When Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was were creating Ghost of a Dream, a full-scale model of a Hummer H3 made entirely of losing lottery tickets, they were thinking about “what people dream about when they scratch the coin against the ticket”. According to Was, “This is a ghost of all those dreams.”
The piece took about 2,400 hours of combined work to make over a six week period, and is covered in $35,000 of losing lottery tickets, which is also the sale price for the piece as well.
Tickets were gathered from areas all around Brooklyn, Miami and Minneapolis, as well as from friends that sent them in from as far as Seattle and Los Angeles. They were then glued to a plywood and metal frame, though being able to look through the grille or the windows and see the frame is part of the charm, as Was noted “it’s just a shell, it’s just a dream.”
Michael Neff’s Chalk series is a terrific idea in which he outlines various objects’ shadows in chalk, and then photographs them at night, giving each shadow an odd, sort of radiating glow.
So far, cities that he’s done this in include New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and a small town in Oregon, and the series is ongoing, so he has plans for more in the future.
Multinational coffee companies now rule our shopping malls and supermarkets and dominate the industry worth over $80 billion, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil.
But while we continue to pay for our lattes and cappuccinos, the price paid to coffee farmers remains so low that many have been forced to abandon their coffee fields.
Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee. Tadesse Meskela is one man on a mission to save his 74,000 struggling coffee farmers from bankruptcy. As his farmers strive to harvest some of the highest quality coffee beans on the international market, Tadesse travels the world in an attempt to find buyers willing to pay a fair price.
Against the backdrop of Tadesse’s journey to London and Seattle, the enormous power of the multinational players that dominate the world’s coffee trade becomes apparent. New York commodity traders, the international coffee exchanges, and the double dealings of trade ministers at the World Trade Organization reveal the many challenges Tadesse faces in his quest for a long term solution for his farmers.
It looks like a fascinating film, and definitely brings light to an issue that few Americans consider while waiting in line at the local Starbucks.
10 MPH is “a comical documentary that follows a pair of aspiring filmmakers as they quit their jobs and turn a friend’s ludicrous idea into a movie. The impulsive purchase of a two-wheeled Segway scooter sets this story in motion when the two friends decide to travel from Seattle to Boston at 10 mph in an attempt to change their lives forever… What ensues is a road trip like none other with a haphazard cast of characters you could only find on a zany 100-day trek through America’s back roads. Each poignant story the two friends discover along the way inspires a craving inside to go out and do that thing you’re supposed to do.”
What’s interesting is that they’ve taken this film to the indie extreme, making money through a partnership with OurStage, and going open source by showing you how to make your own movie with the 10 MPH DIY Manual.
The entire film is shown below, but be sure to check out the 10 MPH site to help support the cause.
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