Category Archives: Documentary

Above: The BLAST team standing next to BLAST (right) in Antarctica

This year’s HotDocs festival showcased a few science-related films. Although the subject matter they approach is often fascinating, the films themselves falter by attempting to bring an emotional pull through Hollywood cliché to tell the stories. The science, however, is what brought me to these films, and it makes these films worth the see.

BLAST!

BLAST! is a documentary about the fascinating work being done on a hot air balloon machine of the same name, which has been launched into low earth orbit to collect data about the cosmic microwave background. In layman’s terms, this means getting information about the history of the universe and how the universe evolved, looking back many, many years, which is exciting even if you don’t have much of a scientific background. The story of the work itself is also rather engaging: five years of work, building, designing, researching, and getting funding and everything depends on a launch in Antarctica. The launch gets screwed up because a mechanic’s glove gets caught in the balloon, so the balloon gets damaged. And when the machine finally returned to earth, in Antarctica, it was lost in the middle of nowhere, with the precious data – in a white tube on white snow and ice – separated from the actual machine. Continue reading →

Helvetica is a sans serif font, best known as the default font on Apple computers; Arial is Microsoft’s inferior imitation font. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Helvetica: New York City’s MOMA held an exhibition in its honour and director Gary Huswit made a documentary, Helvetica.

Huswit interviewed a variety of typeface experts, from academics in graphic design to font-makers great and small, all in an effort to compile the varying perspectives on typeface and on that particular one, Helvetica. As we learn in the film, Helvetica is a “modern” font, which helped usher in the era of clean and serious fonts, leaving the cutesy multicoloured typefaces of the fifties behind in the dust. Some admire it for its simplicity and ability to blend into all sorts of surroundings, taking on a different character depending on its setting; others despise the font for its lack of ‘identity’. But it is reasonably unanimously agreed that no matter how hard people try, Helvetica cannot be improved.

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