22 januari 2017

The people of Merida



Mérida has been populated since prehistoric times as demonstrated by a prestigious hoard of gold jewellery that was excavated from a girl's grave in 1870. Consisting of two penannular bracelets, an armlet and a chain of six spiral wire rings, it is now preserved at the British Museum. The town was founded in 25 BC, with the name of Emerita Augusta (meaning the veterans – discharged soldiers – of the army of Augustus, who founded the city; the name Mérida is an evolution of this) by order of Emperor Augustus, to protect a pass and a bridge over the Guadiana river. Emerita Augusta was one of the ends of the Vía de la Plata (Silver Way), a strategic Roman Route between the gold mines around Asturica Augusta and the most important Roman city in the Iberian Peninsula. The city became the capital of Lusitania province, and one of the most important cities in the Roman empire. Mérida preserves more important ancient Roman monuments than any other city in Spain, including a triumphal arch and a theatre.

20 januari 2017

Madder



Rubia was an economically important source of a red pigment in many regions of Asia, Europe and Africa. The genus name Rubia derives from the Latin ruber meaning "red".

The plant's roots contain an anthracene compound called alizarin that gives its red colour to a textile dye known as Rose madder. It was also used as a colourant, especially for paint, that is referred to as Madder lake. The synthesis of alizarin greatly reduced demand for the natural compound.


 

Colorflower



Colorfulness, chroma, pure color and saturation are related but distinct concepts in colorimetry and color theory, referring to the perceived intensity of a specific color. Colorfulness is the visual sensation according to which the perceived color of an area appears to be more or less chromatic. Chroma is the colorfulness relative to the brightness of a similarly illuminated area that appears to be white or highly transmitting. Therefore, chroma should not be confused with colorfulness. Saturation is the colorfulness of a color relative to its own brightness. Though the general concept is intuitive, terms such as chroma, saturation, purity, and intensity are often used without great precision, and even when well-defined depend greatly on the specific color model in use.

19 januari 2017

Fontaine de Vaucluse



Geography
Fontaine-de-Vaucluse ("spring of Vaucluse") is built around a spring in a valley at the foot of the Vaucluse Mountains, between Saumane and Lagnes, not far from L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. It is named after the spring, the source of the River Sorgue.


Fontaine-de-Vaucluse

Hydrography
The fountain, or spring, of Vaucluse, situated at the feet of a steep cliff 230 metres high, is the biggest spring in France. It is also the fifth largest in the world with an annual flow of 630 million cubic metres.

The fountain of Vaucluse surges in March for about 5 weeks and then subsides. The increased flow of water swells the Sorgue to flood. The mechanism behind the surging remains somewhat of a mystery.


 


Sur le Pont



Sur le Pont d'AvignonOn y danse, On y danse
Sur le Pont d'Avignon
On y danse tous en rond

On the bridge of Avignon
We all dance there, we all dance there
On the bridge of Avignon
We all dance there in a ring


 


17 januari 2017

Made in France



A slide is a specially mounted individual transparency intended for projection onto a screen using a slide projector. This allows the photograph to be viewed by a large audience at once. The most common form is the 35 mm slide, with the image framed in a 2×2 inch cardboard or plastic mount. Some specialized labs produce photographic slides from digital camera images in formats such as JPEG, from computer-generated presentation graphics, and from a wide variety of physical source material such as fingerprints, microscopic sections, paper documents, astronomical images, etc.

Reversal film is sometimes used as motion picture film, mostly in the 16 mm, Super 8 and 8 mm "cine" formats, to yield a positive image on the camera original. This avoids the expense of using negative film, which requires additional film and processing to create a positive film print for projection.

15 januari 2017

Carnival Collage



Carnival is a Western Christian festive season that occurs before the liturgical season of Lent. The main events typically occur during February or early March, during the period historically known as Shrovetide (or Pre-Lent). Carnival typically involves a public celebration and/or parade combining some elements of a circus, masks, and a public street party. People wear masks and costumes during many such celebrations, allowing them to lose their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Excessive consumption of alcohol, meat, and other foods proscribed during Lent is extremely common. Other common features of carnival include mock battles such as food fights; social satire and mockery of authorities; the grotesque body displaying exaggerated features, especially large noses, bellies, mouths, and phalli, or elements of animal bodies; abusive language and degrading acts; depictions of disease and gleeful death; and a general reversal of everyday rules and norms.


 

13 januari 2017

Movie-tricks



Practical effect techniques
The use of prosthetic makeup, animatronics, puppetry, or creature suits to create the appearance of living creatures.
Miniature effects, which is the use of scale models which are photographed in a way that they appear full sized.
Mechanical effects, such as aerial rigging to simulate flight, stage mounted gimbals to make the ground move, or other mechanical devices to physically manipulate the environment.
Pyrotechnics for the appearance of fire and explosions.
Weather effects such as sprinkler systems to create rain and fog machines to create smoke.
Squibs to create the illusion of gunshot wounds.


 

11 januari 2017

Camera shaking



Image stabilization (IS) is a family of techniques used to reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or other imaging device during exposure. Generally, it compensates for pan and tilt (angular movement, equivalent to yaw and pitch) of the imaging device, although electronic image stabilization can also be used to compensate for rotation. It is used in image-stabilized binoculars, still and video cameras, astronomical telescopes, and also smartphones, mainly the high-end. With still cameras, camera shake is particularly problematic at slow shutter speeds or with long focal length (telephoto or zoom) lenses. With video cameras, camera shake causes visible frame-to-frame jitter in the recorded video. In astronomy, the problem of lens-shake is added to by variations in the atmosphere over time, which will cause the apparent positions of objects to change.

Corpus Christi



The Feast of Corpus Christi (Latin for Body of Christ) is a Latin Rite liturgical solemnity celebrating the belief in the body and blood of Jesus Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist. It emphasizes the joy of the institution of the Eucharist. The latter had previously been observed only on Maundy Thursday, in the somber atmosphere leading to Good Friday.

The feast is liturgically celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday or, "where the Solemnity of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ is not a holy day of obligation, it is assigned to the Sunday after the Most Holy Trinity as its proper day"

Rubio Tinctorum



Rubia is a genus of flowering plants in the Rubiaceae family. It contains around 80 species of perennial scrambling or climbing herbs and subshrubs native to the Old World. The genus and its best-known species are commonly known as madder, e.g. Rubia tinctorum (common madder), Rubia peregrina (wild madder).

Rubia was an economically important source of a red pigment in many regions of Asia, Europe and Africa. The genus name Rubia derives from the Latin ruber meaning "red".


The plant's roots contain an anthracene compound called alizarin that gives its red colour to a textile dye known as Rose madder. It was also used as a colourant, especially for paint, that is referred to as Madder lake. The synthesis of alizarin greatly reduced demand for the natural compound.


 


09 januari 2017

Joop Geesink



Joop Geesink (The Hague, April 28, 1913 - Amsterdam, May 13, 1984) was a famous Dutch film producer. He is best known for his work with dolls. Best known is his creation of Joop Geesink Loeki the Lion which cheered over 30 years the advertising of the Dutch television.


He began his career as a set designer for the Dutch theater revues. Soon he became interested in film and animation especially with Marten Toonder (known by the stories of Tom Puss and Oliver B. Bumble), he established a filmstudio . Marten Toonder focused on cartoons and Joop Geesink loved dolls movies. The partnership lasted from March 1942 to March 1943.

08 januari 2017

Campers & more

 

 

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is an American trade association representing the five major film studios of the United States, as well as the video streaming service Netflix. Founded in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and known as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) from 1945 until September 2019,[3] its original goal was to ensure the viability of the American film industry.

Unnavigable river



River engineering is the process of planned human intervention in the course, characteristics, or flow of a river with the intention of producing some defined benefit. People have intervened in the natural course and behaviour of rivers since before recorded history—to manage the water resources, to protect against flooding, or to make passage along or across rivers easier. From Roman times, rivers have been used as a source of hydropower. From the late 20th century, river engineering has had environmental concerns broader than immediate human benefit and some river engineering projects have been concerned exclusively with the restoration or protection of natural characteristics and habitats.



06 januari 2017

Spectacle


In general, spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. Derived in Middle English from c. 1340 as "specially prepared or arranged display" it was borrowed from Old French spectacle, itself a reflection of the Latin spectaculum "a show" from spectare "to view, watch" frequentative form of specere "to look at.

The Hollywood spectacular

When the zoetrope and nickelodeon technology first appeared, the earliest films were spectacles. They caught the attention of common people. They showed things people would rarely see, and they showed it to the wide audience.

    Thomas Edison filmed Eiffel Tower, actual American Indians in a simulated attack, and even celebrated beauty queens.
    Louis Lumière filmed a train pulling into a station in 1895. The camera was in front of the train, and the train "came" directly at the viewer. It was a sensational because it gave an object of gaze.

02 januari 2017

Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) in Tromsø.

An aurora, sometimes referred to as a polar light or northern light, is a natural light display in the sky, predominantly seen in the high latitude (Arctic and Antarctic) regions. Auroras are produced when the magnetosphere is sufficiently disturbed by the solar wind that the trajectories of charged particles in both solar wind and magnetospheric plasma, mainly in the form of electrons and protons, precipitate them into the upper atmosphere (thermosphere/exosphere), where their energy is lost. The resulting ionization and excitation of atmospheric constituents emits light of varying colour and complexity. The form of the aurora, occurring within bands around both polar regions, is also dependent on the amount of acceleration imparted to the precipitating particles. Precipitating protons generally produce optical emissions as incident hydrogen atoms after gaining electrons from the atmosphere. Proton auroras are usually observed at lower latitudes.



01 januari 2017

King of Cowboys



Thomas Edwin Mix (born Thomas Hezikiah Mix; January 6, 1880 – October 12, 1940) was an American film actor and the star of many early Western movies between 1909 and 1935. Mix appeared in 291 films, all but nine of which were silent movies. He was Hollywood's first Western megastar and is noted as having helped define the genre for all cowboy actors who followed.


Ice-sailing



An ice boat (often spelled as "iceboat") is a boat or purpose-built framework similar in functional design to a sail boat but fitted with skis or runners (skates) and designed to run over ice instead of through (liquid) water. Ice yachting is the sport of sailing and racing iceboats. Sail-able ice is known in the sport as "hard water" versus sailing on liquid or "soft" water. A related sport, land sailing, utilizes a configuration with an iceboat-like fuselage or frame equipped with wheels instead of runners. Iceboats commonly used for racing are usually only for one person, but several classes of two-seat and multiple-seat iceboats are more or less common. On some boats, a "side car" can be fitted to take others along for a ride.

29 december 2016

The DP



A cinematographer or director of photography (sometimes shortened to DP or DOP) is the chief over the camera crews working on a film, television production or other live action piece and is responsible for making artistic and technical decisions related to the image. The study and practice of this field is referred to as cinematography. Some filmmakers say that the cinematographer is just the chief over the camera and lighting, and the director of photography is the chief over all the photography components of film, including framing, costumes, makeup, and lighting, as well as the assistant of the post producer for color correction and grading.

The cinematographer selects the camera, film stock, lens, filters, etc., to realize the scene in accordance with the intentions of the director. Relations between the cinematographer and director vary; in some instances the director will allow the cinematographer complete independence; in others, the director allows little to none, even going so far as to specify exact camera placement and lens selection. Such a level of involvement is not common once the director and cinematographer have become comfortable with each other; the director will typically convey to the cinematographer what is wanted from a scene visually, and allow the cinematographer latitude in achieving that effect.



23 december 2016

EL EMPLEO / THE EMPLOYMENT

This short film written by Argentine artist Patricio Plaza and directed by Santiago Grasso provides a strong message on work, alienation and how each of us takes part in a system in which people exploit other people, helping an unfair system continue functioning.

The highlight of the short lies of course in its acid humor, and how it creatively replaces objects with human beings that are being used as such. To transmit a sense of alienation slow visual rhythm and audio pace are used (except for the street scene), together with de-saturated colors, expressionless characters with black eyes (many of the characters remain static) and monotonous background ambient sound.

 


 

21 december 2016

Drowned city




Reimerswaal is a lost city in the Netherlands.

The present-day municipality of Reimerswaal is named after this city, which was granted city rights in 1374. The city was destroyed by repeated floods, and the last citizens left in 1632. Nothing remains. It was located north of the current municipality, on the east end of the Oosterschelde, on land which is now called the Verdronken Land van Reimerswaal ("Drowned Land of Reimerswaal").

 


19 december 2016

Picasso's Guernica



A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on). With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Graeco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, and has remained significant since then. Still life gives the artist more freedom in the arrangement of elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture. Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound



Amsterdam as filmlocation

>

A filming location is a place where some or all of a film or television series is produced, in addition to or instead of using sets constructed on a movie studio backlot or soundstage. In filmmaking, a location is any place where a film crew will be filming actors and recording their dialog. A location where dialog is not recorded may be considered as a second unit photography site. Filmmakers often choose to shoot on location because they believe that greater realism can be achieved in a "real" place; however, location shooting is often motivated by the film's budget. Many films shoot interior scenes on a sound stage and exterior scenes on location.

It is often mistakenly believed that filming "on location" takes place in the actual location in which its story is set, but this is not necessarily the case.



16 december 2016

Capital of Norway: Oslo



A film treatment (or simply treatment) is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards (index cards) and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline (or one-page synopsis), and it may include details of directorial style that an outline omits. Treatments read like a short story, but are told in the present tense and describe events as they happen.




09 december 2016

Crystals



CRYSTAL can be experienced in Eindhoven. The permanent artwork consists out of hundreds of LED-crystals which brighten when people touch them. Designer Daan Roosegaarde calls them “Lego from Mars”. The name refers not only to its futuristic design, but also to its endless potential to play.
The Crystals are placed in a black tunnel at the Natlab, the place where Einstein once worked, where Philips produced its lightbulbs, and the first CD was presented. CRYSTAL is a perfect match, the Crystals are white geometric shapes with LEDs inside. The local floor has a magnetic field which allows the Crystals to light-up. CRYSTAL is therefore one of the latest innovations in light. The artwork CRYSTAL can be experienced at night at Natlab, Kastanjelaan 500 in Eindhoven NL.

07 december 2016

I Daniel Blake




A 59 year old carpenter recovering from a heart attack, befriends a single mum and her two kids as they navigate their way through the kafkaesque impersonal benefits system. With equal amounts of humour, warmth and despair. Heartfelt and emotional until the end

I, Daniel Blake is a 2016 British-French drama film directed by Ken Loach and written by Loach's frequent collaborator Paul Laverty. The film stars Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Dylan McKiernan, and Briana Shann.

It won the Prix du public at the 2016 WAMA film festival in Poland.

It won the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival l.



06 december 2016

Frame by Frame


FRAME BY FRAME official trailer from RED REEL on Vimeo.



When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, taking a photo was a crime. After the regime fell from power in 2001, a fledgling free press emerged and a photography revolution was born. Now, as foreign troops and media withdraw, Afghanistan is left to stand on its own, and so are its journalists. Set in a modern Afghanistan bursting with color and character, FRAME BY FRAME follows four Afghan photojournalists as they navigate an emerging and dangerous media landscape – reframing Afghanistan for the world, and for themselves. Through cinema verite, intimate interviews, powerful photojournalism, and never-before-seen archival footage shot in secret during the Taliban regime, the film connects audiences with four humans in the pursuit of the truth.




Dutch Dark Chapter

 

Early documentary films, originally called "actuality films", lasted one minute or less. Over time, documentaries have evolved to become longer in length, and to include more categories; some examples being: educational, observational, and docufiction. Documentaries are very informative and are often used within schools, as a resource to teach various principles. Social-media platforms (such as YouTube) have provided an avenue for the growth of the documentary-film genre. These platforms have increased the distribution area and ease-of-accessibility; thereby enhancing the ability to educate a larger volume of viewers, and broadening the reach of persons who receive that information. 


 

05 december 2016

VR-movie theatre



 Most 2016-era virtual realities are displayed either on a computer monitor, a projector screen, or with a virtual reality headset (also called head-mounted display or HMD). HMDs typically take the form of head-mounted goggles with a screen in front of the eyes. Some simulations include additional sensory information and provide sounds through speakers or headphones. Virtual Reality actually brings the user into the digital world by cutting off outside stimuli. In this way user is solely focusing on the digital content.



Virtual reality environment can be captured using 360° stereoscopic spherical video and 360x360 surround sound from professional VR video cameras. The users can emerge in the virtual reality environment using head-mounted displays.

02 december 2016

Im Memoriam : Manuel



Manuel is a fictional character from the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers. Played by Andrew Sachs, he is one of the most iconic characters in British comedy history. He reappeared for a small sketch with John Cleese in We Are Most Amused in November 2008.



Manuel himself appeared on the audio adaptations of Fawlty Towers as a linking narrator, explaining things from his point of view, when the series was released in audio format. The first two episodes released did not feature him at all, as the dialogue was edited and short burst of piano music would indicate a change of scene. However, when the whole series was re-released, they were re-edited with Manuel's linking commentary.