Voyage

While enjoying, or rather trying to survive the long Easter weekend, I stumbled across this fantastic voyage video from maground. Using a number of photos from their own archive, a stop motion style video was created, taking users on a trip around the world in just 53 seconds. Check out the video below and take a look at the maground site for individual images from the series.

Shanghai Disneyland

On April 1st 2011, Walt Disney Co. revealed plans to develop their fourth Disney Park outside the US with news of a 963 acre resort in Shanghai, China. After sixteen years of speculation, the announcement marks an important milestone for Disney as they look at entering a market of 1.3 billion people. The park, set to open in five years, will cost an estimated $3.7bn and rumour has it, that it will be the first park not to include the main street entrance, an attempt to make the park more cultural. News on rides are being kept tightly under wraps, learning from the mistakes made in Hong Kong when rival parks were quick to install cheaper rides with striking similarities. No doubt over the years news will start to leak about the park and its features, but until then I've included a couple of Disney videos below that are definitely worth a watch.

The first video shows a behind the scenes look at the magic of Disney's classical animation, highlighting the true artistic talents within the company. Filmed in black and white, it captures the early days of Disney when Walt Disney overlooked operations and built one of the greatest entertainment companies in the world.

Another video is a recent upload looking at Disneyland Paris in almost a toy like view. The video was released to celebrate the upcoming Disney Magical Moments Festival and was shot using the "Tilt Shift" technique. The outcome is outstanding, bringing together a total of 4,000 images, from the initial 125,000 taken over a seven month period. The technique takes photographs, usually from high vantage points, using selective focus and perspective control to give the impression of a miniature model. The images were then stitched together to create the impression of a short movie, while afterwords colours were over-saturated, colours blurred and contrasts altered by post production to enforce the model impression. Directed by Céranne Gantzer, you can watch the video below.

Life and Times

Shawn 'Jay-Z' Carter is perhaps one of the greatest rappers to have ever graced the mic, with eleven number one albums, accounting for sales of around 50 million, and thirteen grammys. Alongside his glittering music career, he owns his own clothing line, heads up his own music label, owns his own nightclubs, is a co-owner of an NBA franchise, and just so happens to be married to Beyonce Knowles. Sounds pretty good, but Jay felt there was one thing missing, a lifestyle website.

Launched a couple of days ago, Life and Times, aims to cover style, leisure, art and design, technology, music and sports. The site's name derives from Shawn's 1999 album Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter, and from the looks of it, the site will cover various aspects of Hov's life, particularly on his individual blog, Jays I. Currently the site features a number of interesting features including Love on the Beat, Dishing with Daniel Boulud, and Keyed In, with a lot more to come hopefully.

As a blogger I probably shouldn't be sending users away to check out other sites, but this looks to have real potential, so if you miss my blog updates, be sure to check out Life and Times to see what will be inspiring me. Check out the promotional video for the site below and head on over to see what you think.