There's Still Time! Celebrate Jim Henson’s Birthday by Reading Tale of Sand | GeekDad

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via Jonathan Liu - Grazie!

"It should come as no surprise to anyone that Jim Henson, who would have been 75 today, had a lot more up his sleeves that he didn’t get to complete. One such work is an unproduced, feature-length screenplay co-written with Jerry Juhl, which turned up in The Jim Henson Company’s archives. According to info from Archaia, Tale of Sand:

tells the story of a man who is kicked out of a dusty town in the middle of the desert, with no memory of who he is or where he came from. Relentlessly pursued by an unknown assailant, and with only a rucksack of odds-and-ends to his name, he embarks on a desperate race across an increasingly bizarre landscape with only one thing in mind: survival.

While the book isn’t due out until November, the first 20 pages will appear on Archaia.com starting today, so go over and check out one of Jim Henson’s latest works."

Whoa. Obsession: Flavorwire » Time-Lapse Videos of Drawings Made with a Salt Shaker

Bashir Sultani uses a salt shaker to make art, documenting his creative process in a series of intriguing YouTube videos. Subjects of the artist’s portraits range from pop-culture icons such as Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, and President Obama to legendary figures like Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, and Albert Einstein. Check out Sultani’s fascinating time-lapse videos after the jump.

The Joker

Jad Abumrad, Radiolab’s ‘genius’ storyteller, on what public radio needs now: ‘more joy, more chaos’ » Nieman Journalism Lab

WNYC's Jad Abumrad

First thing’s first: Jad Abumrad does not know how he will spend half a million dollars, but it’s probably going right into his labor of love, the mind-bending radio show that earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant this week.

“The central problem for me has always been that the show eats me alive, and how do I get out from under it just enough to re-imagine it? Particularly because the rest of my life is getting so chaotic,” he told me. (Abumrad has a 2-year-old child and another due in February.)

If you don’t know WNYC’s Radiolab or haven’t heard it before, I will break the rules of blogging now and ask you to leave this page and go listen. Abumrad and co-host Robert Krulwich (who has been experimenting with radio journalism since the ’70s) take big, huge ideas — time, randomness, mortality, fate — and shrink them into something edible and charming. It’s science that feels like play.

read the fully post by Andrew Phelps on NiemanLab.org

Super Super Cool Nuit Blanche Flame Throwing InstallationThe Heart Machine Press Release 20-Sep-2011 | interactive arts

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Excerpt:

"The Heart Machine is a collaborative art project that combines sculptural structures, flame effects and modern mechanics to create a compelling interactive experience that invites and thrives on it participation.

The piece features a 6-foot by 10-foot industrial heart as its center, surrounded by four 16 foot “arteries”. When touched or stroked by passersby, participants control the rhythm and size of the fireballs, shooting flames up to 25-feet into the sky. The exhibit also features technology originally created for the Ontario Car Industry, re-purposed to run the interactive elements of the sculpture.

It is also the first art project by a Canadian woman, Irving, to receive official honorarium status by Burning Man’s art team, as well as the first project from Eastern Canada to receive the competitive bursary. This year, in addition to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche’s support, the project has also been granted a special award from the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF) to support its first Canadian presentation.

The sheer scale of the project, spanning 80ft x 80ft, has brought together makers from all walks of life, including an architect, welders, electricians, product and interaction designers, an anthropologist, a lawyer, students, a couple of engineers – one retired, and software experts, to name a few, from across the Greater Toronto Area. The piece will be located in “Zone B” at Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche, near Bay & Edward Street in downtown Toronto. The piece will be engulfed in sand to emulate the conditions of the desert, where the piece was first displayed one year ago...."

Finally. Movie studios give up the DVD ghost, look to the Internet & faster delivery #infdist

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Excerpt:

Ben Fritz, Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2011

Across Hollywood, a quiet revolution is brewing that's about to transform living rooms around the world.

After desperate attempts to prop up the industry's once-thriving DVD business, studio executives now believe the only hope of turning around a 40% decline in home entertainment revenue lies in rapidly accelerating the delivery of movies over the Internet.

In the next few years, the growing number of consumers with Internet-connected televisions, tablets and smartphones will face a dizzying array of options designed to make digital movie consumption a lot more convenient and to entice users to spend more money...."

Sweet Find: Volkswagen Turns Norwegian Roadway into a Interactive Roulette Game

Volkswagen Turns Norwegian Roadway into a Interactive Roulette Game

Volkswagen Bluemotion RouletteTo demonstrate just how far the new fuel-friendly Volkswagen Bluemotion Golf could travel on a single tank of glass, Norwegian agency Apt came up with the very creative idea. They decided to have two drivers head north from Oslo in the Golf using the road commonly known as the E6.

The road was divided into 80,000 car-length roulette slots using Google Maps and Streetview. A TV commercial informed Norwegians to go to the site and select the section of road that they thought the car would run out of fuel on. The lucky person who chose the correct section on the roadway won the car. Pretty simple right?

The whole drive was broadcasted live through the campaign website and 27 hours later the car finally came to a stop after driving 1527 kilometres north from Oslo.

Fuego 2.0: 'Heat-Seeking Twitter Bot' It’s like being on Twitter all day long — without having to be on Twitter all day long. » Nieman Journalism Lab

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By Joshua Benton, Excerpt via Nieman Lab

"It was one month ago today that we launched (as part of our redesign) Fuego, our heat-seeking Twitter bot. Fuego scans through the future-of-news sector of the Twitterverse to identify the stories that journalists, techies, and thinkers are reading and talking about right now.

Well, we believe in iterative design, so I’m very happy today to unveil a new version — call it Fuego 2.0. It’s live now — go check it out.

There are three major improvements worth noting:

A new design
The most obvious change is a very different look. For each story, we now give you a rich set of information, including its headline, its source, an image (if available), and a sample tweet linking to it. It arrays the top links in a tile/card style, making them much more scannable and visually interesting.

(This is done via the magic of Embedly, a Cambridge startup with an API that converts simple URLs into rich metadata, including headlines and images. It’s a very useful product for a particular set of needs; check them out.)..."

Bookmarking Blog -Smart Case Study: Creating Its Own World: Terra Nova’s Website | The Extratextuals

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September 9th, 2011 | Jonathan Gray

"In my last post, I noted that the only truly interesting and innovative website for the new network shows this Fall belongs to Terra Nova. Why?

Well, first, let me offer a quick qualifier to the previous statement. Grimm’s website, while largely uneventful and de rigeur, includes what could become a neat little Production Blog, in which various production staff are offered a small amount of space to explain what they do in general and how that works on Grimm. It could provide yet another example of how paratexts teach production literacy, and are invested in a process of multiplying the number of supposed authorial geniuses working on any show … but they have three posts in one month, so perhaps they ran out of geniuses already? Anyways, go see it here.

Back to Terra Nova, though, while not wholly stepping (yet?) into the realm of being an alternate reality game, it does do a good job of setting up the alternate reality in which the show will be set. Almost buried away on the official webpage is a link to become part of the Eleventh Pilgrimage, and by clicking through, one is situated in the futuristic society from which our Terra Novans will depart. The show follows a “pilgrimage” of people from the future who are escaping that hostile future to try and reestablish the past and make better decisions in order to refashion the future (imagine if Wall-E won over the Terminator and the two started hatching ideas)....

Catching Up: The Interest Graph, Digital Distribution & Transmedia Storytelling | Transmythology.com

Reason 1: Digital Distribution

Even in the DVD era, there was little need to sustain sales of a piece of content (or larger brand) after its initial release. “Catalog” sales were considered a bonus, not a necessity. That is gradually changing in the digital era. Digital distribution, particularly when it forms part of the new-generation cloud based services we are beginning to see, makes content available for purchase on a consistent basis. With infinite shelf space, and the ability to key into audience preferences through data analytics and recommendation engines, a piece of content can add to a company’s bottom line for years to come. This may be particularly important for an independent production seeking to recoup over a longer stretch of time, especially if self-distributed.

Reason 2: The Death of the Sequel and Birth of the Brand

If there has been one major realization within the entertainment industry over the past 10-15 years or so, it is that entertainment companies are not merely in the content creation business; they are in the brand-building business.

In the old paradigm, production of sequels was reactionary. A movie studio, for instance, would release a slate of films, gauge which were popular, and then contemplate how to follow up on that success. Of course, this meant brainstorming an entirely new story (often grafted on to an original premise not designed to be extended), and renegotiating talent deals in less favorable ways. Little thought was given to the interest graph above; the thought was that the combination of public goodwill towards the talent involved, and another huge advertising spend, would be sufficient.

By and large, we are seeing that old paradigm die – with good reason. Entertainment companies are realizing that it is better to make a slightly larger initial investment in story development and multi-picture talent deals than to be forced to scramble to react to a success that, through sheer managerial negligence, was entirely unforeseen.