Journeyman Pictures has uploaded nearly 4000 videos to YouTube. Many of these are trailers for the documentaries they sell, but they have also posted hundreds of full-length videos. Most are for short documentarie, but there are a lot of features too. It's somewhat daunting to explore, but the
playlists are a good place to start, and so are the shows:
Features,
Shorts,
News and
Savouring Europe, a European travelogue series. Here's a few interesting ones:
Gastronauts, about French culinary students working to make astronaut food more palatable,
Demon Drummers, about student Kodo drummers,
India's Free Lunch, about the effects of free school lunches on Indian society,
The Twitter Revolution, about YouTube and Twitter's role in the 2009 Iranian uprising,
Europe's Black Hole, about Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova,
Small Town Boy, about a gay male carnival queen in a small town in England,
The Vertigo of Lists, Umberto Eco talks about the ubiquity of lists in modern culture and
Monsters from the Id, about scientists in the science fiction films of the Fifties.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2010 -
10 comments
The Age of Uncertainty is my new favorite blog. It's by a gentleman bookseller who works in a warehouse in Sussex processing lorryfuls of used books. He shares the most interesting things he finds, commenting with wit and sensitivity. He also writes entertainingly about his everyday life. Let me point you towards his series of extracts from a diary that came to his warehouse, detailing the life of Derek, an employee of the government who converted to Mormonism. It was a fairly normal life, but the excerpts are fascinating. Here are the entries in order:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5 and
6. He also posts beautiful images he finds, such as Victorian color plates:
1 and
2. Still, it is the remains of ordinary lives washing up on his shores that most enthralls me, such as
this tear-inducing post about a family photo album which was sent to his used books warehouse.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 13, 2010 -
27 comments
Educational gamesmaker Preloaded has recently made two strategy games for English TV station Channel 4.
1066 is a mix of tactics, insult-typing, bowmanship, rhythm-game and narration by Ian Holm.
Trafalgar Origins is all Napoleonic high seas derringdo all the time, as you sail your English ship in real time against the damnable French and Spanish. Whether you want to hoist the sails or call your opponent a stench weasel, they are fun little games which have the added bonus of teaching you about British history. Both games can be played solo or multiplayer.
[via Rock Paper Shotgun, where they like those games quite a lot]
posted by Kattullus
on May 5, 2010 -
14 comments
Norman Centuries is a new podcast by Lars Brownworth, best known for his podcast series
12 Byzantine Rulers (
previously). Norman Centuries, as the name suggests, recounts the history of the Normans, those literal vikings who gained Normandy and then England, Sicily, Malta, Antioch and, well, a whole heck of a lot of other places too. They were a conquering bunch. First two episodes are out with more to follow.
[iTunes link]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 15, 2009 -
18 comments
Colour on the Thames is a 7 minute film shot in 1935 using
Gasparcolor, one of the many early forms of tinting black and white film. Beside
Colour on the Thames, which provides a wonderful view of 1930's England, the only film made in Gasparcolor I could find online was
Colour Flight by New Zealand artist Len Lye, an abstract cartoon set to instrumental 1930's pop music.
The story of Gasparcolor is in itself interesting, for instance touching on Nazis, Hungary between the wars and early color animation.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 27, 2009 -
12 comments
