Links and write-ups about beautiful things from around the web!
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Rotoscoping via Machine Learning
A recent computer vision paper titled Learning to Cartoonize Using White-box Cartoon Representations trains machine learning software to automatically “cartoonize” photographs — a normally human-done process known as rotoscoping (at least when applied to moving images). The results are strikingly similar to the work produced for the (excellent) Amazon show Undone or the earlier animated Richard Linklater / Bob Sabiston classic Waking Life.
It’s interesting that their training data was “collected from Shinkai Makoto, Miyazaki Hayao and Hosoda Mamoru films.” These demo images definitely look akin to the American productions mentioned above, more than I’d expect from the background art of a Studio Ghibli film, say.
The good news for now for human animators: I presume these images each take significant processing power to generate, and would have trouble with consistency between frames even if it could be animated (?).
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The Letterform Archive: Now Open to All
This great news ought to keep fans of typography and lettering busy: the Letterform Archive, the physical collection of letter arts based in San Francisco, has digitized a significant chunk of their holdings and that searchable database is now free and open to the Internet.
There’s lots to look at, but don’t miss that they have the complete run of Emigre magazine available!
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8-bit Arcade Fonts
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Isn’t Everything Amazing
Over on the great Bright Wall/Dark Room online magazine, Ethan Warren writes a timely appreciation of animator Donald Hertzfeldt and in particular his 2012 feature-length film It’s Such a Beautiful Day:
As I write this, a few weeks into an open-ended global self-quarantine that we hope might mitigate the worst effects of what data suggests will be a historic wave of illness and death, it’s easy to feel that the future has been stolen, or at least the luxury of feeling halfway certain what the future might hold on levels both micro and macro. It’s easy, as well, to feel that even the very recent past is suddenly unavailable, at least without the risk of tumbling into nostalgia for a time when we took mundane errands and gatherings for granted. As winter finally gives way to spring, each day offering my three-year-old daughter new flower buds to marvel at through the sliding glass door, I find myself living like a goldfish in a bowl, endlessly tracing the same few movements—bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to living room to kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom. I yearn for a return to normalcy while fearing the consequences that return might bring. I watch governments at home and abroad either fumble or sabotage their response to this disaster. For lack of a better option, I batten down the hatches and wait for death to roll through, hoping that by sheer luck myself and those I love might be passed by. And in the meantime, I focus as much of my attention as possible on my daughter’s shrieks of glee as she notes the day’s new purple and yellow buds. You’d think the kid had never seen a flower before.
Good news, you can now stream Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day for free via Vimeo:
while we're all locked indoors wondering how bad things will get, "it's such a beautiful day" will be available to stream around the world for free. use the coupon at the following link if you need something new to fall asleep tohttps://t.co/wA0zkChV0w
— don hertzfeldt (@donhertzfeldt) March 19, 2020
See also Vulture’s take: “One of the Saddest Films I’ve Ever Seen Makes Me Feel More Hopeful Than Ever”
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The Making of Prince of Persia, now in Hardback
Jordan Mechner’s game development diaries from when he made the original Prince of Persia are a good read, and now available in what looks like a nicely illustrated hardback edition — he was a teenager when he released his first commercial game and roughly 20 when developing the even bigger hit Prince of Persia, and his diaries illuminate both the remarkable technical accomplishments he was able to pull off on the limited 1980s hardware but also the mind and outlook of a teenager diving into an increasingly commercial world.
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Harvesting Metal from Plants
From the NY Times, one of the more interesting science reports I’ve read lately: there exist a number of species of plants that thrive in metal-rich environments, soaking up the heavy elements that can then be harvested and used for industrial purposes (traditional farming has a lot of downsides, but perhaps not as many as mining operations?).
Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a sap that oozes a neon blue-green. This “juice” is actually one-quarter nickel, far more concentrated than the ore feeding the world’s nickel smelters.
This quote is evocative of the “speculative fiction” sound this makes:
The language of literature on phytomining, or agromining, hints of a future when plant and machine live together: bio-ore, metal farm, metal crops. “Smelting plants” sounds about as incongruous as carving oxygen.
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Old CSS New CSS
A fantastic post / trip down memory lane on the insanity that was developing for the web (the post touches on HTML and JS, not just the CSS of the title) from the late 90s through today.
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The Making of Brilliance
In 1985, computer graphics were exotic enough that using them for a TV commercial was the kind of thing you might save for a Super Bowl ad slot, as seen in this short documentary. I would not have guessed that the first significant use of CGI on TV was for an ad illustrating the sexy (?) futuristic appear of _aluminum cans_.
(They fail to mention this in this mini-doc, but the ad studio was clearly lifting the chrome-plated sexy robots imagery of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama)
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Jan Tschichold on Sans Serifs
It is high time to call a halt to the spread of sans serifs in architecture and elsewhere. Jan Tschichold, Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering (1952, p.39)