The Canadian documentary The Corporation is available for free on BitTorrent. Even though the official site says nothing about this, it seems to be all legal, the torrent being release by the film maker himself, Mark Achbar.
Download it, watch it and please consider making a donation.
A few months back I got this message from my colleague David Huska, really nice pointer to Canadian animation:
For years as a kid we all saw these *instead* of commercials on public stations. Canada's National Film Board is a publicly-funded agency. They just put 50 of their animated shorts, spanning 70 years, up on their site.
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/films/
I haven't seen many of these, and it's been 25 years since I last saw the ones I have seen! Some of my old faves:
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/films/film.php?sort=title&id=15310
I saw An Inconvenient Truth today. If you have any doubts that we are causing a massive climate change then make sure you see this movie. And I really mean MASSIVE.
If you still have doubts after seeing this movie then your salary depends on having doubts.
One of the trailers shown before the movie started was for "Who Killed the Electric Car?", related subject, looks pretty interesting.
There is a saying, "The map is not the territory". While there are many reasons why this is true, there is one aspect regarding maps of the whole Earth that caught my interest quite a while ago. The Earth is more or less a sphere, how do you project a sphere on a plane? By distorting it, of course. Knowing that maps are distorted projections is one thing, getting a feel for that distortion is another.
If you could animate a map by continously changing the projection point, you could get a better understanding in which ways and to what extent different areas of the map are distorted. A few weeks ago I just realized that the individual frames of such an animation could be generated by xplanet and then an animation can be created by joining together all these frames. Since you don't want to manually generate all the frames you would need a way to automate the whole process. I wrote a short Python script that generates the frames by calling xplanet in a loop and then creates an avi animation using mplayer.
We saw an excellent movie the other day: What the Bleep Do We Know!.
If you ever wondered what reality is then you must see this movie.
