neologisms
‘A nail-house parable’
Cool WSJ blog post on the reaction to Avatar in China:
In his post, titled “Avatar: An Epic Nail House Textbook,” [blogger] Li [Chengpeng] draws a comparison between the tree where the Na’vi live and the homes of people who resist eviction—known in China as “nail houses” because of the way they stick up out of would-be construction sites
I liked this line from Chinese writer Han Han:
“For audiences from other places, barbaric eviction is something they simply can’t imagine–it’s the sort of thing that could only happen in outer space and China.”
“Nail house”—what a great, evocative term. And some of these images are so dramatic. Check out the WSJ post, or the Wikipedia entry.
Of course, I’m just waiting for that house in the WSJ photo to explode into a mass of brightly-colored balloons and float away…
Animanifestos
I like this neologism from Chris Coldewey: He calls the short, type-heavy, idea-rich videos that are used, more and more, to explain products and services “animanifestos.” Here’s one example.
As one of those people who often likes title sequences better than the movies they introduce, I like this trend a lot. It’s also very Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word—except (of course) the word isn’t falling out of the picture, it’s falling in to the video frame. Words spinning and dancing, bumping up into pictures, emphasizing (or contradicting!) the voice-over track… mmm, good stuff. More animanifestos, please.
To answer one question Chris poses in his post: This kind of animation is still mostly done in Adobe After Effects, but I think the field is wide-open for something more mass-market. Some new iMovie to After Effects’ Final Cut Pro. Prezi could grow to meet this need, if they made the tool a lot more flexible—so it was built for making media, not just giving presentations.