Directed by Will Hoffman & Daniel Mercandante for NPR & Radiolab, Words is a delight.

Stunningly beautiful film exploring the link between nature and the Fibonacci Sequence. By Cristóbal Vila of Eterea Studios in Spain.

We don’t get a chance to go to the cinema very often but one weekend Gillian and I had the opportunity. We went to see Star Trek and boy did it make every other film in the series look weak, thin and boring! The new cast were absolutely spot on and the effects were utterly fantastic. The story and the action drew you in and kept you in that universe.

Directed by none other than J.J. Abrams, the film had 1,005 visual effects shots beautifully realised by ILM and Digital Domain. Any post house that can take anamorphic plates with tons of lens flares, create intricately detailed CG and comp it to perfection deserves all the accolades the industry can award. There’s a really good write-up on the VFX side of Star Trek on the CG Society site.

It’s fantastic that J.J. Abrams decided to take a very well known franchise like Star Trek, shake it to it’s foundations and come up with a much better story than almost every other film done before. Bravo, and I’m looking forward to the next one!

Click on the plates above for a larger view.

I was a little bit disoriented with Quicktime X, to be honest. What, no export preferences? Only Sharing to iTunes? The UI looks very nice and the promise of GPU-accelerated playback is theoretically good, but what about 1080p MKV files playing natively? Quicktime X doesn’t recognise anything besides MP4 or iTunes’ M4V files. Perian was a constant presence in Leopard but a second-tier citizen with 10.6. Until now!

Thanks to the info in this thread on the cocoa forge board and the latest version of Perian, this utility will let Quicktime X recognise and play .mkv files. Front Row will happily play AVI files (as long as you have Flip4Mac installed) and SD MKV files but not 720p or 1080 movies unfortunately.

Of course, there’s always Plex which plays all movie codecs flawlessly without the need for Perian.

It was 1984 and I was 14 when Tron came out. I absolutely loved the film and I think I probably watched it over a hundred times. I was surprised when I felt a little bit excited about the sequel after watching the VFX concept trailer.

It’s released at the end of 2010 and with most of the original cast appearing. From the trailer it appears that Jeff Bridge’s character, Flynn, is perhaps now a baddie! Oh yes: Light cycles, frisbees of death, Master Control Program, glow suits. And it’ll be in 3D.

Pixar: what an amazing idea factory. Watch the latest short film on YouTube before it disappears!

It’s been pulled unfortunately. It’s worth going to see UP in the cinema and watch the short before the main feature.

Dear Santa,

I’ve been very good this year and all I want for Christmas is The Godfather Family Album. Or failing that for my birthday next year. Or the next. Any time before the end.

Thanks.

P.S., If you need any more convincing, there’s a great article about The Book.