the-future-of-moving-pictures
Outside the Gold Ring: Notes from the First Ever Middle East Film and Comic Con
V drifts along in front of the main stage, black cape sagging, the yachts of the 0.0001 percent in the marina beyond. Alan Moore's vigilante looks happy as he vectors toward the shwarma hut. My wife's lounging on a pink beanbag in the lawn with my...
Afiq Omar Makes Acid-Dosed Analog Graphics With Science, Not Software
Watching “Ferienne” by analog motion graphics artist and Singapore native Afiq Omar must be an intimidating experience for any videographer. Part three in a series focused on understanding “fluid dynamics, magnetism, and natural invisible forces,” the...
The First Remote Control Was a Gun to the Head of the Television Industry
Eugene Polley, man who invented the remote control died on Sunday, leaving behind not just the Zenith Flash-Matic, but the template for a subversive technology that would change the face of the television industry.
Motherboard TV: The Creature Shop Is the Scariest Place in Johannesburg
Last year Motherboard traveled to Johannesburg to check out South Africa's top fright factory, known to those in the horror biz as The Creature Shop.
Bombers in Hollywood: The Price of Military Tech Assistance in Movies
If the most powerful armed force in history isn’t winning in reality, it certainly is on the big screen. And like so many problematic aspects of late capitalism, the military-Hollywood complex has a grimly understandable logic. For example, consider...
Battleships Are the Worst Possible Choice for Fighting Aliens
Transformers, the concept, is the defining ontological challenge of our time. Clue, the film, is a definitive text of the American avant-garde. So the problem is not, as various troglodytes might claim, a toy-based movie in the abstract. No, Battleship...
Is CGI Software Poised to Kill Photography? It's Close
Despite public craving for ridiculous Photoshop failures and public shaming of horrific photographers, the perpetual myth that a fancy-ass camera and technical wizardry is the way to get rich off photos still remains. But outside of the hyper...
In a Field of '90s Barbieland Wreckage, Chop Suey Got Gaming for Girls Totally Right
Developed in 1994 and published the following year, Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups -- smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably -- as it was to the prescribed "girls 7 to 12" crowd...
One Laptop Per Child and Epic Screens: 8.5 Questions with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepsen
Mary Lou Jepsen is the founder and CEO of Pixel Qi Corporation, a manufacturer of low-cost, low-power LCD screens for laptops. She has also been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine for her work in creating One...
The 1-Bit Camera App Is Cool, But Here's a Whole Movie Made With the Game Boy Camera
About a month ago an app called the "1-Bit Camera":http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1-bit-camera/id505119307?mt=8 arrived, promising images with fidelity low enough to make Instagram look like HDR. The nostalgia it delivers is a bit more recent than...
How the BBC's Threads Outfroze Most Anything Else In Film Forever
It came to my attention a couple weeks ago that _Threads_, the 1984 BBC docu-drama about the aftermath of a nuclear war, is now available for free viewing on Google Video (and, thus, here). There exist many dark, soul-freezing, plain old fucked up...
How Drones Are Boosting Digital Filmmaking To New Degrees of Insanity
To start, take four minutes and watch the above 2012 reel from adventure-chasing chronicler of the superhuman, "Brain Farm":http://www.brainfarmcinema.com/. Finished? OK, good, now you understand: extreme sports porn isn't extreme sports porn anymore...