ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), created by George Lucas to create the special effects for Star Wars, has maintained a lead role since pioneering computer graphics in Hollywood movies. This Encore Special, covers ILM’s story from the first Star Wars film to its role in movies like Iron Man and Transformers. One of the more interesting aspects covered in this documentary is seeing how the company transitioned from analog to digital effects.

Matt Diffee, a cartoonist for the New Yorker since 1999, talks at Cusp 2011 about how he designs jokes. Titled “Things You Might Not Think I Think About”, Matt shares his process for coming up with jokes and many of the tips and rules he uses. From the composing the visuals that maximize the comedic effect to the word play, there is no doubt that Matt is right as rain speaking at a design conference.

Miguel Endara, creates a drawing of his father composed entirely out of 3.2 million ink dots. The beautifully crafted video shows the progress from the very first dot and the fine precision and detail produced as the result after a mear 210 hours (8.75 solid days or 5.25 full-time office weeks) of work.

Ji Lee, Creative Director at Google, speaks at the 99% conference about his personal endeavor in 2002 to break out of the creative constraints of his advertising job by creating his own art project. Ji’s ad-spoofing Bubble Project entailed printing out stickers in the shape of word bubbles and sticking them on advertisements all around New York City. Ji would return later to document what people would write into the bubbles. Amusing, political, and esoteric, the bubbles were a hit and spawned campaigns by others. Ji now advocates for using personal projects to provide an outlet for personal creative freedom, create platforms for others to collaborate, meet new people, and to learn new skills.

David McCandless, award winning designer, writer, and author, speaks at TED on his passion for exploring data and creating meaningful visualizations that convey information in the form of a story. With a plethora of examples from his latest book, Information Is Beautiful, the talk is both facinating and inspiring. In one example he displays the carbon output from the Icelandic volcano that grounded thousands of flights over Europe in 2010. By comparing the carbon output that those flights would have produced themselves, the eruption was the first carbon-neutral volcanic event the world has seen. David posts his visualizations on his website and it is worth diving in to take a look.

The Machine Orchestra brings together custom-built robotic musical instruments and human performers with modified instruments, unique musical interfaces, and hemispherical speaker-pods. The ensemble combines KarmetiK’s international lineup of artists and musicians with students in the Music Technology & Technical Direction programs at the California Institute of the Arts.

Johanna Blakley studies the impact of the fashion industry’s lack of copyright and imparts many lesson on how other creative industries could flourish with a similar regard for copyright. Johanna discusses how the fashion industry is forced to constantly innovate to keep ahead of trends, obsolescence, and build brands. The fashion industry is only one of many industries who’s work is not copyright eligible. Other industries include food, furniture, magic, jokes, cars, databases, etc… The talk is thought provoking to say the least and will provide some fodder for your next discussion on issues of copyright.

This short, heart felt documentary reveals the fading tradition of hand painted advertising as told by the painters struggling to keep it alive. The trade is nothing short of amazing, involving a highly artistic touch, inordinate amounts of time, and grueling labor. Up There is directed by Malcom Murray, and is produced by Mekanism with music by The Album Leaf.

Aaron Koblin talks about his use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace to explore the ‘emergence of new labor systems in the information age’. His largest project, The Sheep Market, entailed paying people $0.02 to draw a sheep facing left. Pointing the individual artists to a custom drawing tool, he captured the drawing process for each one. Accumulating a total of 10,000 sheep, all of the drawings are now visible at TheSheepMarket.com.

Alex Roman has created this beautiful piece that tries to “illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view”. The entire piece is computer generated and demonstrates a tremendous amount of skill. Alex used 3D Studio Max, Vray, AfterEffects, and Adobe Premiere in its creation. Alex also created the music which was done in Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP. Simply amazing!