Norah Jones - Thinking About You

Norah Jones - Thinking About You (QuickTime) [Partizan USA]
Norah Jones - Thinking About You (YouTube)

Infinite-zoom video from director Ace Norton that transforms successive thought bubbles into continuous subframes. There is a familiar feeling to the clip's visual technique, but it's made up by the lovely details in individual moments.

See mildly heated discussion on videos.antville.org.

GMC - Sierra

GMC - Sierra (1) (YouTube)
GMC - Sierra (2) (YouTube)
GMC - Sierra (3) (YouTube)

A series of commercials in 2006 from GMC touting the "professional grade" of their Sierra line of trucks. Small, animated subframes float over the video of the moving truck, revealing different image layers. Similar to the Slide component of my Asynchrony project.

The blurry YouTube video compression makes it a bit hard to see the animated frames. If you visit the current GMC site, the Flash intro uses the same visual technique with higher-resolution images.

Question: Mystery film

A reader named Donald asks:

[I] have been dying to find out the name of this film that I saw about 8 years ago that incorporated split screens in it. Here is what I can remember of the film: At some point this man/husband locks his wife/girlfriend in a small room in this cabin in the middle of the woods. She is about to have a baby and her husband leaves her alone and gets in his car and drives away from the cabin to try to return later. This is when the split screen comes to play and one screen shows him driving to get something while the other screen shows this woman in pain, screaming with blood everywhere and trying to get out of this locked up cabin. Now here is where my memory starts to loosen up...Then I remember her eventually escaping and close to the cabin there is a river or creek where she meets someone and tries to convince him to get her out of town, but her husband finds her before she can leave. Eventually she escapes somehow and takes the baby with her, which he then tries to take back from her when she moves to the city.

Do you know this film? Leave a comment if you have any ideas. Thanks.

Lucky Number Slevin

Lucky Number Slevin (Excerpt) (QuickTime)

Last night I watched Lucky Number Slevin, a clever puzzle of a dramedy involving mistaken identities and vengeful scheming. In this scene, two different moments in time are blurred into one using a series of subframes that fade in and out. In one moment, Josh Hartnett discusses with and receives instructions from Morgan Freeman regarding a planned hit on a rival mobster's son. In the other moment, Freeman himself learns about the plan from Bruce Willis who is the real mastermind. The use of split screens makes for a subtle visualization of the flow of information from Willis to Freeman to finally Hartnett, with room for a third, imagined moment of the actual killing. The initial use of translucent chess pieces sets up the blurry visual look and feel. It enhances the game-like feel of the narration in which information defines who holds the upper hand moment to moment.