Daft Smoke

My good friend, David Black, an amazing cinematographer and photographer, shot and directed a short film with Daft Punk recently, clouding them up with smoke bombs! I'm putting it together for him. Doing some cool smoke composites and light flares. It's looking pretty good so far. Video up soon!

Two Things

1.) I finally got myself a Vimeo page.

http://vimeo.com/dortch

2.) This is my latest project! I collaborated with an awesome designer Samantha Pleet to create a video lookbook for her Autumn/Winter 2009 collection.

Yip yip yip yip

Seriously, Sesame Street was soooooo next level. Genius.

Eye Fireworks

Ever since I was young, I've been fascinated by the colors I see when I close my eyes really tightly. When I would have trouble going to sleep, I would press my face down against my pillow and watch the patterns of light pulse and move, like clouds of electricity changing shape. Researching it in later years, I've learned it's called phosphene, the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. In a basic sense, the photoreceptors in our eyes can respond to other things other than light -- in this case pressure.

Mine are mostly blue in color, with some spiraling shapes and little glowing electric snow.

Apparently some people see red, yellow, purple, pink, green, or even a kaleidoscope or snow of combined colors.

I've always wondered if blind people are just trapped in total darkness, or if they have any sensation of these clouds of electric colors.

There's a lot of research going on about how the visual cortex in our brain handles other stimuli, like pressure, magnetism, and electricity. Scientists working for the Boston Retinal Implant Project have even created a bionic eye. They implant a small chip behind the retina, and run this micro-thin wire to the optic nerve.

Then special eyeglasses have a battery-powered camera and transmitter which sends the images to the chip behind the retina. It doesn't provide total vision, but they say it can give blind patients a general sense of their surroundings and recognize faces and expressions.

Electric eyes to the rescue. Now onto bigger problems. Like bald robots.

Half Awake and Half Asleep

My friend Zen Sekizawa, who is an amazing photographer in her own right, showed me this new collection of photographs from Asako Narahashi, Half Awake and Half Asleep In The Water.

The series has been on display in Japan and recently has been published as a book.

They're hypnotically beautiful. Like you're floating between surviving, reemerging for air, entering the world again -- and drowning, sinking down, back under into the murky blue.

Sealshine

The other night my friend Lauren and I got into a pretty interesting conversation regarding Cillian Murphy. She has a big movie star crush on him. I mean he's a pretty cool dude, I guess. A decent Scarecrow. I really liked him in 28 Days Later. He was good in Sunshine.

I brought up this point, because looking at him, it's just something I can't get over. I mean really, no offense intended -- he's a fine actor -- but he looks like a seal to me. Not a kiss from a rose on the grave Seal -- a seal, seal. She agrees that he is unique, even odd, looking, but she doesn't really see the seal resemblance.

So... I made this to help her see my point. This is the dramatic goodbye video chat from Sunshine, re-imagined...

Yeah, she still has a crush on him.

Dinochickens

There's a great interview in Wired this month with Jack Horner, a paleontologist who is working on tweaking chicken embryos to make dinosaurs. Horner was a consultant on Jurassic Park, and was apparently a partial inspiration for the character of Dr. Alan Grant.

Dinochickens. Seriously. Horner says that since birds are descendants of dinosaurs, they still carry their DNA.

"So in its early stages a chicken embryo will develop dinosaur traits, like a long tail, teeth, and three-fingered hands. If you can find the genes that cancel the tail and fuse the fingers to build a wing -- and turn those genes off -- you can grow animals with dinosaur characteristics."

Crazy. I wonder if they would look like these... the Titanis. A dinosaur bird that lived in Florida and Texas. They were up to 10 feet tall and weighed as much as 800 lbs.

Or... wait. Dinochickens. Maybe like this...

Dinochickens.

The water's fine...

I don't know where exactly to start, so I'll just jump right in.