It’s one thing to shoot an entire short film on a Canon flatbed computer scanner. It’s another to do it well. With Memoirs of a Scanner, Mindfruit Films pretty much nailed it.

It’s a short short – just over a minute – but Memoirs covers a lot of ground: an office fling, in-fighting, getting fired. And it makes me think twice about taking my office equipment for granted. Except for the three-hole punch. That, I’m totally over. [Vimeo via Daily Dish]

In the 1990s, researchers at University of Texas in Austin determined that our attention spans could be described by the 1/f fluctuation, a pattern representing the ebb and flow of our concentration over a period of time. In a new study, professor James Cutting found that the more recent the blockbuster, the more closely its editing followed this fluctuation.

Where’s Detour, made in 1945, has shots that only vaguely correspond to the 1/f fluctuation, the 2005 King Kong remake stays surprisingly snug with the attention span wave.

As Cutting explains, this increasing correlation means that films “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,” but just because movies are increasingly pleasing to our subconscious minds doesn’t mean that we will necessarily like them more: the Star Wars prequels strictly followed the formula. [PhysOrg and PopSci]

And that’s essentially the dichotomy of Avatar. On the one hand you have a fairly generic plot (although, admittedly, not a bad plot). Someone descibed it to me as Dances With Wolves meets the Smurfs, which isn’t exactly inaccurate (although smurfs are small, while the Na’vi are large). There’s no revolutionary new storytelling techniques here. The script alternates from “fine” to “cringe” (“You’re not in Kansas anymore” – really? They’re still using that line in the 22nd century?) while the characters are exactly what you expect them to be.

Yet everything about the film is gripping. Even though the film is two hours and 40 minutes long, you don’t feel like it’s dragging on. And the reason that you don’t notice is that every second you spend on Pandora is like an ejaculation of beauty. There is so much colour, so much life packed into every frame that you can’t even begin to notice the intense level of detail. And that just keeps you captivated.

The 3D element might help, too. Despite the fact that I walked out of the cinema with a throbbing headache again, I have to admit that Avatar did seem to be a much more immersive film than many of the other Hollywood blockbusters I’ve seen of late. It is frustrating to have your eyes tricked into believe your watching three dimensions, yet not be able to focus on objects that are deliberately out of focus. And I’ll never be a fan of wearing glasses…

The CGI is also on another level altogether. If you thought what Peter Jackson did in The Return of the King was good, you’ll be blown away by Avatar. Despite the fact that the Na’vi are CGI, they’ve completely jumped the uncanny valley. Like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, you actually care about them as characters, suspending your disbelief for long enough to trust that they’re actually real beings. The same goes for all the fantastic creatures in the film, as well as the vehicles and battlemechs. There’s attention paid to every aspect of every pixel of every frame, and you believe every moment of it.

And overall, that makes it a film worth watching. Probably twice.

For now, you can check out both the videos that have already been submitted as well as this clip, in which judges Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office) and iJustine (from the internet, I guess?) talk about the festival. Oh, and here’s a little tidbit for the few of you that bothered reading this post: I’ll be interviewing Rainn Wilson tomorrow, so look forward to that. I am! [Nikon]

Considering how much we claim we’re a multi-cultural country, it’s not often that you’ll see an Asian blockbuster movie screened at a major cinema. But the upcoming Chinese blockbuster The Storm Warriors (which has an amazing looking trailer, as you can see above) will have a release across Event Cinemas, Greater Union, Village Cinemas & Birch, and Carroll & Coyle all along the east coast of Australia on December 10, the same date the film launches in China.

Hopefully this is a trend we’ll see more of. After Transformers 2, I’m a little bit jaded with the crap Hollywood keeps serving up to us…

[Cine Asia]

Avatar dates back to 1977, when Cameron was just a truck driver determined to “out-Lucas George Lucas” in the outer-space epic genre, but it took decades to get the clout to make as outrageous a project as Avatar. When he first sat down to plan the movie, his tech people told him his vision simply was not possible – “‘If we make this, we’re doomed,’ one of the artists told him. ‘It can’t be done. The technology doesn’t exist.’” He had to wait until after Titanic before he could tackle the project again.

This time, he got more invested in the tech side of it. The problem: He needed an incredibly high-definition camera that could deliver both 2D and 3D, without the headaches that sometimes accompanied two hours of 3D watching. There was a camera that could handle it, made by Sony, but the giant 200kg unit wasn’t feasible for Cameron’s style of directing – so in 2000, he went out to Japan and persuaded Sony to re-engineer the camera to his liking. They ended up separating the camera’s huge CPU unit from its lens, connected by a cable, thus bringing the handheld weight down to only 20kg.

Cameron lent the camera to filmmaker buddies to spread the gospel of 3D so his eventual release of Avatar would have the distribution it needed. Spy Kids 3-D and the Lord of the Rings trilogy opened the doors for technologically astounding epic films, just what Cameron orchestrated. His camera and belief in 3D is setting the stage for the current era of blockbusters – not necessarily something you’d expect from a guy who releases a movie about once every 15 years. [Wired]

The Nikon Festival has the theme “A Day Through Your Lens”, and asks budding filmmakers to upload digital films with that theme, of lengths less than 140 seconds, to their website. The contest is six weeks long, starting right now. Festival judges include Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute of The Office fame), photographer Chase Jarvis, and some girl unfortunately described as an “Internet Personality” with the even more unfortunate name of iJustine. But guys, Rainn Wilson!

Oh yeah, and Ashton Kutcher will be sharing his own entry, partly because he has an advertising deal with Nikon and partly because this contest is tangentially related to Twitter. That ’70s Show was a long time ago, you know, and now Twitter is his job — and Ashton Kutcher is nothing if not dedicated to his job.

The winning filmmaker will get $US100,000 and some sweet Nikon gear, and there’ll also be an audience favourite award worth $US25,000, in case iJustine is out of touch with modern independent filmmaking. [Nikon Festival]

Priced at around AU$60, you get two Blu-ray movies (choices include films like Batman Begins and 300) and a PS3 Blu-ray remote. The two-movie pack is just a $10 premium on top of the remote price—not a bad deal (for us).

I’ve resisted Sony’s Bluetooth remote for some time—probably long enough that I’m over the need since I’ve gotten so darn good with a Dual Shock by now. But if they threw in some Blu-rays to sweeten the deal, I imagine that Sony could unload em by the truckload. Well, I guess all remotes come off trucks at sometime, but you get what I mean. [JB HiFi via Kotaku]