Film explores the omnipresent PowerPoint culture in search of its philosophical potential
A PZ reader yesterday pointed me to a very cool online video — a short film really — which many of you will surely enjoy. If you are interested in visual communication, PowerPoint/slides, and appreciate a good fix of irony, then you will love this creation from two very clever design students studying at the Linz Kunstuniversität, Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit (narration by Andre Tschinder). Here's what Clemens says about the visual presentation called Le Grand Content:
Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent PowerPoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.
Maybe I've just had too much coffee this morning (curse those ¥100 refills at Starbucks!), but I find this short four-minute presentation absolutely brilliant (and hilarious). Watch below on Youtube, or go here to see the video directly on Clemens' site.
Read more about Le Grand content here. You'll also see many stills of the motion graphics used in the presentation (sample below).
You will see loads of diagrams in the presentation which they say were inspired by another very cool blog site called Indexed by Jessica Hagy. The diagrams on Jennifer's site are not only amusing, but they may give you some ideas for presenting your own information in a more visual way. Definitely adding Indexed to my RSS feed.
That was awesome!
Posted by: Aaron | January 18, 2007 at 03:46 AM
Brilliant! Absolutely made my day.
Posted by: Jim McGee | January 18, 2007 at 07:34 AM
Genius! Stream of consciousness style, "écriture automatique"! At least, that's my interpretation.
Posted by: =lloyd= | January 18, 2007 at 11:19 AM
That's Jessica Hagy. =P And her site is awesome, too.
Posted by: Michael Chui | January 18, 2007 at 11:26 AM
I have been a big fan of Indexed for a bit now. Very much worth checking out
Posted by: David Baker | January 18, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Check out www.slideshare.net, I use it and happy that I do.
cheers!
Deepak
Posted by: Deepak | January 19, 2007 at 01:46 AM
Incredimazing. I couldn't help but laugh out loud, and that's kind of frowned upon by some in my office. :)
Posted by: Berin Lorisch | January 20, 2007 at 02:51 AM
My only hope is that people get the irony here and understand that while this may be , (I'm not sold) a fun short film and commentary, it is not a good presentation.
Far too much unrelated and incidental processing required for people to actually get the point.
The sad reality is that many of your readers are going to brief their preso crew to create their next budget presentation using this kind of animation. Their audience (and I'll bet the vast majority of people that watched this vid only once) will love what they saw, but forget what they heard...!
Posted by: Rich...! | January 21, 2007 at 12:44 AM
@"Rich...!"
Thanks. I was just about to wake up our graphics team in India to start work on a copycat version but I won't now that you've said that.
Posted by: Lee McEwan | January 21, 2007 at 05:27 AM
Great aritcle, very useful.
Posted by: Hansjoerg Schneider | January 23, 2007 at 05:22 PM
Amazing one, thanks Garr!
Posted by: Niko Neugebauer | January 25, 2007 at 03:43 AM