linden's blog

This post is confirmation that yes, I'm still alive! I realize its been quite a while since my presence has been felt around the site and things are in dire need of some old fashioned up keep. To be perfectly honest, I have been completely swamped over the past four months with other personal projects and a new day job.

Anyways, its coming up on about a year since I first started working on filmforay in my spare time. I feel that I have learned insane amounts of stuff and in retrospect I have nothing but good feelings about the work put into it. However, all good things must come to an end, so I'm halting any future development on the site. I'll still be around in the comments and forums so if you have a film idea by all means share it! Who knows, perhaps in the future I will find the time to rethink the site and the siege will begin anew!

I have been migrating filmforay to another server this week along with taking care of tons of other tasks, both big and small, and filmforay was down for a few hours.... I know, a pretty big deal huh? Anyways, I hope anyone gravely impacted by this mis fortunate accident has fully recovered.

I don't know about you, but tonight I can rest easy knowing filmforay lives!

I've just lifted a the veil on a new area of the site focusing on interactive data visualizations. Introducing filmforay labs! Lately, I have been really interested in data visualization and excited about the potential of this emerging new medium. Data visualization has been around forever, but only just recently have we started to explore the vast quantities of data available through web service APIs and other sources in an interactive and (dare I say) entertaining way.

My first project entitled timepiece allows a user to explore all the film ideas, new members, comments, and votes over the five months that filmforay has been alive and kicking. Here is a sample image of timepiece in motion:

The visualization is done with Adobe Flash and pulls all recent data from the site, updated every 30 minutes. Currently it takes a pretty heavy toll on your CPU and loading does take some time, so older computers might have some trouble running it. And I'll admit the design wouldn't scale very well given a larger data set, but for the meager traffic filmforay has received so far it does just fine! As always, this project is still in very early stages of development so let me know what you think and if you encounter any problems. Enjoy!

Here is a video that really inspired me. Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the creators of their top notch Entertainment Technology Centers. He was recently diagnosed with a terminal cancer and this is a lecture he gives on truly realizing you life dreams. Worth watching.

Here is a cool little motion type video by MK12 studio , brazil inspired: machobox. Film buffs might recognize some of MK12's graphic work from last year's Stranger Than Fiction.

Check this stuff out!

• Type and film: I'm still stuck on typography and I just found this great flickr set that unites my new love with an old love (movies).

  

  Found this on: [ http://www.typography.com/ ]

• If I had a penny for: Every person mentioned in the Lord of The Rings: Return of the King credits, well I would have a lot of pennies. Here is an interesting graphic from the New York Times comparing the length of the credits from LOTR and some of the classics.