Web Forum: Internet news

Jan 8 2010 by Andrew Jackson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THEY are bright blue, 10ft tall, look a bit like cats and cost millions of dollars to produce on the big screen. You’ve probably seen them on advertising hoardings all over the place.

They are the Na’vi alien creations at the centre of James ‘Titanic’ Cameron’s latest blockbuster, Avatar.

When Cameron says he put a lot of thought into creating them, he means it. The Na’vi aren’t just swish special effects.

Like the Klingons before them, the Na’vi have their own official language. We know this because Cameron commissioned linguistics expert Paul Frommer to create one and, like Klingon, it’s now all over the internet.

Frommer wrote a fairly technical introduction to Na’vi for the Language Log site (bit.ly/navi-language), but there’s now a much simpler introductory guide at the new Learn Na’vi site (www.learnnavi.org). If you’re interested, there’s a great interview with Frommer by Vanity Fair magazine at bit.ly/frommer, where you can find out more.

If that’s not enough to satisfy your appetite for all things Na’vi, there’s also the interactive trailer to download (from avatarmovie.com). It uses technology called Adobe Air which means you can download fairly complex software via your web browser.

Interactive trailers are a fairly new thing and frankly don’t offer much interactivity just yet. This one lets you pause the action and click on hotspots which let you find out more about the people, places, and 10ftt tall bright blue aliens on screen. To be honest, it’s not much more interactive than a perfectly decent web page could have managed but when you’re spending that many millions of dollars on the movie and on invented alien languages, no-one’s going to notice a few more spent on web toys for the fans.

SWIRLING IMAGES

Here’s another idea from Google: Image Swirl (image-swirl.googlelabs.com). Normal searches for images only show up a gallery of little thumbnails. Swirl animates everything and makes image searching more about what you see, not the text that goes with it. Try one of the canned searches, like ‘Golden Gate bridge’ or ‘da Vinci drawings’ to see how it works.

BROWSING AROUND ... CRANES

Thoughtful Channel 4 documentary on crane life

www.channel4.com/programmes/the-solitary-life-of-cranes

Industry bible, Cranes Today

www.cranestodaymagazine.com

How do they build themselves?

bit.ly/ZJfB6

When cranes have accidents

www.craneaccidents.com