firehose

Evan Hansen at Medium asked if I would write a piece for them for the July 1 turn-over of the RSS market to the people. Who knows what's going to happen? I sure don't. But then I realized I have something to say at this juncture.

The last few years, as Google has come to dominate the RSS market, have been very bad for RSS, imho. I say that because a technology with tremendous potential for decentralizing news flow became one of the Internet's most singularly centralized technologies. We couldn't move in RSS-land because any change had to be implemented by Google. And their only ideas seemed to be how to most efficiently kill RSS, not to improve it, make it work better. As their involvement neared the end, all you would hear from the tech press were gloating cheers that RSS had died. Twitter was the new RSS. Never did they say how actively the other big tech companies had conspired to kill it.

If RSS had been a product, the advent of Twitter would have been its moment of greatest glory. Because it would have forced Twitter to remain open to competition. Twitter's business model might have been simplifying and rationalizing RSS, which RSS certainly needed, and they would have been entitled to get hugely rich for pulling that off.

Had RSS been a product, subscription would have become easy, not an increasingly complex maze of negative feedback, thanks to deliberate sidetracks from the leading browser vendors. If you doubt this, try clicking on this link, to an RSS feed, and see how hard it is to just view the contents of the file. In Chrome, Safari or Firefox there's no way to do it. In this one area apparently Microsoft wins the prize, and all they had to do is not screw with RSS, and let the browser render it as it would any other file. Whether Google, Apple or Mozilla actively wanted to kill RSS doesn't matter -- the net-effect was the same. How can you use it if you can't even click a link to begin the subscription process.

So now, here we are at a crossroads. There are lots of ways RSS could improve. The question is this -- will the tech industry learn how to cooperate on an open format, or will each of them play a game of winner-take-all, which will certainly result in none of them getting anything in return for all their efforts.

My company, Small Picture, is working on authoring tools to create new RSS feeds. I have a private on-the-side project, just me personally, to help foster the development of new river-of-news aggregators, commercial and open source.

I would love to see RSS achieve some of its great potential. There are still millions of feeds being actively updated every day. This is a treasure that we can build on, instead of watching the tech industry fight to kill it, once again.

Not sure whether I should be optimistic. But if the tech industry can turn this corner, then there's nothing we can't do. But having spent 40-plus years in this industry, I don't have much cause for optimism.

China is showing signs of stress this morning after the central bank issued a terse statement telling bankers to shape up and stop counting on perpetual money printing.

Chinese stocks tanked. The Shenzhen A shares fell more than 6%. The Shanghai Composite index, pictured below year-to-date, was down more than 5%, falling below 2,000.

Of course, a lot of the the worries center on the stability of China’s banking system. China’s government-controlled version of Libor still shows that conditions in the interbank lending markets are a bit tight. Still, rates have declined since last week, showing some improvement.

As the US learned during its financial crisis, it doesn’t take long for problems in the banking system to bleed into the overall economy. Copper has been something of a proxy for Chinese growth in recent years. Prices for the industrial metal tumbled to its lowest price in nearly three years.

There are emerging doubts about how all this will effect the fiscal health of the world’s second largest economy. The cost of insuring against a default on Chinese government bonds has jumped over the last few days. Here’s a look at five-year credit default swaps on China.

ironspy:

The World’s End - 2013

The next merger boom is already here.

It’s easy to think such a statement is based upon optimism following the worst post-war recession in living memory, new sovereign and municipal debt crises seemingly arising once a month, and the still-unknown consequences of quantitative easing.

But it’s not the case entirely.

New merger booms always have their doubters, and the present cyclical upsurge is no exception. For every few articles such as The Economist’s “Shall We”  anticipating a rise in overall merger activity and volume, there seems to be at least one other media piece bemoaning stagnant deal total transaction numbers when assessed on a year-to-year basis.

But understand the factors behind those apparently flat numbers through February through March, and the result is a decidedly more buoyant forward perspective, merger-wise.

Tech sector deal volume has risen fairly consistently since the second half of 2011, particularly in social networking. Bank financing—required fuel for merger-cycle growth once the initial cheap, cash-only opportunities are depleted—has been a question mark for several quarters, as bank capital adequacy levels are debated in New York and Brussels. But merger financing is historically a profit-leader, and the siren-song allure of increased profits is music to embattled bankers’ ears.

The Economist piece points to an additional explanation for the relatively subdued levels of deal volume in this decade’s signature M&A cycle through about February of this year: hesitancy on the part of would-be operating company acquirers to blindly chase those sexy-but-doomed deals, which were reminiscent of merger bubbles past.

No longer are dud deals rubber-stamped by the board just on the say of the acquiring company chief executive.

Those mistakes included “transformational” deals designed to puff up the acquiring firm CEO’s ego and temporary market stature while changing a utility into an entertainment conglomerate (Vivendi/Universal) or a fading dial-up net service provider into a multimodal print-and-virtual media juggernaut (AOL/TimeWarner). Both deals—and transactions resembling them—are today correctly viewed as being merger train wrecks. These errors shortened chief executives’ careers while stalling the acquiring company’s momentum and competitiveness.

The newest merger boom

As spring 2013 officially heats up and becomes summer, the corner in the M&A deal marketplace finally appears to have been turned, with tech leading the way. It all started with Facebook’s shock acquisition of Instagram shortly before its May 2012 Initial Public Offering at DOUBLE the price set a week earlier.

At one point in time, Facebook/Instagram appeared to be a one-off. But social networking competitors, and those trying to make up for lost time, have picked up the momentum, exemplified by Google’s acquisition of Waze and Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr (the latter snatched away from Facebook at the eleventh hour). International telecoms, local news media, natural resource companies, utilities and pharma are all now picking up their consolidation pace. Announcements of the creation of acquisition war chests come once-per-week, signaling acquirers on the hunt.

Thus, the customary factors, which have driven each of the past three post-merger booms are now all falling into place (Fig. 1). Plus one more: record high share prices coincide with new expansion optimism.

In a phrase, mergers are once again beginning to appear safe to do. The result is that the present merger boom appears to be in second phase of a predictable pattern (Fig. 2). With returns from internal investments now often disappointing to outright career-threatening, it is at this point in time in recoveries past that chief executives begin looking outside the firm: to strategic alliances, new commercial licenses and contracts, and most conspicuously, acquisitions of other companies.

As in any marketplace, the intensity of buying mania matters in M&A. The number and range of quality merger targets for external investment quickly disappear as the merger cycle ages and a ‘buyers’ panic’ takes hold. In the late phases of recent merger cycles past (1982-1990, 1996-2000, 2002-2008) all that’s left to acquire in the final, frantic months of the merger cycle- just before the bubble pops- are poorer quality target companies at prices so high that acquisition regret is almost assured.

Thus, not only do merger cycles matter, but knowledge of them are also critical to the acquiring company’s CEO in order to know which part of the acquisition cycle she or he is entering, thus helping ensure the highest chances for M&A program success.

Yes, Most Mergers Will STILL Fail

Is it really safe to jump into the merger pool? History suggests that the answer is “mostly no” as evidenced by more than 20 articles and papers indicating that two-thirds or more of all deals “fail” based on the criteria those researchers applied.

But can companies do better? With spectacular merger missteps such as BofA/Countywide Financial, Hewlett-Packard/Autonomy and RBS/ABN Amro all in recent memory, every wannabe acquirer gives lip service at least to prudent acquisition practices for the next deal: determining whether the financial return from the deal justifies the outlay (rather than total reliance, nebulous, subjective notions such as “strategic fit”), and assessing whether the acquisition purchase premium (APP)— referring to the amount that has to be paid above the target company’s share price in order to close the deal—is mostly backed by achievable synergies: postmerger improvements.

Whether or not such prudence is real or continues yet to remain. Figure 2 shows how modest merger activity in early phases of M&A cycles past and present quickly become runaway buyers-panic bubbles, especially as late arrivers to the party scramble to make up for lost time.

As the current merger cycle marches through its second phase (of four), merger activity is no longer a matter of business media speculation, but rather, is confirmed by companies own acquisition war chests. In October 2012, 3M closed its biggest deal in two years and in the May 2013 declares that more deals are on the horizon.

This month, following speculation about its pursuit of Spain’s Telefonica, telecommunications giant AT&T openly admits to what the financial market had already suspected for months: earnest pursuit of international deals, especially those involving next generation 4G mobile technology.

Steady, moderate acquirer John Chalmers of Cisco Systems endures as a poster boy for this acquisition boom, in stark contrast in terms of both style and substance to the pop-biz media stars of M&A bubbles past, such as Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi or Jurgen Schrempf of Daimler-Benz. Firms such as Cisco, 3M, Apple and PepsiCo typify merger prudence for others in the new boom: generally (but not always) smaller-sized deals, closely aligned with areas of existing or emerging strength in those organizations, justified on a hard numbers basis, and acquired at a price likely to be perceived by both the financial markets and their own boards as justifiable.

Merger volume will still increase, even if most mergers continue to disappoint

For argument’s sake, let’s pretend that today, there will be no discernable improvement in overall merger performance in the present-merger wave, compared to the disappointments of last three post-1980 M&A cycles.

Does that mean that the newest merger boom will sputter and crash, as acquirers become timid and/or scared again? Despite the reality that most mergers STILL fail, the answer to that question is “no” (at least over the next few years) for reasons including:

I’m the exception. Wannabe merger dealmakers, consultants and advisors try to turn lemons into lemonade, acknowledging that most mergers disappoint, but that they’re just the guys to help find the one-third of transactions that are viewed as successful nine months after the close.

Looking for alternatives. Holding cash and near-cash means close to zero returns, and even less, if new indications of return of modest inflation persist. The acquiring firm’s easy areas for organic growth, such as product line extension and expansion into contiguous geographic areas, are quickly becoming used up. What’s left? External investment, usually referred to by its other name: mergers.

Spending imagined wealth. Never mind that in broad-based stock market booms such as the rally since late 2010, prices of ALL companies tend to rise, acquirer and target alike. The corporate fiction—and the sense on the board—persists that “we should do something to take advantage of our high stock price.” A likely target? Another company.

Acquiring company CEO hubris. Presiding over a major acquisition during his or her period as company CEO remains as a driving force, admitted or not. Faced with a reality that only around a third of deals succeed, the super-confident new chief executive has little doubt of his/her own ability to beat the odds.

The above figures come from Peter’s forthcoming book Masterminding the Deal: Breakthroughs in M&A Strategy and Analysis. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

ABC News

Berlusconi Guilty in Sex-for-Hire Trial ABC News Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's flamboyant former premier, was sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from politics for life Monday for paying an underage prostitute for sex during infamous "bunga bunga" parties and forcing public officials to cover it up. Berlusconi conviction spells trouble for Italy's fragile governmentGlobe and Mail Seven year sentence for Berlusconi in Rubygate trialABC Online Silvio Berlusconi verdict sends shockwavesBBC News Irish Times -Xinhua -Bloomberg all 422 news articles »

ABC News

Missing red panda from National Zoo found in DC USA TODAY WASHINGTON (AP) — A Twitter photo and phone tip from a resident helped animal keepers track down a red panda in a Washington neighborhood after it went missing from the Smithsonian's National Zoo. The male named Rusty was captured Monday in a ... Rusty the red panda escapes from National Zoo for a field tripLos Angeles Times Follow That Tweet: Twitter Helps DC Zoo Find Escaped Red PandaDesign & Trend Endangered Red Panda That Escaped From Zoo IS Found In WashingtonInternational Business Times NBC4 Washington -WUTC all 246 news articles »

firehose shared this story from time to feel good about every limb.

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digivolvin:

wgsn:

Fabien Verriest’s floral beards made us smile at La Cambre National School of Visual Arts final MA show.

this is everything

Mormons to use technology in missionary work KSRO SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Mormon missionaries will soon spend less time knocking on doors and more time chatting online with potential converts. Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced the strategy shift Sunday night in Provo, ... and more »

Don’t call it a comeback

little-known fact about women of war: their stories were defaced by dinosaurs and ancient mammals

(keep reading, more inside)

via Russian Sledges

newberrylibrary :

Kady Brownell, pictured above, was one of 250 women who fought in the Civil War.

Brownell was born Kady Southwell in Kaffraria, South Africa, to a French mother and Scottish father. Shortly after her birth, Brownell moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where she would become a weaver in textile mills. When the Civil War began, Brownell’s soon-to-be husband, Robert Brownell, enlisted in the 1st Rhode Island Infantry; Brownell was determined to join him. Rhode Island Governor William Sprague accepted her into his unit.

Once in Washington, Colonel Ambrose Burnside made Brownell a Color Bearer and Daughter of the Regiment. She was charged with carrying the flag into battle (considered a great honor), and was an active participant in several battles—both as soldier and nurse. Brownell won the admiration of her contemporaries, lauded as a “skillful sharpshooter and expert swordsman.”

When her husband was wounded and discharged, she, too, returned home.

This portrait, taken after the war’s conclusion, was featured in Frank Moore’s Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self Sacrifice, published in 1866. Brownell posed for the photograph, which was subsequently transformed into a steal engraving.

BOSTON — New farms could sprout up around Boston under proposed new zoning rules that would make it easier to start commercial agriculture operations.

The Boston Globe reports that the new rules would allow small ground-level and roof-top farms to be established without the sometime lengthy public hearing process.

And this month, city officials have kicked off a series of neighborhood meetings to discuss how to remove barriers to launching urban agriculture.

Non-commercial farming, such as what people practice in backyard plots, is already permitted. But Boston’s zoning code doesn’t address many other types of agriculture, and if the code doesn’t address it, it’s not allowed.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino backs expanded urban farming, saying it can increase neighborhood unity and help bring more green spaces to the city.

A Taiwanese coffee mart called Let’s Cafe has a special coffee machine that allows users to print pictures of themselves directly onto the foam of their latte. Customers simply take a photo with their phone, upload it to the coffee machine, and the machine prints the picture onto their coffee. Previously, we wrote about the 3D latte art of Japanese barista Kazuki Yamamoto.

images and video via ExMaBlog

via PSFK

urhajos:

Justin Hager

A common shared belief among delusional people is that “orbs” (specks of moisture or dust illuminated by a camera flash) are not artifacts of taking a picture with a flash, but rather, celestial beings from another plane. The author of this book reports that she was “mocked by family and friends about her obsession” until the Archangel Michael appeared to her. She doesn’t say what he told her, but I’m guessing it was “WoooOOOOOoooo write a crazy ass book wooooooooooOOOOO.”

If you ever need proof that you’re not as crazy as you could be, ask yourself: has God or an angel personally talked to me to tell me something? If no, then you could be worse.

A plane took off from Moscow Monday headed for Cuba, but the seat booked by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was empty, and there was no sign of him elsewhere on board. An Aeroflot representative who wouldn't give her name told The Associated Press that Snowden wasn't on flight SU150 to Havana. AP reporters on the flight couldn't see him. The Interfax news agency also quoted an unidentified Russian security source in Moscow as saying that Snowden wasn't on the plane. The airline said earlier Snowden registered for the flight using his U.S. passport, which American officials say has been annulled. Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday from Hong Kong, where he had been hiding for several weeks to evade U.S. justice. Ecuador is considering Snowden's asylum application. After spending a night in Moscow's airport, the former National Security Agency contractor — and admitted leaker of state secrets — had been expected to fly to Cuba and Venezuela en route to possible asylum in Ecuador.

In part, the single and its video have garnered so much attention beacuse critics have slammed the song for being "rapey." However, Thicke was not thrown by the poor reviews as it was his intention in the first place to "break every rule of things you're not supposed to do and make people realize how silly some rules are."

It’s not quite on the scale of [Michael Bay], but that’s probably a good thing. We do think that this robot built from a mailing tube by [Will Jack] would be right at home in a Transformers movie.

The bot starts out looking like a normal cardboard mailing tube. But the seam at the middle splits to reveal the electronics inside. An Arduino Uno drives the device, monitoring that infrared rangefinder which is facing forward. Each half of the tube acts as a wheel, pushing against the at-rest mass of the internals to create motion. It can even pull off a tank-like pivot to turn in place by spinning he halves in opposite directions.

We were intrigued to hear that the admissions department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a single page acceptance letter in these silver tubes to those students accepted into the class of 2017. The letter invites the incoming class to hack the tube and send in their results. We’re going to have to dig through the submissions and see if there are any other noteworthy projects.

Filed under: robots hacks

The Republic

Report: Kids in Texas have it rough Fort Worth Star Telegram Conditions have improved slightly for children in Texas, but a national report that ranks states on the health and well-being of kids still has the Lone Star State among the bottom 10. In its 2013 Kids Count report, released Monday, the Annie E. Casey ... NJ 5th, Pa. 17th in child well-beingPhilly.com Report: Economic Well-Being of US Children SlipsABC News Annual Kids Count report bumps state to 49Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal KOB.com -WBIR-TV all 103 news articles »

	rachel shared this story from drwnng:
	- You still can't comment on a share without an existing comment. I would be posting these comments on Firehose's share if I could. - I'm mostly happy with Newsblur, but if something comes along with a good search function, I'll probably switch. + I really like the iOS mobile app, although you can't hide comments by strangers yet.

PROS:

• BOOKMARKLET
• Imports and exports OPML
• Best solution to the use of wide monitors: a three-pane interface of subscriptions, then item titles, then the full items. All panes are collapsible, I believe.
• Extensive keyboard shortcuts, with navigation shortcuts using the GReader/vim-style standard.
• Social sharing with threading comments.
• Comments can be made directly on a sharer’s item, or publicly on any item. Public comments appear everywhere.
• Privacy controls let you limit comments on public shares, or allow only people you approve to see your shared stories at all.
• You can train the reader to “focus” on (promote) shares that match your reading preferences (allegedly; never seen it happen and don’t want/use it)
• Flexible mark-as-read tool lets you mark items older than x days
• Flexible avatar selection (upload unique to NB or use Gravatar, Twitter, FB)
• Public shares are published to a page with an RSS feed; page can be customzied with colors or custom CSS.
• Interactions list shows social activity at a glance.
• You can view other users’ followers and who they follow. Good for discovery.
• Good community of sharers and commenters.
• Dev is active and listens to feedback.
• Self-supported by paid subscriptions.

CONS:

• NO SEARCH
• No user-definable tags; the author’s tags come through but are only used for training. You can’t sort or filter by tags.
• Interface is still slower than nearly all other reader webapps. As slow as tOR for me in Chrome and Firefox, sometimes slower.
• Interface uses standard concepts in non-standard ways, and the author is vocal that this is intentional.
  
  Biggest, oldest example: mousing over a folder shows an icon with a triangle pointing right, which replaces the folder to the left of the folder name. Mousing over the triangle points it downward. Clicking it DOES NOT collapse/expand the folder: it pops up a drop-down full of options, and none of them are collapse/expand.
  
  So then how do you collapse/expand the folder? A right-justified plus-sign icon that appears on mouseover, which by reflex makes me think it should actually add a feed to that folder.
  
  So then how do you add a feed to a folder? It’s in that drop-down menu under the collapse/expand psychout arrow! DUH!
  
  This sort of wackiness is all over the interface. Let me know when you need help figuring out why stories are (or aren’t) getting marked as read, aka that stupid triangle floating on the left edge of shares, aka why you have to hit j twice to navigate down past the first item in a feed. Or why you can’t mark all as read while viewing the All Shared Stories feed. Or why you can’t add a comment to an item that was shared without comments.
  
  All of the interface problems predate the May 20 redesign, which was mostly shuffling existing elements and colors around but fixed very little in terms of UX.
  
  
• No anti-troll controls on any commenting (block/ban/hide/mute/moderation)
• Site is not mobile friendly; mobile apps required
• Still the only reader that uniquely can’t handle numerous feeds. Paizo feeds constantly fall over. Comic Book Resources shows each post twice.
• Privacy options don’t allow for friend-of-friend GReader-style discovery.
• Even when you crank the privacy options as far as they go, it’s not clear whether others can still see your recent interactions, followers, and who you follow.

CON, MAINLY TO FIREHOSE:

• Took VC funding via Y Combinator (startup culture influence).

Original Source

Continuing a series of interviews with designers and artists that bring user interfaces and graphics to the big screens, today I’m honored to host Joseph Chan. You have seen his work on “Tron: Legacy” and “Oblivion”, as well as one quite a few motion ad campaigns for companies such as Sony, Google, HP, Intel, Blackberry and others.

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Kirill: Please tell us about yourself and how you started in the field.

Joseph: I’m a motion graphic designer and I’ve been working in the industry since 2007. I graduated from Pasadena Art Center in 2006 with a degree in graphic design, specializing in motion graphics.

Before that I attended UC Irvine, I didn’t have a major and was deciding what I wanted to do as a career, and it was around the year 2000 when the .com boom was in full force. It was a great and inspiring time for me, people were designing amazing abstract graphics from 3D programs that I had never seen before. I learned Photoshop and put together a portfolio with personal projects that I did in my spare time. After I was accepted into Art Center, I transitioned from graphic design into motion design which had started to ramp up midway through my college years.

Kirill: What happened after you graduated?

Joseph: During school I took two internships. One was in an interactive design studio, creating graphics and content for websites. In my latter terms at Art Center, I took a class with Chris Do who owns and operates Blind which does motion graphics, and I interned under him and Tom Koh. From then on I decided to focus entirely on motion graphics.

Kirill: And here you’re not talking about Flash / VRML containers that were very popular at that time in the browser environment.

Joseph: I wasn’t into the technical side of Flash or into creating websites. I was mainly using it as a tool for simple layer and text animations, because that was what people used at the time. But the designers who were using Flash in amazing ways, creating beautiful websites full of motion really caught my eye and pushed me towards my career.

Kirill: So back to what you did after graduating…

Joseph: I graduated in mid December in 2007, took some time off for the holidays, and started freelancing at different motion graphics studios around LA and Santa Monica, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve never been staff at a studio before, at this point in my career I feel freelancing is the way to go as I have a little bit more freedom in terms of studio and project choices.

Kirill: Are you also involved in art direction / concept design?

Joseph: Sometimes I am brought in to a project midway or near the tail-end, so therefore I won’t be as involved with the concept as someone who had been on the project since the beginning. So in that scenario I’d be helping out with animation and finishing. Other times I am brought in from the pitch phase, and that includes art direction, concepting, and designing. I do enjoy all parts of the process, designing and animating, and personally I like to find a balance between the two, trying not to do too much of one thing for long stretches of time.

Kirill: You’ve worked on projects with rather different styles. For example, the spot for the first launch of Google Chrome, the recent spot for Google Now and the one for the Gates foundation are semi-vintage illustration style, while Beats Envy and Sony spots have a very modern high-tech industrial feel. Do you like exploring radically different styles?

Joseph: Absolutely. I’m influenced by all kinds of different styles and I try not to limit myself to a particular one per se. I’d like to think that each project has a different and unique solution, so I keep my mind open to what the project asks for.

Kirill: How many people do you usually have collaborating on a single spot?

Joseph: It all depends on the project and what it entails. The spot for Google – compared to other big budget projects that I’ve worked on – was quite simple from the start and we knew that. We did everything from concept to delivery – illustrations, design, compositing and animations – with a team of four people. The spot for Beats Envy also had a small team, but it was a little bit more complicated due to the need for 3D modeling and animation. I worked on the UI designs, compositing of 2D and 3D elements, and the overall grade. The team was four or five people. And then of course we had producers and the creative directors.

Kirill: Was the spot for Sony more complex?

Joseph: The UI and graphic design, a little bit. We had a small graphics team in charge of about 30 screens, so that was a bit daunting. But the direction was very open and we had time to experiment in Cinema 4D and After Effects.

With regard to the overall project, it wasn’t too complex. We weren’t in charge of compositing the graphics so we did our own thing and handed it off.

Kirill: On a spot such as Sony, do you limit the design to be just beyond the edge of what is generally available in consumer electronics and software? Do you aim to create something explicitly futuristic?

Joseph: I feel designers are best when they aren’t constrained by the software. My philosophy is to really design without worrying too much about the technical limitations. That way, the design will be the best possible solution, and that rings true for animation as well. It can always be pushed, experimented with, and figured out.

On a spot such as the Sony Mouse & Cat, we were given free reign on the look of the UI, so naturally the designs were quite far out, futuristic. I think it fit quite well with the techy nature of the campaign.

Kirill: And then a few years ago you worked on “Tron: Legacy”. How was the transition to working on a much bigger project?

Joseph: I always wanted to work on something related to film, especially in the sci-fi genre because of the futurism involved. There’s always a lot of potential there, and I was very happy to be a part of Tron: Legacy. It was unlike anything that I’ve worked on. Not just being involved with and experiencing the massive Digital Domain pipeline (we were a small team of graphic designers and animators sitting in a small corner surrounded by them). But also knowing that your work is going to be viewed by people from all over the world, really challenged and inspired me.

We were creating our content with the usual toolsets (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, C4D), with the exception of some generative art, and handed the results off to the compositors.

Kirill: What is compositing?

Joseph: The compositors take the graphics that we’ve created – 2D or 3D – and implement them into the shots. It’s the layering of these separate objects, put together in order to get the final picture.

Kirill: And then you reunited with most of the people on the same team to work on “Oblivion”. How was it?

Joseph: It was fun. It was pretty much the same team, with a few newcomers. Gmunk contacted me to bring me in, and opined that it wasn’t going to be as big as Tron: Legacy, but it was with the same director (Joe Kosinski), with a lot of freedom to do what we do, so I was immediately on board.

It was also exciting for me because I took on much larger role than on Tron: Legacy. This time I was able to be involved with the project from pre-production to post, and that allowed me to have more design and animation input.

Kirill: How are you preventing yourself from falling into the trap of not using the same graphic and animation elements in different projects?

Joseph: Sometimes recycling ideas, elements or animation is required for the sake of time and to make ones’ life easier, but personally I try to push myself to learn something new, perhaps something that I’m not comfortable with, in the projects that I work on. It could be a very small or big thing, but I feel it’s a good challenge. In order not to fall into the trap of rehashing things, you just have to be aware of it.

Kirill: How did you handle the on-set playback schedule of “Oblivion”?

Joseph: The Light Table was shot on set, so we made sure that the graphics looped, with startup and turnoff animations. We packaged everything and delivered it to a company called i.Solve who took our graphics and ran them through their software. They were on set, controlling the specific timings of each animation.

Kirill: And then you had screen designs for the automatic drones. They don’t really need to project that information for themselves, but you also can’t just show a blank screen. You need to support the narrative with some kind of a menacing automated scanning interface.

Joseph: It’s part of the magic of designing these interfaces because we’re essentially creating stylized, almost exaggerated versions of information that may not make perfect sense in the real world. Like you said, the drones would obviously not display information for themselves, but we decided to allow it anyways while also maintaining its menace, danger and mystery.

Kirill: Are you concerned about how this work will look like in 15-20 years? How it will have “survived” the actual technological advances known to that future audience?

Joseph: I’m not too concerned. Things change, technology, styles, taste. New things will get introduced and change the way we think and that’s just the nature of it.

I guess if you look back at Oblivion in 15-20 years, it’d be like looking into a little time capsule, where you can see the choices we made based on the technology available at the time. Our research and influences–the functionality of interfaces and HUDs that exist today–reflect the times, and we used that as a base to make sure it was grounded in reality.

We also looked at other interfaces to see what others have come up with. Movies, video games, all have great examples of what others have thought up. I think we’re all in the same camp where we don’t really know what the future may hold, but we’re excited and we’re inventing as we go along.

Kirill: Are you comfortable with having this work described as Fantasy UIs?

Joseph: I think that’s a nice way to put it. Technology is all about enriching humans in some way or another, so inventing the design, look, and animation of how we interact with new technology really gives it that fantasy element.

It’d be a totally different beast if we were designing for real life applications though. The research and development process alone would take years, every detail has to have a real function. So it’s nice working with Fantasy UIs.

Kirill: How were you able to validate some of the explorations for this big light table in “Oblivion”?

Joseph: The Light Table was basically three flat screens horizontally and one that went vertical. Joseph Kosinski [director], the director, decided to use HDTVs and even shared a photo of himself sitting and interacting with a screen laid flat just to give us a sense of scale. So the design fit the 1080p dimensions of the screens perfectly.

The main section was the map which the character in the movie, Vika, interacts mainly with. Then we had a Drone monitor, HydroRig monitor, and a weather map, which took up the vertical screen.

After the design phase we took a trip to i.Solve’s studio with some stills of the Light Table, and we were able to get it up on the screens. We checked for any color or size discrepancies, and they took it from there.

Kirill: What are you thoughts on the software tools that you’re using? Are you frustrated by them? Do you wish to see a radically different way to interact with them?

Joseph: You learn not to be frustrated by them. They are just tools and in the work that I do the concept is always the most important. When you get to art directing and having a more hands-off approach, then the software tools and its limitations do not become so much of a problem as you have technical teams that take your direction and help bring your designs to life.

In terms of interaction, I am open to new things. Years ago I never experienced working with a Wacom tablet and now I can’t work without it. Touch screens allowed us to interact with our fingers. And if something new becomes introduced that changes the way we interact with software, then I’ll be the first to try it.

Kirill: Where do you see the human-computer interaction heading in the near future?

Joseph: I sometimes wish that I’d be able to interact with holograms the way Tony Stark does in Iron Man. As a viewer, it just looks so cool, but I don’t know how functional that would be in real life. I can only guess, but I do think touch screens are going to be more and more relevant in the future, and so the devices that we have now, iPhones and iPads etc. which use natural gestural elements, are maybe preparing us for that.

Kirill: What happens the first time you watched the movies you’ve worked on?

Joseph: It can be quite distracting. Personally I have a hard time focusing on the story the first couple of times. I watched “Oblivion” three times. The first was an early cut on our first day of work, which didn’t have any VFX and graphics in it. The audio and sounds effects also weren’t complete so it really left a lot to the imagination. We were invited to the screening a few weeks before the premiere, and this time it was distracting because I was mainly paying attention to our work, trying to pinpoint anything that might have went wrong, even though there is no way that we could have made changes. It was however great just experiencing for the first time our graphics composited, colored, and implemented into the shots. Digital Domain and Pixomondo did a great job, obviously. The third time I watched it with a few friends, and that’s when I enjoyed it the most, being able to take in the story, the great audio and visuals.

Kirill: Where do you see yourself moving forward?

Joseph: It was a great experience working on several film projects as it’s completely different from motion graphics. I had the chance to work with small tight-knit teams that allowed me to have more creative freedom and input. Working directly with a film director like Joseph Kosinski allowed a close collaboration that sometimes is rare in a motion graphic setting as things get convoluted dealing with agencies and clients.

I hope to continue doing what I’m doing, having fun working and learning from great people, on meaningful projects that I care about. And to continue growing as a designer and story teller.

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And here I’d like to thank Joseph Chan for this great opportunity to talk about his work. You can find Joseph online at his portfolio site.

via aparrish

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