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Formative

Today, standing on the pavements during a fire alarm, we talked about movies from our childhood that we felt were the most formative. I mentioned the Red Balloon, a wordless, but dramatic, short film from 1956 that played repeatedly on television in the 70s. The films mixes solitude, joy, bravery and folly and it probably helped form both my melancholic nature and my love of Paris. And you can watch it online here.

Stop and go

A Night in Hong Kong, stunning stop motion video.

I hate Comic Sans

A short film about the font Comic Sans, in response to Gary Hustwit's film, Helvetica.

Desiree Rogers and her clients, diagrammatically

Human-assisted robots reveal human behaviour

Tweenbots are simple robots Kacie Kinzer invented to see if strangers would be willing to interact with an anthropomorphised object on the streets of New York. They are set off in a simple, straight line with a written on a flag and instructions to point the tweenbot in the right direction. She didn't expect any to arrive at their destination and was surprised how actively and willingly strangers rescued the human-assisted robots from blocked paths, objects or perilous roads. She writes:

The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.

In typical headscratching style I started my holiday by working. Getting up at 4.30 to fly to Nice for the MIPTV conference in Cannes. It was a great event