The Weather Channel’s amazing new “Immersive Mixed Reality”

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

The Weather Channel this week introduced new technology that will add astonishing visual effects to their broadcasts. Check out this Co.Design article, with video, where you can see a demo in which the anchorman barely escapes being crushed by a flying car and struck by a downed power line during a tornado. It’s startlingly realistic.

Link: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90176637/the-weather-channels-new-storm-graphics-are-totally-insane

Update: The article link is no longer good. But I found the video on YouTube.

Posted in Creativity, News, Popular culture, Technology, Television | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Homage in The Shape of Water – Monsters who like candy

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Colonel Strickland, the cruel government agent who pulled the amphibious fish/man out of the river muck in South America, continually crunches on green (lime?) hard candy throughout The Shape of Water.

Strickland isn’t cinema’s only early-’60s  antagonist with a sweet tooth, though. Who could forget Psycho‘s Norman Bates, the mama’s boy with a taste for candy corn? (shown here nervously chewing away as he disposes of Marion Crane’s car, her freshly-showered body in the trunk)

Candy adds an intriguing dimension to these two tormented monsters. It makes them somehow vulnerable, possibly even childlike. The line separating the truly evil from the rest of us becomes a little more blurred.

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Homage in The Shape of Water – Odessa Steps

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

The last movie we watch in my film studies class every spring is always whatever has won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. This year we’re watching The Shape of Water. This is a really brilliant movie, and I have so many things I’m thinking about in response that I want to write a longer essay/article this summer. In the short term, just to give myself an outlet right away, I’m going to post small items I’ve noticed and am mulling over.

One thing I want to look at in this film is homage. I’ve written about “homage” before; you can read that post for additional background if you like (here, for example). If you read reviews of The Shape of Water, you can see that others have noted some of the more direct film references (like Elisa dancing with her mop à la Fred Astaire dancing with the coat rack in Royal Wedding). I’ll probably talk about those, too.

But today I just thought I’d post some screenshots of a little thing I noticed. Below is a screenshot from the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 classic portrayal of a real life massacre of innocent civilians by government troops as punishment for feeding the starving sailors out on the ship just beyond the docks. This is the mother whose baby carriage careens down the staircase after she is shot in the stomach. Note the close-up of her hands and the blood oozing out as she clutches her wound.

The second is a screenshot from the last scene in The Shape of Water, where Elisa has been shot in the stomach by Colonel Strickland for trying to help the creature escape the torture he’s been enduring under the government’s (Strickland’s) authority. Note the placement of Elisa’s hands and the blood emerging from the bullet’s entry point as she presses against it with her fingers.

A really small thing, possibly coincidental but appearing quite obvious to me, especially when you consider the similar themes of the two films.

So that’s today’s post, nothing more than a snippet of something I’m thinking about as I continue to ruminate on Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece. Thanks for reading and thinking about it with me 🙂

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Posted in Art, Creativity, Movies and film, Popular culture | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Fog rolling in off Lake Michigan

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

A foggy start to the day in Milwaukee yesterday morning. Looking east up State Street from the Grohmann Museum.

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Mesmerizing music visualization

Posted on May 12, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I’m reading paper drafts from students in my film studies course, and one of them is writing about the baptism/assassination montage in The Godfather. I was pretty sure the music playing through that scene is Bach, but I looked it up just to make sure.

Check out this cool video I found of that music, Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor,” (BWV 582), posted several years ago on YouTube. I love being able to watch the music move through the bars like unscrolling player piano rolls.

And, of course, one can never hear this piece of music again without thinking of that masterpiece of a scene from The Godfather. So here it is, to save you the trouble of searching for it yourself 🙂

Posted in Creativity, Movies and film, Music | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Hemmed in, but still a beacon

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

For decades Milwaukee’s favorite weather forecast has been the flame atop the Wisconsin Gas Building. It changes color and flashes to announce rising/falling temperatures, snow/rain, or a steady state (no change from current conditions). There’s even a little poem to help you remember:

When the flame is red, warm weather is ahead.

When the flame is gold, watch out for cold.

When the flame is blue, there’s no change in view.

Where there’s agitation, expect precipitation.

The farthest-off white building has been around since the early 1970s, and I think it remains the tallest building in Wisconsin. But the other skyscrapers are new, built within the past 5-10 years. Makes it harder to find our trusty beacon, but it’s still there for all those willing to seek it out.

Looks like we’ll continue warming up. Temps are in the eighties this week. Hard to believe we got several inches of snow and ice just two weeks ago. That’s life in Wisconsin, I guess  🙂

Posted in architecture, History, Life, Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

New Milwaukee Bucks arena changes color as light shifts

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Street construction on my usual route to work has me driving past the new Milwaukee Bucks arena from different directions and at different times of day than usual. These literal shifts in perspective have led me to discover something kind of cool: the walls of the arena change color depending on the light.

Here’s a picture from last week Wednesday morning, taken from the west, heading east.

Here’s a picture from last Thursday evening, taken from the north, heading south.

Last night I drove past, from south to north, around 7:20 pm, and that gray was an even more mellow, creamy shade, like a dove’s breast. Traffic was too heavy for me to get a photo. I’ll try if I get another chance.

Clearly the shifts in color have something to do with the light, but I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. Nonetheless, it’s pretty spectacular. Reminds me of how Lake Michigan also constantly changes its appearance, with a different look every single day.

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Random photos from yesterday

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I’ve been super busy trying to keep up with midterms and paper grading this week while also mourning the death of my sister-in-law, so obviously no blog posts lately. But I took a few photos yesterday of things encountered as I moved through my Friday, so here they are.

The birds on the rooftop caught my eye because I liked the colors. Plus I thought it was kind of odd that so many gulls were flocking to that railing and facing in the same direction.

The giant snowball in the ice rink at Red Arrow Park is a leftover from a snowstorm Wednesday. On Thursday morning there were a couple inches of snow inside the rink, and it looked as though someone had started to build a snowman before abandoning it. By Friday that snowball just sat there looking rather lonely in a pool of water under the sun. (“I’ll be back again someday” 🙂 )

And the patchwork of filters below happened because I was trying to capture an image of the Grohmann Museum’s atrium staircase in the glass of the elevator shaft, and that reflection just wouldn’t show up on my phone. I tried out several filters, thinking one of them might help, which a few did, but not enough. So I gave up and walked away to go get my stuff from the printer in our main office, which is where I’d been headed in the first place. Then I noticed this image in my hand and realized I’d accidentally left the filter options up and camera on. Liking what I saw, I kept my hand in place to hold onto that oblique angle and took a screenshot.

Posted in Life, Milwaukee, Photography | 6 Comments

A Reminder: Count Your Blessings

Posted on April 14, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

Every time I drive past this burnt-out house, it serves as a stark reminder that bad things can happen to any of us at any time. It’s too easy to focus on what’s not going right in my life. Seeing this helps me think instead about what’s not going wrong!

Posted in Life, Milwaukee, Photography | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

YouTube: In the Beginning

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Katherine Wikoff

I’m teaching a mass media course this quarter, and while doing class prep recently, I needed to look at something in the internet archive, aka the “Wayback Machine.” (Wikipedia article here)

Have you used this super cool  site before? You can enter any URL, and the Wayback Machine will take you there . . . transported back in time to the way it was at some point in the past.

Anyway, because I’m also teaching my film studies course this term, I’ve been using YouTube a lot for film clips. And suddenly I wondered: What did YouTube look like when it started?

The answer: a lot like the old personal ads you used to find in those free tabloid-style newspapers on the giveaway racks near the front doors of hip businesses in happening areas of town. You know, “men seeking women,” “men seeking men,” etc.

It was an easy click to find the first-ever archived version of YouTube’s website. You can do it, too, with any website. Just go to the Wayback Machine and plug in the URL of the site you’re looking for, as if you were doing a Google search. And presto! You’re transported back in time to the cheesiness that was once a state-of-the-art website 🙂

Here is what YouTube looked like in the beginning, on April 28, 2005.

The first thing you were supposed to do once you got there was log in (or create an account) that was geared to set you up . . . with something that looks a lot like a date.

I am a Male/Female seeking Everyone/Males/Females between [ages] 18 and 99.

No videos on the landing page. Just these boxes/menus to log in and indicate your preferred sex and ages for online YouTube friends. Looks like YouTube also allowed you to save your “favorites” and check for “messages” from your new online friends, too.

And look at what happened when I hovered my cursor over the URL bar.

That little slogan, “YouTube – Broadcast Yourself,” intrigued me. I skimmed through the archived site to see how long it hung around. It remained in place for several years, but by the end of 2012 it was gone. I’m glad I noticed this because it helps me to understand why the site is named “YouTube.”

The logo itself clearly refers to television, right? TV was once known as “the tube” (still is) because of the vacuum tubes (that used to be) inside.

Affixing “You” to “Tube” turns the user into a broadcaster. It’s not two words (You + Tube) but one. “You Tube” as two words might have prompted associations with the derogatory “boob tube,” with “You” being an adjective similar to “boob” in describing “Tube.” But “YouTube” as one word becomes an entity in and of itself. And kind of a hip entity, at that, creating a compound word that keeps its separateness intact. Kind of like “iTunes” and “iPod” (no iPhone yet, though, LOL) and fitting right in with the new-media, new-millennium 2000s.

So isn’t it kind of interesting to see that in the beginning YouTube was trying to be a truly social network, like a Facebook or Myspace (which is still around, by the way, but now part of the People / Entertainment Weekly Network)? A place where you went to meet new friends online, yet also a creative space where you were encouraged to express yourself and “broadcast yourself” out over the internet airwaves?

I looked at some other snapshots of the YouTube site in 2005 and 2006, and indeed it looks like the main content is home-movie type videos that people are uploading primarily for their real-life friends but also for their online friends, and not to mention for the novelty of knowing their video might be seen by a worldwide audience.

Although I just randomly stumbled across all this by virtue of getting distracted while doing my actual work, I think I’ll take the time to work through more of the archived YouTube site, just to see how it’s changed over time. If I do, I’ll write about what I find here to keep you posted 🙂

Posted in Creativity, History, Learning, Life, Popular culture, Television | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments