Alternative energy: the movie
It’s not often I get to reference “Donnie Darko,” pig poop and Michael J. Fox in a single story:
Getting the dog and the Roomba/Roboquad/Pleo to co-exist
“I wanted not a single tooth mark on the dog,” says Ms. Turbeville, 54. Her solution: a paste of cayenne pepper and Cholula Hot Sauce, which she painted on its tail. The cats still sniff the Aibo’s backside. “They just can’t help it. But they never, ever bite him anymore.”
Many owners have found robotic pets attacked by their “bio-pets” when they aren’t home, she says. People on some online forums suggest getting rid of the flesh-and-blood pets with territorial issues. “Obviously, they’re feeling threatened,” Ms. Turbeville says. “They retaliate. They retaliate hard.”
On Page One: When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To (Thanks, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Jezebel and Wonkette!)
(This story also ran in the Arizona Republic, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Charleston [W.V.] Gazette, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press and the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star.)
The art on, and about, the Internet
The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.
To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.
“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.
“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”
The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.
Midwest Teen Sex Show
Episode No. 4 of “The Midwest Teen Sex Show,” a new video podcast, opens with a shot of a young woman holding a crying baby. Nearby, two young boys are noisily scuffling and trading noogies. Looking into the camera, the obviously stressed-out mother of three says nothing, but her expression says: How did I get into this mess?
Seconds later, the episode’s title, “Birth Control,” flashes on the screen.
That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn’t pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators — host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.
The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim — and boring — to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.
In “The Older Boyfriend,” which warns teenage girls against taking up with a guy in his 20s or 30s, Ms. Hasler says, “You may think you’re pretty cool for having an older boyfriend, but what you have to remember is he’s not cool for dating you. He’s a loser. And you can find plenty of losers to date at school.”
More than 50,000 people subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. The “Midwest Teen Sex Show” is listed under iTunes’ “Health” category, where it regularly is in the top 10. Yesterday, it was No. 7, compared with Discovery Health Channel at No. 20.
Along with growth has come controversy, particularly among sex-education teachers and therapists. While some praise it for tapping a hard-to-reach audience, others worry it’s too racy for younger teens, and still others say the podcast focuses too much on humor and not enough on the facts kids need.
The Lego-movie industry
Young Cineastes Find Lego a Congenial Medium for the Age of YouTube
In the three-minute film “Cognizance,” a hit man on his way to his next target wordlessly reflects on his life. He walks past shoppers browsing in stores, children on a merry-go-round, a young couple embracing. Finally, he spots his intended victim across a busy street, and, as the soundtrack music by Coldplay swells, he reconsiders and drops his gun in an alley.
As the killer turns and begins to walk home, he finds himself facing the barrel of another man’s gun. A subtle smile crosses his placid, yellow face as the screen fades to black.
One reviewer said he was “overwhelmed with emotion” by the film. Another called it “a gleaming gem,” adding that it was “required viewing for anyone interested in our little plastic world.”
“Cognizance” is one of hundreds of movies known as “brickfilms” that are getting attention on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Amateur filmmakers use Lego pieces to create characters and scenes, sometimes spending months painstakingly arranging and rearranging the blocks before the camera. Re-creations of famous moments in “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” faithfully rendered in the primary colors of Lego pieces and stitched together from thousands of stop-motion frames, have drawn hundreds of thousands of viewings. Many of the productions are original films with elaborate plotlines, soundtracks and voice-overs.
The growing genre is driven by a lively online community of would-be Spielbergs who swap tips on message boards about tackling the unique challenges of the medium.
Read In This Film Industry It Really Helps To Be a Blockhead
Bands Walk Fine Line With Contests That Invite Fans to Shoot Music Videos
Hundreds Enter, but Some Complain Winners Are Often Pros Seeking Exposure, Not Loyal Listeners
Time was, interacting with a favorite band didn’t go much beyond joining a fan club and singing along, lighter or cellphone outstretched, at a concert. Now, artists are asking listeners to shoot their next music video.
Several popular acts, including established artists like Björk and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as indie bands like the Decemberists, are holding video-making contests to coincide with the release of their latest albums. Even Ozzy Osbourne will invite fans to create the video for his single “I Don’t Wanna Stop” later this month. Prizes range from cash and computers to having your creation distributed as the band’s “official” video.
Record labels hail the competitions as a way to tap into the growing interest in user-generated content, and connect with their most passionate fans. While music videos are no longer a central part of the programming on MTV and VH1, they’ve enjoyed a resurgence in popularity thanks to sites like YouTube and MySpace. But the contests are alienating some listeners, who gripe that winners tend to be highly skilled video producers looking to gain attention, and aren’t always die-hard fans.
Deaf Web Users Fear Being Left Behind as TV Shows Stream Onto the Internet
The Internet has been a boon to deaf computer users, giving them easy access to a wide variety of information and breaking down communication barriers. But many of those users feel left behind by one of the Internet’s fastest-growing segments: online video.
Though television networks and movie studios are rapidly expanding into Internet distribution, few online videos offer the closed captioning that companies are required by law to offer to TV viewers. The major networks provide full-length episodes of some of their most popular shows on the Web, including hits like “Lost” and “Survivor,” but none of them include captions. Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store sells downloads of more than 200 TV shows, but doesn’t offer versions with captions, and the company’s popular iPod player doesn’t support them.
The absence of online captions has emerged as a hot topic in the deaf community. The media providers say they are held back by technological hurdles, and point out that online distribution of TV content is still in its infancy. But advocates for the deaf and hard of hearing say the lack of captions is a slight, since most programs have already been transcribed to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules. They are pushing to update government regulations to cover the Internet.
“It’s like history repeating itself from TV to Internet,” said Jim House, a spokesman for Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Inc., a Silver Spring, Md., deaf advocacy group. Groups lobbied networks to caption shows starting in the 1980s, he said. Regulations put in place in the 1990s by the FCC and Congress required TV manufacturers to make sets compatible with closed-captioning signals, and set a timetable for networks to include captions with their broadcasts. While captions are now common on U.S. broadcasts, it wasn’t until January of this year that they became mandatory for all English-language programs produced since 1998.
“I’m hoping we do not have to wait another 25 years” to bring captioning to Internet video, Mr. House said.
Museums Try YouTube, Flickr to Find New Works for the Walls
A forthcoming exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art will feature work selected by unlikely curators: visitors to the YouTube video-sharing site.
MoMA solicited videos to be included in a retrospective of the Residents, an avant-garde multimedia group, that will open next week. The museum has posted the clips of 11 finalists on YouTube and invited the public to weigh in. The votes and comments those works receive on the site will help determine which are screened at the museum.
It is among the latest moves by museums to capitalize on the popularity of online communities and remain relevant to the new generation of art fans. London’s Saatchi Gallery is sponsoring what it calls “the first reader-curated contemporary art show” later this month, in which online voters picked the participants. In New York, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has this year expanded the prestigious awards it bestows on artists, adding a “people’s design award” based on votes from visitors to the museum’s Web site.
Meanwhile, the New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery staged a summer show based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Pace/MacGill’s project, called “Self-Portraitr,” included nearly 130,000 user-submitted photos, and drew a younger-than-usual audience — one of the goals of the exhibit, a gallery spokeswoman said.
Veoh Cleans Up Its Act, but Some Users Cry Foul
Video-sharing Web site Veoh.com has been around less than a year and is dwarfed by rival YouTube.com Inc. But Veoh has drawn outsized attention from bloggers and other Internet users for its willingness to host racy videos that other sites prohibit.
But that changed late last week, when closely held Veoh Networks Inc. quietly removed the “adult” category from its site and deleted thousands of risque videos. The San Diego company also said it was cracking down on copyrighted material.
Veoh, like YouTube and Google Inc.’s video site, attracts visitors with its user-contributed collection of video clips. The site, which was launched in September, has lined up prominent backers, including Time Warner Inc. and former Walt Disney Co. chief Michael Eisner, who sits on its board.
Veoh has been popular with bloggers because, unlike YouTube and Google, it allowed bloggers to upload and link to videos containing nudity.
Hollywood’s Take on the Internet Often Favors Fun Over Facts
In the 1996 blockbuster “Mission: Impossible,” the secret agent played by Tom Cruise uses email to set a trap for one of his adversaries – a shadowy, Bible-quoting figure he knows only as “Max.”
Mr. Cruise’s character uses a laptop to compose an email message addressed to “Max@Job 3:14.” Once he clicks the “send” button, the email is carried away in an oversized on-screen envelope, complete with postage stamp. In the real world, such a message would set the stage for a bounce-back error message, not an action/adventure thriller.
Ten years after “Mission: Impossible,” Hollywood still has a spotty track record when it comes to portraying computers and the Internet. Some portrayals are so absurd as to leave viewers wondering if the film’s producers use the same Internet they do.
“The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails,” said Harry Knowles, a self-described tech geek and online film critic who runs Ain’t It Cool News, a popular movie-industry site. “You click ’send’ and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.”