Blog by Brett Johnson

Neil Gaiman gave the commencement address this year at...

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:47:17 -0500

Neil Gaiman gave the commencement address this year at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

Wonderful. Ken Burns talks about story. Watch it.

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:22:20 -0500

Wonderful. Ken Burns talks about story. Watch it.

Orson Welles on Work-Life Balance and the Gift of Ignorance (1960)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:23:29 -0500

Orson Welles on Work-Life Balance and the Gift of Ignorance (1960):

I didn’t know what you couldn’t do. I didn’t deliberately set out to invent anything. It just seemed to me, ‘Why not?’ There is a great gift that ignorance has to bring to anything, you know. That was the gift I brought to [Citizen] Kane… ignorance.

Orson Welles on Work-Life Balance and the Gift of Ignorance (1960)

Letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:55:46 -0500

Letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald:

F. Scott Fitzgerald asked Ernest Hemingway to read his newest novel at the time. This letter is Hemingway’s critique.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

A nice analysis and defense of the visual styles and motifs used...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:57:51 -0500

A nice analysis and defense of the visual styles and motifs used in The Wire.

Style in The Wire by Erlend Lavik

"The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 05:45:52 -0500

“The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.”

- Charles Dickens

Fish: a tap essay

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:20:05 -0500

Fish: a tap essay:

Want to read something wonderful?

Think I might love it.

“Fish: a tap essay” by Robin Sloan

So much gold. The first I’ve seen of this guy, but I love...

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:39:51 -0500

So much gold. The first I’ve seen of this guy, but I love him.

A Show with Ze Frank

Is everyone entitled to their opinion?

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 09:00:27 -0500

Is everyone entitled to their opinion?:

If we’re going to do great work, it means that some people aren’t going to like it. And if the people who don’t like it don’t have an impact on what happens to the work after it’s complete, the only recourse of someone doing great work is to ignore their opinion.

Is everyone entitled to their opinion? by Seth Godin

Excerpts from Martin Scorsese’s storyboards for the climactic...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:10:59 -0500

Excerpts from Martin Scorsese’s storyboards for the climactic scene in Taxi Driver (1976) (via)

Vince Gilligan talks about creating and running Breaking Bad and...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:28:00 -0500

Vince Gilligan talks about creating and running Breaking Bad and writing on the X-Files.

Nerdist Writers Panel #30

I want to see Napoleon so bad. The three screen idea is so...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:59:01 -0500

I want to see Napoleon so bad. The three screen idea is so intriguing.

The film was an astonishment, and it was doomed. One hurdle was its length — his early versions ran from 3 hours to 6 hours 28 minutes (down from 9 hours) — while other difficulties were posed by Gance’s advances, specifically a process later called Polyvision that extended the visual plane into a panorama or three separate images and that required three screens to show it.
— ‘Napoleon’ Is Lost, Long Live ‘Napoleon’!

What kid wouldn’t want an iPod with $8 billion of stolen...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:00:06 -0500

What kid wouldn’t want an iPod with $8 billion of stolen goods on it?

Rob Reid reveals the overwhelming complexity of ©opyright Math™ used by the film and music industries when projecting how much is lost due to piracy.

I knew the numbers were inflated, but…

David Fincher and his designers discuss the Dragon Tattoo titles and design

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:16:10 -0600

David Fincher and his designers discuss the Dragon Tattoo titles and design:

It’s got to move the heart, or the mind, or the groin. It’s got to engage you on some other part of your being than just your eyes.
— David Fincher

There were other things that were tangential and totally foreign to the final, but you’ve got to hit all of those dead ends in order to find something different. You’ve got to go down that road and fail – a lot.
…
I generate a lot of failures, but there’s usually a grain of something interesting when you take a chance, and after a while, all those parts and pieces can add up to something interesting.
…
I mean, it’s not that difficult to make a pretty picture. It’s much more difficult to do something that’s a little different while remaining perfectly appropriate and authentic, and that’s what we were after.
…
The closer you can get to something that’s authentic and appropriate – if you have good reasons for your decisions and can speak about your ideas as solutions – the easier it may be for someone to accept something they’ve never seen before.
— Neil Kellerhouse

Charlie Rose talks with with Mexican filmmakers Alejandro...

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:00:05 -0600

Charlie Rose talks with with Mexican filmmakers Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron. The only way this could have been better is if Emmanuel Lubezki had been there.

Movie Hecklers Awesome video from Key & Peele.

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:57:40 -0600

Movie Hecklers

Awesome video from Key & Peele.

Is Television the New Cinema? An interesting panel discussion...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:32:00 -0600

Is Television the New Cinema?

An interesting panel discussion put together by The New Yorker on whether TV is replacing Film.

How I Made My Films Site

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:56:40 -0600

Building my films site was a really exciting and educational experience for me. I gave this presentation about it at a creative team meeting last week.

Title.

I want people to see my stuff.

The Problem: My portfolio site does a decent job of featuring my design work, but my films get lost in it. Alternatively, Vimeo is a good place to find all of my videos, but it’s not exclusive to my work and cannot be customized visually.

The Solution: Make a new site.

I treated the project as a playground. I was the designer and client, so I felt free to try things that I may not typically be able to do (to the extent I’d like at least).

Influences and choices.

The concept for the site came from combining the fullscreen, sectional portfolios with cinematic, animated GIFs. I wanted something that immerses you in one thing at a time and is continually moving, like film.

I went with Futura as my primary font for the site. I love geometric sans-serifs and Futura especially for the slight off-ness of it (especially when italicized). For contrast, I used Georgia in the body copy.

The current navigation style came late in the game. It initially was a horizontal nav that was fixed as you scrolled near the top right of the window, but it would often cover up content and limited the number of links I could include. While exploring other options, I remembered Chance Graham’s site which then reminded me of New Order’s album Power, Corruption, and Lies.

This site took about three weeks from start to finish. Coding and asset preparation were two of those.

There were several code libraries and snippets I took advantage of to speed up development and enhance the site:

FitVids is a great tool for making video embeds responsive, but it has a shortcoming in that it scales only according to width. I needed my videos to scale with height also, so I did some math and worked up a fix in Javascript that resized a video container’s width if the window becomes wider than the video area.

// edit FitVids code - http://j.mp/yIVjuJ

// adjust panels and video to window size
function setPanelSize(){
    var windowHeight = $(window).height();
    var windowWidth = $(window).width();
    var videoWidth;
    //calculate whether the video is too tall for the space
    if ( ((windowWidth-120)*.5625) > (windowHeight-160) ) {
        videoWidth = (windowHeight-160)*1.777;
    }
    //resize video and panel
    $(‘.videocontent’).css({‘max-width’:videoWidth+’px’});
    $(‘.panel’).css({‘height’:windowHeight+’px’});
    //reset scrollspy
    $(‘body’).scrollSpy(‘refresh’);
}

Unexpectedly, the navigation was the biggest hurdle in the coding. It’s kind of complicated to explain why but the problem lies with my wanting to keep the width of the hover states determined by the text length. If you make each the same fixed width, it’s simple, but it doesn’t look as nice. I came up with two solutions and the one I went with, simply changing text size from 0 to 18 on hover, had an unintentionally cool effect.

#main-nav li {
    height: 40px;
}

#main-nav a {
    background-color: #ccc;
    line-height: 40px;
    display: inline-block;
    height: 40px;
    position: relative;
    border: none;
    color: #fff;
    font-size: 0;
    padding-left: 40px;
    overflow: hidden;
    -webkit-transition: all 0.2s ease;
    -moz-transition:    all 0.2s ease;
    -o-transition:      all 0.2s ease;
    transition:         all 0.2s ease;
}

#main-nav a:hover {
    font-size: 18px;
    padding-right: 20px;
}

There are a ton of ways to create animated GIFs. This was my general workflow for creating the looped animations from video footage.

When it came time to launch my site, I obviously turned to Facebook and Twitter, but I also submitted it to a handful of web design galleries.

As a result, I received a couple of awards.

I’m only sharing this because I found it interesting to look at how the hits rise and fall with the web gallery mentions.

I was getting the most hits I’d ever had, but when I dug deeper in the stats, I was a little let down.

Overall, I feel like the site has been a success. Lots of people are seeing my stuff, I’m gaining more followers, and I’m making some meaningful contacts.

But I believe I’m still missing my audience.

Back to work.

"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:51:37 -0600

““The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.””

- — Linus Pauling, an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century. Pauling was among the first scientists to work in the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology.

Quote Vadis - Quotes, Inspiration, Wisdom

“Why’s this so good?” No. 32: Darcy Frey on the brink

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:54:28 -0600

“Why’s this so good?” No. 32: Darcy Frey on the brink:

Laurie Hertzel analyzes the pace and language of good suspenseful writing.

He keeps this tension going by sprinkling the narrative with reminders of how terrible things are. He doesn’t clump it all together in one blob, but every few paragraphs, every few scenes, he rolls out another reminder that everything could fall apart in an instant.