On Sunday, January 8, CBS’ 60 Minutes aired a piece on the Department of Defense’s Perdix autonomous military drones, filming an impressive spectacle – a swarm of 100 drones. But this was no easy feat. In fact, the small, fast-moving drones proved so difficult to capture that 60 Minutes nearly abandoned the entire story. That’s when the team came up with an idea. Would a cameraperson who is able to capture a small, fast moving golf ball be uniquely suited to capturing drones in flight? With the help of the latest Sony production technology, the 60 Minutes team was willing to find out.
Using Sony’s HDC-4300 4K high frame rate camera system attached to a nearby PWS-4500 4K server, golf cameraman Rudy Niedermeyer attempted to capture the drones in action. 60 Minutes Overtime, the program’s online source for material beyond the broadcast, was there to see if Niedermeyer would succeed. After many failed attempts, Niedermeyer was able to take advantage of the camera’s 480 frames per second to slow the footage down. With the right person, the right tools and multiple days of testing, 60 Minutes was ultimately able to achieve what they set out to do and spectacularly captured the swarm of Perdix.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More