Meanwhile #140
I’ve completely forgotten how to newsletter and apparently newsletter is a verb now.
— Happy new year! You’re probably sick of end-of-year lists now, but here’s my movie posters of the year for Creative Review; featuring a bevy of butt plugs, celebrity slappings and Blanchettian jawlines. Hard to pick one favourite, but I find myself lingering on Intermission’s simple but incredibly executed poster for The Stranger every time. There are omissions that will displease, but hey, I discovered four whole films I didn’t even know existed while researching this post, so I’m rather pleased with the final selection.
— Fantastic photographic archive of buildings under construction, “celebrating the creation of architecture, its methods of construction, the beauty of building sites, and the indispensable labour involved in the process.”
— I’m very much a D&D bystander, happy to read rulebooks and manuals without actually playing the game itself (see Damien Walter’s the joy of reading roleplaying games). Still, awfully tempted by these Field Notes gaming journals, specially designed to keep track of your characters, GMing and monsters.
— John Boughton celebrates ten years of his fabulous blog Municipal Dreams. Particularly proud to have designed the cover for the first edition of Boughton’s book of the same name.
— Luke Caspar Pearson and Sandra Youkhana delve into the intricate architecture of videogame environments in Videogame Atlas, their new book published by Thames & Hudson, which they believe could help democratise urban planning.
— Granta’s Production and Design Director, Sarah Wasley, talks to The Flip about knowing your own limitations, balancing caring with her career and shares her experience of adjusting her working conditions to fit around her life.
— Danny Dimian, Visual Effects Supervisor, and Josh Beveridge, Head of Character Animation, discuss how they and their team created the look of Into the Spider-Verse, a stunning turning point in animation that just keeps on blowing my mind (The sequel simply cannot come soon enough). Interesting to note how they used machine learning for the character animation – as another tool, not a solution or a shortcut.