Shinya Kimura by Adam Richards | Doing What You Love

My friend Thomas  (@tvelvet) tweeted this video today, titled Shinya Kimura by Adam Richards:

http://vimeo.com/16981453

 

I love the simplicity of the whole piece. It’s a short 3 min piece that illustrates a man’s love and passion for motorcycles and how significant it is to him. There are some great shots in this mini documentary and very inspiring overall.

The video also reminds me of another blog that I keep up with called Grain & Gram. Every so often, they feature a gentleman with a unique occupation or craft. I really liked the one about Blair Sligar, a woodworker from Orlando, FL. Besides featuring awesome projects, the interview and videos also gives you a glimpse of someone else’s life that is so different from your own.

Projected Voices

The Egyptian people are talking and making themselves heard. It would be prudent for the president opened his eyes and ears, and listen hard to what they are saying.

Sail Away

Boats at Fisherman's Wharf - Monterey, CA

trees, flowers and unicorns

Having a large memory card for your camera means that you never have to delete another picture again. Besides transferring my pictures to my computer, I barely go through them all; I usually just pick out the ones I am looking for and just leave the other ones as they are. Today, I decided I want to declutter my memory card and just delete all those ugly, blurry, why-the-hell-did-i-take-that pictures that have laid dormant on my hard drive. I am never going to look at them, I don’t like them, why keep them? It is the same theory I apply to decluttering my environment. I am no pack rat.

Here are some of the pictures that I do like and wanted to share. They’ve all been taken sometime this month. All of them are just scenery; lots of trees, flowers and some rainbows. I like taking pictures of nature because I don’t have to ask their permission to take their pictures. Plus, I like trees, flowers and rainbows a lot :]

i spy a rainbow

different rainbow, different day but same magic

my favorite trail

taken on a really really foggy day

Making Statements With a Chopstick Tree

Chances are you will see a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks on your table when you eat at a Chinese restaurant. A seemingly harmless item and part of the eating-out experience. Plus, it teaches you how to hold and use chopsticks correctly! Not many people give it a second thought as they dig into their General Tso Chicken.

Yet, if you think about how many disposable chopsticks are used on a daily basis and the amount of waste it generates, you might view those seemingly harmless chopsticks a little differently. The amount of waste generated by disposable wooden chopsticks is pretty mind-blowing. According to the China Environmental Protection Foundation, some 25 million trees are required to produce disposable chopsticks a year.

To raise awareness of this problem, the Chinese Environmental Protection Foundation turned to DDB/Ogilvy for suggestions. The group  collected 30,000 pairs of used disposable chopsticks and constructed a 5 meter high tree. After placing it in a busy part of Shanghai, they chopped down this tree to further drive the point home. A sign laid out the consumption statistics and warned: “Our trees are enough to feed us for only another 20 years.” Volunteers handed out reusable chopsticks to passers-by. (via Magical Urbanism)

Image: China Environmental Protection Foundation

There are many other similar campaigns carried out in China (check this site). I thought this project was well executed because it grabs your attention and gets the point across. Most people probably never gave disposable chopsticks much thought and I like to think that these campaigns might give people something think about while the walk away from the exhibit. Disposable utensils are an incredible waste of resources for a very minimal benefit. Making the switch to reusable isn’t hard, it just has to be a conscious decision.

Logorama – Pulp Fiction for Brands

The world around us is dominated by products, companies and brands both figuratively and literally. Logorama, created by French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, takes this idea one step further by building a world solely constructed by brands. This short opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.

A brand is the identity of a product, service, or company. There’s  a fantastic website that I love browsing called Brand Tags. Brand Tags is a collective experiment in brand perception. The site works by flashing a brand image at the viewer and the viewer writes the first word or phrase they think of when they see the image. These tags generate a word cloud for each individual brand. In my opinion, the top words/phrases are usually pretty indicative of what the majority of people think of a brand. For instance, the most common words that are tagged of Abercrombie & Fitch are moose, clothes, preppy and gay. Apple, is most frequently tagged as apple, mac, cool, and ipod. McDonald’s on the other hand is perceived as fat, fries, food, and big (haha).  It only takes one image to trigger a bunch of words, thoughts and emotions;  it’s fascinating and powerful. This is why companies spend so much time building brand equity.

I love the personalities that the creators have attached to the brands in this short. Ronald McDonald is most definitely the best pick for the bad guy (clown, scary hair = evil) and Big Boy can totally pass as the annoying young perv. Never thought that the Michelin man would be speaking in ebonics, so unexpected and hilarious. I’m surprised it took me this long to discover the video…did it not go viral?

Edit: 1.5 million views according to Vimeo. Not that many considering how many views Justin Bieber has for any one of his music videos. Also, it is sad that I’m using Justin Bieber’s MV views as a benchmark…

Violin Hip-Hop

Not too many people know this, but I am a classically trained pianist. I have a love-hate relationship with the piano. When my older sister started playing the piano before I did, I got so jealous of watching her play that I bugged my mom to let me start taking lessons too. Only after I started taking lessons did I realize practicing was part of the process of being able to play. I went through phases when I would really love playing and then get really lazy. Needless to say, I am no professional pianist. Yet, I stuck with it throughout high school and college (even minoring in college). So thankful that I never quit playing and continue to play to this day.

Just a cool piece of violin hip-hop. I always love the marriage of different musical genres. Feeling happy and musical on this Friday night.

“The Ghost in the Machine” Series by IRI5

I unexpectedly stumbled onto the “The Ghost in the Machine” series by IRI5. Most of the pieces are portraits that are created out of disgarded material, most notably cassette tapes  and old film reels.

 

Jimi Hendrix – cassette tape on canvas (via IRI5.com)

The inspiration behind the project is described as:

The idea comes from a phrase (ironically) coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging.

Bob Marley (via IRI5.com)

george lee: tie tea

'tie tea' photo by joseph hsu image © le mouton noir & co

10 hands are not enough to figure out how many times my tea bag string has fallen into my mug. Simple and effective design by designer george lee founder of le moutin noir & co solves that problem with this simple design. I wonder where they have this for sale?

'tie tea' detail photo by joseph hsu image © le mouton noir & co

Now I just need to file a customer complaint to Lipton and tell them that their teabag sucks. Has anyone had the experience of the little paper tag separating from the actual string? So bloody annoying.

 

(via Designboom)

The Deep – PES