Minuscule

On Sundays I teach a design class at Art Center for kids between 8 and 13. Yesterday we had a couple of kids who were picked up really late because the dad picking them up thought the class ended at 5, not 4. Thankfully these kids were the older ones, so my friend Eric (who I teach the class with) and I had things to talk about with them. Well they’re kinda’ hip 13 year olds, and one of them showed me these short cartoons called Miniscule. They basically feature a bunch of computer generated bugs in real environments doing funny things.

The cartoons are released by a French animation studio called Futurikon and written and directed by Thomas Szabo. They seem to have a bunch of DVDs of this stuff. I guess the shorts are also on Toon Disney as well, which might be where he found it. I’ve posted some of these under the cut so you can see for yourself.

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Bobby Solomon

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March 10, 2008 - See more posts by Bobby

While You Wait For The Others by Grizzly Bear

Today was an absolutely beautiful day in Los Angeles, and it really felt like the first day of spring. In honor of having such great weather, here’s an amazing new song by Grizzly Bear that I found over on It’s Nice That. I’ll make an educated guess here that we’ll be hearing this song on their upcoming EP, but for now you can listen to this awesome live performance from KCRW. If the song resembles anything else on their next album we’re all definitely in for a treat.

On a quick side note for you tech folks out there, Kitsune Noir is now in the top 10,000 blogs on Technorati. This was a really great thing to wake up to this morning, as it really shows proves that this blog really has some legs now. Yay!

Bobby

Bobby Solomon

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March 8, 2008 - See more posts by Bobby

New Retail by Raul Barreneche

I was browsing around Phaidon’s site earlier this week and came across a new book they’ve released called New Retail. It’s 208 pages of innovative retail stores from all around the world. What caught my eye was that they posted the Mpries grocery stores which I posted about last May. The fact that they caught onto those stores was pretty exciting for me, not to mention stores like Prada and Hermes, which are both in Tokyo. And of course, the giant beautiful photos are the biggest sell, and it looks like they’re filled to the brim with them. Definitely check this book out if contemporary architecture does it for you.

Check out more photos under the cut!
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Bobby Solomon

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March 7, 2008 - See more posts by Bobby

Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level


Jeff just called me to tell me that he watched this insane video from 1971 called Protein Synthesis in his Biochemistry class this morning. The movie was directed by a guy named a Robert Alan Weiss and was made for the Department of Chemistry for Stanford University. The video clearly shows that protein synthesis in your body is actually done by a pack of dirty hippies tripping on god-knows-what. It’s impossible to say what the best part of this is, the T-Factor wearing a black cape and a giant beard, the near-narrative music, the poetic stoner narrating, or the fact that Jeff goes to MIT and they’re still showing this there.

Skip ahead to about 3:30 in and you’ll see what I’m talking about, the beginning is just some Nobel prize winner blabbing on and on…

UPDATE: Click this entry and DIGG it! For some reason I can’t get the DIGG button to work when looking at the main page… I don’t get it.

Bobby

Bobby Solomon

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March 7, 2008 - See more posts by Bobby

Official Watchmen Promo Images

For about the last 10 years now comic books have become one of the hottest places to find good material for movies. Very few of these movies though have been based off comics that are considered to be “classics” by fans. That all changes next year with the release of Watchmen, a comic written by Alan Moore in 1986 that changed the very notion of what a comic book could really be. The story is set in the United States in 1985, where a world filled by super heroes is on the brink of a nuclear war. The story begins with one of the Watchmen being murdered, leading into a journey of who did it and the bigger implications of why.

The movie is going to be directed by Zack Snyder, know for his true-to-form adaptation of 300, which was a graphic novel by writer/artist Frank Miller. Snyder did a great job visually, though the screenplay was way too wordy, probably an attempt at making up for the fact that the graphic novel had very little speaking. I have a feeling that he’s going to do a good job of sticking to the book, and seeing the images above make me all the more confident. I think the Comedian (the guy with the shotgun) looks absolutely spot on, and the changes made to Nite Owl and Ozymandias present a good update to the original outfits.

The movie is supposed to come out 1 year from today, so hopefully they release some trailers soon to quench my thirst for more! For more info about the movie, check out the official Watchmen movie blog which is written by Zack Snyder himself.

Bobby

Bobby Solomon

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March 7, 2008 - See more posts by Bobby

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