Motion designer Christian Stang combined 400,000 images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko to produce this sci-fi-yet-real short film:
Design: Two space-loving sisters win Halloween forever 🚀
I can’t really imagine the lunar lander surviving trick-or-treating beyond the end of the driveway, but man do I love these costumes:
Per CNET,
“Charlie enters the costume by crawling underneath, and there is a pair of shoulder straps that she uses to lift the entire costume,” their parent who uses the screen name Brandoj23 wrote on Imgur this week. “The costume looks heavier than it is. It’s almost entirely made of foam and foam board.”
The antennae are made from coat hangers and bamboo dowels. The attitude thrusters are made from disposable wine flutes. The gold foil is made from a gold space blanket material.
“The front hatch magnetically closes and magnetically stays open, and doubles as a candy sample input port,” Brandoj23 added. “The ascent stage (top part) separates from the descent stage (bottom part with landing pads).”
[YouTube]
Animation: VW gives the Beetle a loving send-off
The Russell Brown Show returns & takes on Tokyo
Man, how great is it that after 35 years in the game (!!), Russell hasn’t lost a bit of his madcap energy. He’s bringing back The Russell Brown Show & starting out in nighttime Tokyo:
The clip above is fun, but the really meaty bits are in the associated tutorials he’s posting to his site; enjoy!
[YouTube]
Year in Search: Heroes
Hey gang—Happy New Year! Let’s start things on a positive note by looking at some of the heroism people sought out in 2019:
Oh, and apropos of nothing, here’s one of my young heroes enjoying the New Years lights train with me in Santa Cruz. 🥰
[YouTube]
A family’s brilliant holiday Beastie Boys homage
This makes me unreasonably happy. ☺️
Laughing Squid explains,
Toronto mom Angela Young and her two children Lilah and Levi celebrated both the 2019 holiday season and the 20th Anniversary of the Beastie Boys music video for “Intergalactic” by recreating part of the celebrated video for their annual holiday card. Young and her kids, who were dressed in the same hazard suits, black vests with fluorescent stripes, yellow boots, and gloves as the original, struck poses and danced their way around Toronto’s underground PATH, Union Station and the TTC subway.
[YouTube]
Merry Christmas!
Hey everyone—happy holidays & Merry Christmas from me, Margot, Seamus, and the Micronaxx to you & yours. Thanks so much for being a reader (“the few, the ostensibly proud” 😛), and here’s to making more funky, inspiring discoveries in the new year. Meanwhile, here’s a quick glimpse of our tour of the holiday lights in Los Gatos (complete with throbbing fonky beatz in the tunnel of lights 🙃).
Making 3D models via your drone
I’ll admit that I haven’t yet taken the plunge into photogrammetry, but this tutorial makes me think I just might be able to do it. (And as we close out 2019, let’s take a moment to note how bonkers it is that for the price of a few hundred dollars in flying gear, just about anyone can generate 3D geometry and share it to just about any device sporting a Web browser!)
[YouTube]
Low-light shooting tips for the Insta360
I know this post might be of super niche interest, but I’m going to try out its recommendations tonight when we drive through holiday lights. I think the flowcharts basically boil down to “Go manual, keep ISO at 400 or lower, and bump it up/down to get the exposure right. Oh, and set shutter speed to 2x frame rate for no motion & 4x for moderate motion.” Any shooting tips you may have to share are most welcome as well!
[YouTube]
AI: Diving into Portrait mode improvements
“FM technology: that stands for F’ing Magic…” So said the old Navy radio repair trainer, and it comes to mind reading about how the Google camera team used machine learning plus a dual-lens setup to deliver beautiful portraiture on the Pixel 4:
https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/12/improvements-to-portrait-mode-on-google.html
With the Pixel 4, we have made two more big improvements to this feature, leveraging both the Pixel 4’s dual cameras and dual-pixel auto-focus system to improve depth estimation, allowing users to take great-looking Portrait Mode shots at near and far distances. We have also improved our bokeh, making it more closely match that of a professional SLR camera.
