Movie or Photography?

Half the world wide web media have been recently talking about a footage collecting in a rapid and (IMHO) perfectly mounted sequence many short video clips taken in Astoria, New York Queens, when a snow blizzard struck NY district the day after Christmas. "Idiot with a tripod", photographed (sic) and edited by NYer director Jamie Stuart, is a short but great documentary film that keeps the eyes of the audience clutched to the monitor for the whole three minutes of its length. The short, admitedly an homage to the 1929 Dziga Vertov's masterpiece "Man with a Movie Camera", is so impressive that someone (namely Roger Ebert, on his blog on Chicago Sun-Times) even claimed it deserves an Academy Award for the best short live-action subject: "You can tell from the cinematography he knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it. He held the Vertov film in memory. Stuart must already been thinking of how he would do the edit and sound. Any professional will tell you the talent exhibited here is extraordinary."

I'm not able to add anything more to help J. Stuart to get the deserved credits. Yet, the vision of his work sparkled some candid questions in my mind (you might be surprised, as well as I am, why I never asked them before ...): how strong is today, with current technology (the film was shot with a Canon D7), the relation between moving pictures and still? And how large is the blurred area that separates the first from the latter? Is it growing or narrowing? I'd really like to know your opinion about.

Idiot with a Tripod from The Mutiny Company on Vimeo.

Web pearls: part II

Twin Lens refleXions ...

This is another pearl recently found on Vimeo. I already signalled it to 591 but it's worth leaving a trace here too.

This time the video is about how to "seriously" take a boring thing like photography and start from scratches building a camera on our own.
Enjoy!

Web pearls: part I

Polaroidetional ...

Surfing on Vimeo I recently ended up into this little piece of wonder.



It is a promotional film made by Polaroids in early 70's explaining, with an almost poetical touch, how the instant photo system used to work and could be used to get images that today we might achieve after sitting hours in our lightroom. I think these are ten minutes well spent.

Well, this is also the first time I bring something into this blog that is not exactly dealing with me. It has the double intent to remember me good things I've seen on the web and to share these "pearls" with anyone else on the other side of this screen.