The movie Offline began life as a cyberpunk short, put together by Matthew Santoro and released in 2007. According to the folks at The Quiet Earth it is now being extended into a full length feature film. After looking at the trailer, I tend to think this one is worth waiting for, and the Offline home page shows promise as well.
O F F L I N E from Matthew Santoro on Vimeo.
AMC has remade that 60s cult classic The Prisoner. It will start airing in the US in November, and you can get more information here.
Thanks to this Underwire article we finally have the dates for this years Torchwood: Children of Earth run, as well as the airing of the first Doctor Who special: July 20th. That is the day BBC America goes HD, and they are going to max out the Sci-Fi to celebrate. Torchwood runs Monday through Friday of that week, airing each episode just a few hours after it shows for the first time in the UK. Then on Saturday the 25th they will show the season 3 finale of Primeval, followed by the series premier of Being Human. They finish up their first week as a Hi-Def channel on Sunday with the Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead special. I just may have to rewire my TV to use the HD input for this one. IO9 are running a SciFi Sims Contest which looks like fun but seems just a bit recursive to me. Create your best science fiction still image, scene, or movie using the Sims software environment and submit them by June 9th. The winner gets a copy of The Sims 3 package and $250 online cash equivalent.
The latest issue of Sky and Telescope hit the stands a few days ago, with all the usual goodies and one not so usual. The cover article is called Uncovering Mars’s Secret Past, and to go with it they include a nifty little DVD with over 500 images and videos from the Mars Rovers cameras. You can also buy the Mars DVD separately, but for fifty cents more you get the July volume of the magazine along with the free DVD. The disk was put together by Dr Jim Bell, Lead Scientist for the Mars Rover’s panoramic cameras. NASA is building its own cloud environment, called Nebulous (I can’t prove it, but I suspect pun intended). This is for outreach and education, amongst other things, and is compatible with the Amazon web services platform.
The trailer for Twilight: New Moon hit the web shortly ago, and it looks like the franchise might be good for another movie or two. Although I am not sure you can use the word franchise when speaking of a body of work one film deep so far. Now that Barry Sonnenfeld is no longer making Pushing Daisy’s episodes, his new project looks to be the iconic Tom Swift. If done right, that could be a fun movie, particularly for anyone addicted to the books as a kid (even more so for us budding mad scientist youngsters).
According to this BBC announcement, there is more in store for David Tennant’s run as the Doctor. Besides the remaining specials we already knew about, he is signed up for a major part in two episodes of season three of the Sarah Jane Adventures. The new season of SJA starts in September in the UK and will run for 12 episodes. I addition, David has signed on for a series of short animated Who episodes which will also feature the voices of Georgia Moffett, David Warner and Lisa Bowerman. And while he was not directly mentioned, the BBC has confirmed that a movie script is in development for a theatrical Doctor Who treatment. I can’t wait to see it on the big screen! On the small screen, new this week is Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers, based on the book series by Mori Hiroshi. Oshii used the same 3D CG animation team involved with his Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence production. Besides the Ghost in the Shell series of movies and TV shows, previous creations of Mamoru Oshii include Urusei Yatsura, Blood: The Last Vampire, Patlabor, and a whole lot more.