We Make Holes In Teeth

The Audacity Of A New Hope

This just flat-out makes me smile.

For the uninitiated, the late graphic designer Saul Bass was responsible for some of the most iconic film titles sequences of the 1950s and 60s, notably Hitchcock's Vertigo and North By Northwest as well as The Man With The Golden Arm and the screen adaptation of Leon Uris' Exodus. He also gave us the AT&T globe logo.

Design student and YouTuber 'bhilmers' describes his homage to Bass' distinctive graphic style as what the titles might have looked like "if Star Wars was filmed two decades earlier". He adheres to the common trend of the time of including sly visual references to the discipline being credited. My personal fave is the paper-cutout Max Rebo peering sideways from the edge of the screen in time for composer John William's 3 seconds of fame (although Williams' most famous score is swapped out for a 1967 Buddy Rich track "Machine").

Trevor Cawood's Terminus

As anyone who's seen Neil Blomkamp's pre-HALO work can attest, independent film-makers are proving to be the pointy end of the maturation process for CGI effects. The latest manifestation is this wonderfully creepy short by Spy Films director Trevor Cawood:

Cawood - whose commercial reel has a decidedly automotive focus - makes full use of Montreal's uniquely time-lost metro system; both for its Logan's-Run-meets-Solaris paleo-utopian architecture, and by referencing the perpetual clash of commuter and street cultures that plays out on its platforms. Rainmaker's effects work is beautifully blended and wonderfully restrained.

Hoth Couture

(Another culture coup courtesy of the house of Ecko. Linkjacked from starwars.com)

I guess if you're dad was Phillip K. Dick...

... you'd pretty much have to expect something like this would happen eventually (read through to the end). That's one of those authentically Gibsonian paleofuturistic things that could only have happened in the perpetual recent past, circa the early 2000s.

Where Credit Is Due

A very long time ago, I worked with a web marketing genius named Fraser Cain who, among other things, co-created one of the first Internet-enabled recovery systems for stolen laptops. Years later, he transformed his lifelong passion for astronomy, star-watching and space exploration into a fairly lucrative web publishing venture that still orbits to this day. Fraser incorporated every traffic-wrangling gambit he'd ever learned and/or personally invented into Universe Today, and it evolved into the most widely-read aggrogator of space-related content anywhere; enough to earn the rivalry of, well, Space.com. It was during UT's nascent days that Fraser introduced me to the term schmontent - as in, "Content, schmontent..." - a euphemism refering to the daily compilation of linkjacked and excerpted content on Other People's Sites with which he populated his home page every morning like clockwork, from the comfort of his own False Creek living room, presumably while dressed only in constellation-pattern boxer shorts.

Up til now I've resisted the urge to use We Make Holes In Teeth as my own personal show-and-tell of Obscure Shit From The Depths Of The Webs, but the fact is that there are occasionally some useful things to point out, out there in the wilds. And frankly, I'm getting sick of spamming my friends with YouTube videos of masturbating pugs or links to recently declassified counterinsurgency manuals in .pdf format.

I've reserved a little spot off to the right for Schmontent, but it won't be much use without some context, so I'll try to devote a few (quaint)column-inches(/quaint) to each new artifact I uncover before banishing it to the footnotes.