video.