Whitestone Motion Pictures presents Heartless: The Story of the Tin Man, a short movie based on the backstory of The Wizard of Oz. Featuring magnificent visuals and outstanding storytelling, Heartless is truly one the best short films I’ve ever seen online. If you’ve got a bit of free time today, make sure you watch every minute of it, you’ll be glad you did.
[Full Heartless soundtrack available for download here]
[Via Neatorama]
[Via]
In the following video, Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak — the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled?
Whatever your response to the ending of Lost, it probably centered on your approach to the flash-sideways sequences of season 6, both in the way everyone turned out to be connected in some manner, and the fact that it all took place in some form of subconsciousness and imagination.
Those themes show up again in what is also perhaps the pinnacle of TV fan geekery: the Tommy Westphall Universe. This is the theory that because the series St. Elsewhere wound up appearing to be the dream of child character Tommy Westphall, then his imagination must also be responsible for any shows which have storyline links.
The most common starting point of the links is that two St Elsewhere characters, Roxanne Turner and Victor Erlich also appear, as the same characters, in Homicide: Life On The Streets. That makes things interesting straight away as Homicide character John Munch has appeared in no fewer than eight different shows, including The X-Files and The Wire.
At last count, 282 shows can be said to be the work of Tommy Westphall’s mind, running from Degrassi Junior High to Doctor Who.
And to give one example of the connections:
As for 24, forget it. Jack Bauer doesn’t play nice with others.
For more details on crossover episodes, check out poobala.com.
The awesome guys from EepyBird.com, whom we interviewed both in 2007 and 2008 (videos), have just released a brand new video showing their new creation at work: a Mentos and Diet Coke powered car. Check it out!
The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car uses a piston mechanism: a six-foot long rod sits inside a six-foot long tube attached to each bottle of Coke Zero. When the Mentos drop into the soda, the pressure tries to push the rod out of the tube. With 108 rods all pushing at once, that gives us a lot of power.
If you’re a southern California Geek, and are looking for a convention to tide you over until Comic con, then you can hit-up Geeks Con, scheduled for June 19. The good news is that it’s free admission, so you can keep saving your shekels for that 3 day Comic Con pass!
Tags: conventions, geeks con
After a Utah resident was struck by a car while crossing a highway, she filed a lawsuit against the driver of the car – but named Google as a defendant as well. Since, you know, they’re the ones that told her to cross the road.
The lawsuit states that Google should have known that the directions they gave her (when she accessed Google Maps on her cell phone) sent her down a rural highway with vehicles traveling at a high rate of speed, lacking pedestrian sidewalks. And that they therefore had a duty to warn her, rather than sending her down a “dangerous path” that led to the accident and her subsequent pain and suffering and $100,000+ in medical bills.
Of course, her lawyer says that the media is being unfair for painting his client as stupidly ignoring her own safety and common sense by blindly following directions. It’s Google’s fault, for creating a “trap” with their bad directions.
Though the lawsuit doesn’t mention that Google Maps includes a disclaimer for pedestrian directions. On the website, it says “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.” And on my iPhone, it says “Walking directions (beta): use caution.” Even if Google does have a legal duty to warn (which is probably debatable), they’ve probably already met that burden.
But let this be a lesson to you all: Look both ways before crossing the street, even if Google tells you not to.
Enough with the rainbows and flowers – it’s time for guns and missiles! This is the true power of light painting: every weapon at your fingertips.
Yesterday we looked at examples of Lost-style non-linear storylines. Today, in honor of 24, we’ll run down some examples of real-time TV and film.
The most obvious for Keifer Sutherland fans is Phone Booth, in which a man answers a ringing telephone and comes to regret it. Sutherland is the voice of the man making the call, so it’s hardly a Bauer-esque action-filled role on his part. The movie works well for what it is, though.
When you talk about real-time movies, the all-time classic is Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of the play Rope. It begins with two men murdering a former classmate, to then watch them spend the next 80 minutes as they hold a party with the food served on top of the chest in which they’ve stashed the body. The real-time, continuous scene approach is impressive, but to modern audiences the technique Hitchcock uses to get round technical limitations may appear clumsy: with film stock limiting continuous shooting to around 10 minutes, the joins are made by zooming into and out of a solid background such as a jacket.
If you want 24’s approach taken to the limit, check out Timecode. It involves the screen being split into four shots, each running continuously in real-time. The audio fades up and down to put the emphasis on whichever “scene” is most important to plot development at any time. It’s certainly creative (particularly on DVD where all four soundtracks are available in isolation), but not particularly enthralling once you get past the gimmick.
The same can’t be said of 102 Minutes That Changed America, a History Channel documentary about the attacks of 11 September 2001. It’s made up of dozens of different clips shot by ordinary people on camcorders and edited in a simple way: the footage is in real-time and at any particular moment, the most powerful video recorded at that moment is shown. The result is that instead of simply showing the Twin Towers collapsing on a loop, it puts the events into context and conveys the lack of information most people had and the panic they felt. The choice of footage for the moment the second plane hits the tower is probably the most chilling piece of reality you will ever see.
Did you know that the belief that people only use 10% of their brains is a myth? Or that a brain has 100,000 miles worth of blood vessels, and over 100 billion neurons? Hit the jump for other interesting facts about the the organ that makes us, human beings, so special.