These two videos are more than just beautiful. They tap into the spirit of the city like nothing I've seen before; the energy, the cultural juxtaposition, the divergences of millions of human perspectives. I've explored familiar cities like this as a mental exercise, to fall asleep, or to remember street names, but seeing it done this vividly gets me hyped up. It's as if we're taking the cities into our hands, tilting them this way and that, exploring from different angles.
Hollywood, take notice! Heavily incorporating this in a full-length IMAX or HD format would be stunning. Full-screen recommended.
This video has made its rounds. For those of you haven't seen it, it's similarly popular to the time-lapse obesity map that is everywhere recently, only this one probably won't make the main stream news for a while.
I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I watched the first three Saw movies last week. My wife and I had borrowed the movies for
Halloween, but never got around to watching. I finished all three
with mild amusement. The plot twists and creative torture devices are
fun, but I'd rather be watching Cloud Atlas.
One thing I did like, and only came to fully appreciate after seeing the following video from Symphony of Science, was the movie premise: a killer who creates tests in which victims must kill themselves due to their failure to overcome their own faults. This premise was perfected in the third movie when the
Jigsaw Killer sets up a game to test his pupil whose inability to overcome her emotion and
blood-lust leads to her death. Here is a clip if you need a reminder.
A similar attitude is reflected by Carl Sagan in the Symphony of Science video in the line, "If we do not destroy ourselves we will one day venture to the stars." I believe this in both a literal and metaphorical sense. Humans are extremely powerful. The faster we move past the faults practiced by the weakest and most selfish of us, the more we will achieve. The more we succumb the more likely we are to create a hell similar to that depicted in Saw (think atrocities resulting from religious and political hate).
