Connecting Past, Present and Future
Zeitgeist
Great Interactive Music Video: The Wilderness Downtown
04. Sep
Arcade Fire are bringing us an innovative, interactive and personalised music video called The Wilderness Downtown. It uses HTML5 to run in the browser and personalises the video once you’ve typed in the address of your childhood. I also quite like the song but the idea of giving everyone a unique experience when watching it is brilliant.
Unfortunately there is still a huge debate about Google Street View in Germany which made it impossible for me to use my childhood address. So I used the adress of my first work place in the UK instead. My former colleagues will recognise the environment in my personalised video, everyone else should now create their own video. Enjoy
Star Wars Uncut Wins Emmy And Nears Release
26. Aug
No, Star Wars uncut is not the long awaited debut of the Star Wars saga on Blu-Ray. It is also not the special edition. It is a VERY special edition, made by fans and for fans. Initiated by 26-year-old Web developer Casey Pugh A New Hope got cut into pieces of 15 seconds each. Groups of fans could then choose up to three of those scenes and shoot their own version of them. Several groups could claim the same scene and in the community got to choose which fan made scenes will be used in the final movie – stitched together with all the winning scenes.
To Casey’s surprise, but totally deserved, the project just won an Emmy in the category creative achievement in interactive media. Casey initially did not want to apply but got talked into it and has now won an award which previously has been given to big names like Lost or the Jimmy Fallon show.
Pugh says that the movie is finished but he is awaiting a response from LucasFilms regarding legal issues. There is hope that they will treat it as a fan film and give it a green light. You can watch the full Star Wars uncut movie on the website already but until the legal issues are resolved without the original soundtrack though. Still worth watching and a must see if you are a Star Wars fan.
3,2,1 – eBay Movie Trailer Is Good Fun
14. Aug
We still have to wait until October to see if the movie The Social Network aka The Facebook Movie is entertaining or not. It is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires is telling the origin of Facebook – with liberal fact-checking and without Facebook sanctioning the production of the book. Some of the events have likely been dramatised to create an exciting storyline which could help the movie find a broader audience, too (not that 500 million Facebook users would not be enough of a potential audience already).
So we don’t know yet if the movie will be entertaining but its trailer has already sparked some funny spoofs which are all worth watching. It all started with a fictional YouTube movie trailer, followed by the Twitter movie trailer and the latest parody of an eBay movie trailer. In case you haven’t seen them all, I’ve collected them here in chronological order. You should watch the Facebook movie trailer first to get the references in the other videos
What Happened To Making Phone Calls?
10. Aug
Look at your phone, look at me, now back at your phone, now back at me! How many times have you called me in the last few months and how many times have I called you? Well, if we don’t have each others phone number then it is probably zero times. But think about your own friends, how many times have you called them? (If you DO have my phone number I demand an explanation sooner or later!)
Truth is, when the whole world went crazy about the iPhone 4′s antenna issue it left me kinda cold. First, because I expected it to be an overrated issue anyway (Now that I have it I can only say that I can recreate it, but only intentionally – when actually using the phone it does not seem to be worse than the 3GS) but also because I hardly make any phone calls with my smartPHONE. I’ve recently been offered to upgrade my contract to get more free minutes. What for? Give me more data volume!
I remember having used the phone a lot. Especially my landline at home. Now that I would be able to make a phone call anytime and anywhere I seem to not having the need to, but there is also something else….