Interesting Choice Episode 2: Remember the Fish

Episode 2 of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice Episode 1: "F" is for Fish

Episode 1 of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice Episode 0: The Pitch Line

The first episode of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice

I've got a new project in the works. Announcing Interesting Choice: A Webseries As You Like It, a crowdsourced narrative where the viewers decide what happens. In this five(-plus?)-week class project, collaborators Brian Bernhard, Christy Sager and I will be producing a weekly webseries, with each new episode followed by a poll where you are invited to vote on what happens next.

Follow along and join in at http://www.interestingchoice.com.

Our first video will be going up first thing tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

The Last Book

Last weekend, I attended the second annual Global Game Jam at NYU. The Game Jam is a sort of worldwide endurance/speed game-development event in which teams come together and in the course of 48 hours conceive, design, and produce an entire game. The results tend to be quick, dirty, and a little rough around the edges, but often innovative and off-the-wall.

This year, the theme was "Deception," and in the GMT -5:00 time zone, the design constraints were "Rain, a Plain, or Spain." You can check out all the games created for the event at the GGJ website.

I'd like to present our team's game: an action/strategy game for the iPhone called The Last Book.



In The Last Book, civilization has been destroyed by a neverending rainfall. Everything, it seems, has been washed away. Generations after the onset of the deluge, you are the Librarian, tasked with protecting the last book in existence, the only remaining example of the written word. Keep the book dry by collecting and diverting the falling rain, and do your best to hold back the flood.



The rain falls relentlessly, wearing down whatever it touches. Play by arranging pots to collect the water and protect your structure from damage. As the pots get full, you can dump them safely out in the wells. Over time, your pots will wear down, too, so use your kilns to fire up new ones. Protect your kilns, also, because the rain will quickly put them out if they get wet.

Just hold out until the clouds break (two minutes) to collect your reward.

And at all costs, don't let any rain fall on the Book!



Controls: Tap the pots to move them. Select the brick you want to place the pot on, or tap a well to empty the pot. Up to three emptied pots will be stored in each well; tap the well again to retrieve a pot. Tap a kiln that's fired up to start a new pot, then tap it again to remove the pot when it's done.

Currently, in order to play The Last Book, you must have a Mac with the iPhone SDK installed. Download the package and compile the game file in Xcode to play.

For those who are unable to try it out personally, here's a video showing the gameplay:



The Last Book was made with a five-person team, which we christened Brainfall Studios. It was a wonderful group to work with, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to get to know them. Here are the credits:

Design, Story: Jess Haskins
Level Design: Ray Reilly
Programming: Ulf Schwekendiek
Art: R.M. Sean Jaffe
Music & Sound: Justin Mathews



(The team from left to right: Sean, Ray, Ulf, Jess, and Justin).

We had a great time, and we're all interested in continuing to work on the game to flesh it out and eventually release it on the app store. I'll be sure to let you know about it when we do!

For now, here's the link to the game's page on the GGJ site: The Last Book.

Seeing green

Nice video showing the ubiquitous use of greenscreen effects in television, often in unexpected places like ordinary-looking exterior shots for shows like Ugly Betty.



Via Mental Floss.

New Neil

I've belatedly discovered that the entire second season of the hilarious Zelda parody webseries The Legend of Neil is out, and even better, it's still funny.

Fishbowl

A four-minute recording of the tank at Japan's Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, the second largest in the world. PZ Myers of Pharyngula recommends that you "let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes." (The embedded video is HD quality, so you can pop it into full screen right here.) It's definitely better than any screensaver you've got.

The natives are very friendly

Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine encountering a rare flightless parrot in New Zealand in Last Chance to See. It has been suggested that the behavior displayed in this video may explain why it is so endangered.

Via Bioephemera.

Wonderland

Made almost exclusively from spliced and recombined audio samples from Disney's 1951 film Alice in Wonderland, Wonderland, by Australian electronic artist Pogo, is an oddly pleasing album of eerie, rhythmic chillout tunes. All four songs are available for download from Last.fm. (My favorite is Lost.) The first track, Alice, is also available as a music video on YouTube.





Be sure to check out Pogo's other remix work. Classic movie mélange Go Out and Love Someone is well worth a listen.

At the Hotel Paradise

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Ghost of Stephen Foster.

From the album "Perennial Favorites" (Mammoth Records). Winner of "Best Animated Music Video" at the 1999 Vancouver Animation Festival. Directed by Raymond Persi and Matthew Nastuk.

Getting hyped up for the SNZ show tomorrow. I can't wait!

The birds and the trees

The earth moves in this message from Greenpeace exhorting passion for the environment.

Via Next Nature.

Get your Machinarium now

Machinarium, the highly anticipated new game by Amanita Design (creators of Samorost), is due out in October 2009, and is available for pre-order now. Pre-ordering will get you $3 off the regular price of $20, as well as a "pre-order pack" containing a selection of hi-res images and mp3s from the game.

Hear the colors

Synesthesia, a short film by filmmaking duo Terry Timely.

Via shape+colour.

Four short films

World Builder is a blended live action/CGI film by director Bruce Branit. It took one day of filming and two years of post-production work to create this breathtaking work, which details an epic act of creation: in a futuristic holographic environment, a single man builds a fully-realized digital world from the ground up, using a suite of gestural Minority-Report-esqe development tools that should make any designer weep. A labor of love, in more ways than one.

Via shape+colour.





9 is a short computer-animated film by Shane Acker in which a race of diminutive sack-creatures scavenge in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world and try to evade their greatest enemy, a ruthless mechanical predator. It's an intriguing, well-realized world, and there are plans to expand the concept into a full-length feature.
Via io9.

Please Say Something is a mind-blowing short film by animator David O'Reilly. Disjointed and dreamlike, it tells the story of the stormy relationship between a cat and mouse couple. In the future. Amazing.

Via A near life experience.





Maestro is a charming CGI entry in the Portable Film Festival by Hungarian director Géza M. Tóth.

Five minutes before his big performance, the Maestro and his persistent mechanical assistant are in preparation mode. As the clock ticks, life at the top is not all it seems.

Via SleepTight.tv.

Dramedy at the end of the world

More fruits of last year's writers' strike have ripened and fallen to the ground: screenwriter John August has just released the pilot to proposed webseries The Remnants, an apocalyptic sitcom about a tribe of survivors who raid abandoned houses in the suburbs of LA for Pringles and Wiis in the aftermath of a civilization-ending disaster of an indeterminate nature. The tone is hip and ironic, what August describes as "a cross between The Stand and The Office." The well-formed cast includes Justine Bateman, Michael Cassidy, Ben Falcone, Ernie Hudson, Amanda Walsh, and experimental web artist Ze Frank (whose burgeoning collection of flash oddities, artsy webcamery, and multimedia playthings is well worth the detour).

Following the model of Dr. Horrible, The Remnants was conceived and produced during the dark, idle days of the WGA strike and shopped around to advertisers and sponsors for possible development as a new webseries. Though it was at one time under consideration by NBC, its chances aren't looking so good. The upside is that the pilot is now being released to the public, so we at least get to see what we're missing. And maybe it'll somehow generate lots and lots of interest and develop into something in the future.

You can watch the embedded video below, or see it in HD on Vimeo.

Via io9.

Catch up on your sci-fi

Battlestar Galactica returns to tv tonight with the first episode of the long-awaited Season 4.5. If you haven't yet, you definitely need to refresh yourself first with Sci-Fi's highly entertaining recap, Catch the Frak Up!, with rapid-fire narration by Starbuck. Covers pretty much everything, from the twisty plot turns to the universe basics ("'Frak' is a swear word, papers don't have corners, and there's more than one god").

Part I



Part II




And while we're on recaps, if you've never gotten your head around that whole Star Wars thing, get the broad outlines with Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it).

My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top.

Via io9.

Tales in pen and ink

Kunio Kato, a member of the ROBOT Character and Animation team, is a Japanese animator whose quietly surreal films portray a curious world of fantasy and whimsy. This year, his short Tsumiki no Ie ("La maison en petit cubes" or "House of Blocks") won the Annecy Cristal prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market.

In the highly surreal short The Apple Incident (2001), giant apples begin falling from the sky onto a bemused city. Winner of the Best Prize in the 2001 Laputa International Animation Festival.





Dreamy and dreamlike, Aru Tabibito no Nikki ("The Diary of Tortov Roddle" or "A Traveler's Diary") (2003) is a series of unconnected episodes of strange and whimsical happenings in the life of the eponymous hero, a tall traveler in a top hat who wanders the world astride his curiously long-legged pig companion. The film comprises Episodes 1-6. Selected for the 2004 Annecy festival, it was the winner of the Best Prize in the Laputa Animation Festival in 2003 and the Grand Prix in the Hida International Animation Festival of Folktales and Fables.

An excellent review of the film can be found at the Nishikata Film Review.





The adventures of Tortov Roddle continue in the bonus Episode 7, The Red Berry, in which the traveler encounters a garden of hallucinogenic red fruits.





Fantasy Story (2003) is another collection of vignettes illustrating various flights of fancy. It was a selection in the the 8th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF) and the Ottawa 04 International Animation Festival.





Michaël Dudok de Wit is a Holland-born animator living in London whose charming, spare, Japanese-influenced cartoon animations have won numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and the Annecy Grand Prix for his 2000 film Father and Daughter.

The Aroma of Tea (2006) is Dudok de Wit's latest film. It is drawn entirely in washes of tea.





Father and Daughter (2000) is a quiet, moving tale about a young girl awating the return of her lost father.





In the ancient tradition of cat-and-mouse cartoons comes Le Moine et Le Poisson ("The Monk and the Fish") (1994), a delightful, minimalist short about a monk's obsessive attempts to catch the fish he spies in the monastery pond.





Tom Sweep (1992) is a humorous little cartoon about the travails of a beleaguered street janitor.

Musical interlude

John Coltrane - Giant Steps.
Via { feuilleton ].





Gershon Kingsley - Popcorn.





José Feliciano - California Dreamin'.
Via A near life experience.

A sense of place

Morning travelogue is a curiously compelling record of one man's commute to work as he ditches the Tube in order to walk through some of the lovelier and more interesting parts of downtown London. If only we all had such a short, pedestrian-friendly, and pleasant itinerary. The somewhat accelerated tracking and a peppy, danceable tune help, too.
Via Weekend Stubble.






Fed by Birds has just shared a few photographs paired with ambient soundscapes from a recent trip Cornwall, in Cornish Sounds. The captured ambience of waves and seabirds and breezy forests and tolling churchbells is wonderfully tranquil.





I was reminded of Their Circular Life: An Exploration About Human Behavior, an interesting little flash presentation that allows you to cycle through twenty-four hours of sounds and images captured from stationary observation posts in a variety of urban locations. Go fast and watch the day whizz by your eyes, or slow down to listen to the nuances of the place.









At La grange numérique, the panoramic photography site of Denis Gliksman, you can find a number of beautiful 360° scenes, some with sound and animation, like this set of "Spriteoramas" of rocks and lapping waves on the coast of Brittany.