Open Culture digs up director Guillermo del Toro’s sketches – a fine addition to the notebooks and sketchbooks of great creators. Pair with Richard Feynman’s sketches.
film
LATEST
The Roving Typist – lovely short film about C.D. Hermelin, a broke aspiring writer who decided to bring his typewriter to a park and write charming on-demand stories for passersby with a few dollars to spare.
Pair with Story of a Writer, a 1963 short film about Ray Bradbury.
8 years, 860 paintings, 1,026 drawings, 800 letters, 20 people, telling the story of one man.
This is remarkable: Loving Vincent, an ambitious documentary expounding a controversial theory about Van Gogh’s death; each frame of the film is made of a different still painting on canvas in the style of Van Gogh, stitched together so that the image appears to move. Help make it happen on Kickstarter.
Pair with Van Gogh’s never-before-revealed sketchbooks.
The ultimate geeky homage to Kubrick: Dr. Strangelove adapted in LEGO.
(↬ BoingBoing)
99U: That’s the great part of the web, right? You can do a thousand little experiments and stretch.
KIRBY FERGUSON: Yeah, and you can see how your work is going. Most of the time, you’re working on your voice. It’s just your own journey. You’re just working on your stuff and trying to get better, putting it out there and getting a response from it. Getting a feel for an audience is important, and the Internet is a great place to try and fail. Because if you fail, nobody really sees it, nobody cares. No harm, no foul.
Fantastic 99u interview with filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of Everything is a Remix fame, whose new documentary, This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory, sets out to understand the invisible forces that shape our lives.
Pair the above remarks with Ira Glass on the evolution of taste in successful creative work.
What a great film director you would make! Have you ever thought about it?
What is most astonishing about your work is the lighting technique you use — especially in your black-and-white drawings. There is a wonderful phosphoric, limelight, lux perpetua, solar-rimmed light effect to your art.
Federico Fellini’s fan mail to legendary cartoonist Möebius , the best thing since Isaac Asimov’s fan mail to young Carl Sagan and Charles Dickens’s to George Eliot.
To celebrate their 100-year anniversary, the American Film Institute selected the 100 most memorable quotes from American cinema and Nathan Yau visualized them in minimalist graphics. Yau is the author of Visualize This, an excellent guide to telling stories with data.
Pair with David Byrne on how to be an educated consumer of infographics.
November 22, 1963 – a short film by Errol Morris about the assassination of JFK and Josiah “Tink” Thompson’s half-century-long investigation of the photographic evidence. (Cue in Susan Sontag on the violence of photography itself.)
Mental health break: Know your Voltaire. (Happy birthday, Voltaire!)
If you have nothing to say, don’t feel obliged to pretend you do.
Found among this selection of famous filmmakers golden rules of filmmaking, this particular tenet should be applied to every aspect of life – a timeless truth that harks back to this 1866 guide to the art of conversation. Add to that: “Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.”
How is it possible to feel lonely in a city where you’re never alone amidst 8 million others? A poignant monologue by Paul Riccio and Molly Finley. For a more heartening take on the same paradox, see Humans of New York.
(via swissmiss)
Trailer for Design is One, the fantastic documentary about graphic design power duo Lella and Massimo Vignelli. To appreciate Vignelli’s genius, here's Massimo on intellectual elegance, education, and love.
Pair with this heartening read on combining romance with creative collaboration.
I abandoned ever, ever reading any criticisms again. Thanks to my mother, I haven’t wasted any time dwelling on whether I’m brilliant or a fool. It’s completely unprofitable to think about it.
Woody Allen adds to cultural icons’ wisdom on criticism.
Susan Sontag put it best.
Two Guardian designers chart Hitchcock’s cinematic obsessions. The aesthetic is as much a homage to the great Saul Bass, who designed many of Hitchcock’s title sequences and the accompanying film posters.
Pair with this animated recipe for what makes a Hitchcock film.
…only things that are creative and not destructive… hatred is wasted energy.
Alfred Hitchcock, born on August 13, 1899, on the secret of happiness.