Don’t Have Time for a Movie? Watch a Short!

So, I love movies in that I can take in a complete story line in the period of 1 1/2 – 2 hours. I’m a woman on the go and I have a hard time sitting myself down long enough to take in a show every week with regularity.  But, squeeze that gratification in under 20 minutes? We have a winner!

Futureshorts, a website that hosts international short films, bears an extensive collection to choose from. Check out their hoard of short clips on youtube.

They boast gems like “Tell it to the Fishes” a ten-minute(ish) short featuring the talents of Dylan More, of snarky Bristish Comedy “Black Books” fame.

Short film makers learn to distill down the action, the striking moments of a film so they fit into the shortest of time frames.  Check out this short film coming in at under three minutes:

Hope you enjoy!

Even the Wildlife Isn’t Real

This interesting story (Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed) just came out in the Washington Post in response to environmental film maker Chris Palmer’s new scandalous (you can tell this word has various degrees of seriousness for the average reader) tell-all about the fakery that goes on in capturing the natural side of wildlife.

I was a little distraught to find out my own idol, David Attenborough (I will forever observe interesting moments of animal behavior in nature with an astute British man’s voice narrating the action in my head) has even indulged in staging a moment of coital bliss between a pair of scorpions in a studio. However, one would have to be a bit thick (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) to realize the scene in Blue Planet where they show deep sea fish and plankton zipping about involves souped-up sound effects. First of all, the nature of sound in the sea means we hear ocean audible in a very distorted manner, but I hardly think minute little ctenophores sound like 80’s influenced sci-fi spaceships.

But perhaps the most horrifying part of the article is this little clip:

“The lemmings that plunge to their deaths in the 1958 Disney documentary “White Wilderness” were hurled ingloriously to their doom by members of the crew, as a Canadian documentary revealed.”

I will not be able to watch an animal documentary for a bit yet without thinking there may perhaps be an over-worked wildlife cinematographer roughing up the baby seals before the next take so they look nice for the camera…

And on the same type of note, the photo featured above was taken by wildlife photographer José Luis Rodriguez, recently stripped of his National History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year title. Tiger Woods ain’t got nothing on being a wildlife documentarian….

Repost from Wired.com: Sea Creatures Hint at Recent Trans-Antarctic Seaway

The discovery of nearly identical sea creatures on either side of a now solid Antarctic ice sheet — 1,500 miles wide and over a mile thick — points to an open ocean passage there as recently as 125,000 years ago.

A schematic of a seaway created by the partial collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (on left).

The new evidence adds to geologic clues indicating the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has collapsed at least once in the last million years, and could do so again in a warmer climate. The complete collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise global sea level by 11 to 16 feet.

“The West Antarctic Ice Sheet can be considered the Achilles heel of Antarctica,” biologist David Barnes of the West Antarctic Survey, lead author of the study, said in a press release. “Our research provides compelling evidence that a seaway stretching across West Antarctica could have opened up only if the ice sheet has collapsed in the past.”

As part of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life, scientists were looking at the distribution of different species of bryozoans, small filter-feeders that are attached to the sea floor as adults (top image). They found that the populations of bryozoans were remarkably similar in two different seas separated by the ice sheet, the Weddell and the Ross.

“Because the larvae of these animals sink and this stage of their life is short — and the adult form anchors itself to the sea bed — it’s very unlikely that they would have dispersed the long distances carried by ocean currents,” Barnes said. “Our conclusion is that the colonization of both these regions is a signal that both seas were connected by a trans-Antarctic sea way in the recent past.”

“This biological evidence is one of the novel ways that we can look for clues that help us reconstruct Antarctica’s ice sheet history,” Barnes said. The study appears in Global Biological Change.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is already considered to be highly vulnerable to climate change, but estimates of when it might collapse vary from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/antarctic-passage/#ixzz0yH1cDspW