blacksundae

Oceansize is a really impressive short monster movie created by four French animation students. Here’s a direct link with more information, and here’s a version with English subtitles (although you don’t really need it). [via io9]

These monsters are result of my effort to learn Processing and encourage others to do so by showing the source code. Also, at the end, my plan is to do a short music reactive video using these monsters. So if you feel like you can make one too and be part of it, rules are simple:

Link!

Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.

We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.

This book sounds fascinating. An interview with the editor.

Stan Winston, one of my heroes, died last night. He was one of the greatest Hollywood creature creators, close to Harryhausen and O’Brian in my estimation. As MeFi’s quin said, “This man invented my childhood.” I always wanted to work with him.

The New York Magazine “Vulture” Blog has a review:

In transforming the 338-word story of Where the Wild Things Are into a 111-page screenplay, Eggers and Jonze have fleshed out the story not, unexpectedly, with wild plot developments, and not, thankfully, with densely packed pop-fiction references. Instead Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.

Read on. [via Kottke]