Millennium Film Journal 45/46 includes my article on Mary Hallock Greenewalt's "Abstract Films." These are the oldest surviving hand-painted abstract films. [link to pdf]
Disney History blog has posted several pages of transcript of FLW talking to Disney animators about their use of music. From what they're talking about it sounds like this discussion may relate to the origins/development of Fantasia since the use of music FLW talks about it closer to Fischinger's work than to Disney's other films.
VHS tapes were the first genuinely popular, available to the masses media format. So much happened with VHS (and BETA, too) that it is easy to misunderstand what its death means for us: the replacement of VHS with digital alternativesalternatives that change the balance from what the people using the tapes want to do with their technology to that they are allowed to do with it.
Instant Video To-Go is a USB-bsed hardware video encoder. While the quality is limited to that for ipods etc., the idea of a plug-in USB hardware encoder is very exciting.
