Daniel McCullum » Tidbits

The Cinematography of Avatar

Daniel McCullum — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:00:36 +0000

A really fascinating article that examines the challenges facing modern cinematographers through Mauro Fiore’s experience as the DP on Avatar. Some of the solutions his team devised for dealing with the large amount of green screen components are brilliant. Most interesting to me was how Fiore dealt with the limitations of smaller sensor sizes and thus decreased depth of field on the Sony HDCAM gear he used to shoot the live action sequences.

“Instead of working with circles-of-confusion, I had to create depth-of-field through contrast and lighting levels, which was a really fun challenge.”

As someone who has to deal with these sorts of limitations on a regular basis, it was yet another poignant reminder that it’s not the gear that matters, but the person behind it all.

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Apple releases Aperture 3

Daniel McCullum — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:31:17 +0000

Looks like a fantastic update to my favorite photo management and RAW processing application. Especially excited about the Lightroom-style nondestructive brush editing.

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Creative Sense: Gorgeous CS4 Replacement Icons

Daniel McCullum — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:18:28 +0000

I love the look of these new replacement icons for several Adobe CS4 apps, and I only hope that a Fireworks icon will be added in the future (despite it’s mindblowingly awful bugs, I still prefer it to Photoshop for website mockups/graphics)

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Office 2010: The Movie

Daniel McCullum — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:59:04 +0000

Wow, finally an impressively good Microsoft ad. What struck me the most was the brilliantly done tongue-in-cheek humor. I hope this signals the start of a new era of advertising for the company, because I don’t think I can stand another “Laptop Hunter”-style disaster.

The ad was directed by none other than Dennis Liu, who was the creator of the music video of The Bird and the Bee’s “Again and Again” that used the Mac OS X interface and utilities to visualize the song.

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Open-Source Software Sucks

Daniel McCullum — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:52:07 +0000

“Maybe, someday, human altruism will make possible the Grand Dream of Open-Source, where projects are open-source, and well thought-out, and easy-to-use, and easy-to-install, and highly efficient, and bug free. Until then, open-source software is going to run great, but be painful to use, and closed-source software will be easy, but less efficient.”

I agree completely. As much as I want to love software like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, I’ve come to realize that the lack of usability is not worth the money saved.

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ABC rolling out on Hulu

Daniel McCullum — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:05:24 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve started watching Lost from the very beginning. I’ve really been enjoying the show; however, the ABC player…not so much. I’ll admit that the first few interactive ads were actually quite entertaining, but now it’s just plain annoying.

I’m looking forward to finally being able to watch Lost, along with my other favorite shows, in the much better Hulu player, and in the spiffy new Hulu Desktop.

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The infinitely clickable Pringles ad

Daniel McCullum — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:18:17 +0000

This is one of the weirdest and most oddly alluring ads I’ve ever seen. I don’t know whether to be freaked out or awestruck. (via Michael Mistretta)

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Googling with Bing

Daniel McCullum — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:23:32 +0000

“Bing knows what you like to Google, and Googles it based on your previous Googles…”

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