Every process junkie must see the Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian series, in particular, the 4th episode, “Technology,” which goes in-depth about the revolutionary production techniques used for the first Star Wars live-action tv show.
Lucasfilm built a filming stage comprised of a curved enclosure LED video screen-wall that surrounds the set, including a video ceiling. They call it THE VOLUME. It uses game-engine technology to allow camera movements to place mid- and far-background elements on respective planes. CG-created environmental elements can light the reflective surface of the Mandalorian’s helmet, creating a sense of true immersion in its fantastic worlds. A short demonstration of the technology is on YouTube, but the half-hour “Gallery” episode is worth the extra time.
Radar pings
The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a deeply affecting and personal journey by director Peter Medak about a failed & unreleased movie he shot with Peter Sellers in which the eccentric genius Sellers actively worked against the director to sabotage the film. Medak’s painful journey in revisiting a debacle that almost ended his film career is an amazing insight into the travails of the creative life. Medak is unsparing in this portrait of himself (and Sellers).
Re💊LIFE is a slice-of-life anime with an intriguing sci-fi element: its protagonist is given a biotech beta-test to fix his listless life, but the opportunity comes with a terrible catch. Now on Crunchyroll.
We Are Freestyle Love Supreme (on Hulu) gave me plenty of what I wanted: moments of joy seeing these free-styling rappers deliver spontaneous rhymes with a verbal kinetic skill that’s jaw-dropping, but it also went places I never expected and brought a lot of depth to an emotional journey, covering a wide timespan and seeing a core group of artistic friends deal with success, jealousy, and regret as their members spin off to wildly divergent paths.
Tweet of the week
Productivity rabbit hole
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve started working hard on outreach efforts for “Thompson Heller” and discovered my workflow and tools needed a major re-think. I tried out HEY.com and their new vision for email is revolutionary but I’m not quite ready to transition to their platform. I’ve tried a few different project-managing options, task-managing, and note-taking, and I think I’ve arrived at a holy trinity of productivity tools: SPARK, BEAR, and THINGS.
SPARK uses algorithms and machine learning to help automatically filter your email into category buckets, making it easier to manage. Its composition and scheduling features are great, and it integrates with other applications to share events and information. THINGS is expensive, but, it’s the TO-DO app that I’ve always wanted. Clean, unburdened by extra features, easy to use, with a UI that seems to anticipate exactly how I want to interact with it. BEAR is a fantastic note-taking and writing app, using markdown-style formatting, and hashtags for organizing information.
Podcast appearance
This week, I’m appearing on the “Comics for the Apocalypse” podcast. The show has a clever format - investigating guests’ comics tastes through the lens of a post-apocalyptic scenario. It was a fun discussion.
Add+ to pull list
I was a big fan of Christopher Cantwell’s ambitious comic mini-series She Could Fly and his amazing tv series Halt and Catch Fire. Can’t wait to see what he does with Iron Man. And this cover from Dustin Weaver is gorgeous: