The award winning short film Somnium was created by Team Somium of The Animation School in South Africa, the team being Gerard Seymour, Riann Sholtz, Pieter Louw, Eben De Waal, Jasmine Morvan, and Greta Pepler. The award it won was the World Silver Award from the New York Festival’s International Television & Film Awards of 2014, and it only takes about 5 minutes to watch. I find it interesting but appropriate that they named it after the 1608 science fiction story Somnium by astronomer Johannes Kepler. Enjoy!
If you have any love of SciFi at all, run, don’t walk, to your nearest online streaming service, log into Netflix, and start watching Sense8. Eight cities, what starts out being 8 people (who rapidly become one), and one central theme; Homo Sapiens are becoming Homo Superior, and the powers that be will do everything they can to kill them before they lose their own power to control the world forever. This brilliant series includes the Wachowskis as creators, but J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame is the real storyteller here.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
Something of a trailer with a lot of commentary by the author, this intro video to the TV version of Blake Crouch’s Wayward Pines looks like the show just might be worth watching. It is very Twin Peaks and a bit X-Files, so I look forward to seeing how well Fox and the director tell the quality story embedded in the book. If you missed it when it first aired, you can catch it here.
Have you been planning how to make your movie, but can’t afford all the location crews it will take to get the filming done, let alone at the quality level your vision requires? Then perhaps what you really need is a drone, not a film crew. With this kind of technology at your fingertips, you can reduce your total production costs by an order of magnitude, and the control interface is simple enough for anyone to learn. OK, I admit that this video of the LilyCam is basically a commercial, but it is also the best introduction I have yet seen to help everyone understand the potential such toys have to help you create your own masterpiece. In my mind, this is one of those Paradigm Shifts in the way we can do things that no one expects, and everyone wonders how we ever got along without after they saw it in action. Thanks to The Great Dismal for the heads up on this one!
If you are as addicted to reading as I am, and in particular you love to read Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and other Genre stories, then I have a recommendation for you. Every week Locus Magazine generates a comprehensive list of the new publications their editorial team consider the best available. That means you can check in each week to find their New Books page, and learn where and what all the fun stories are, even if you don’t recognize all the authors or editors. For the most part, Locus does not link you to online version of the stories, but if you know their names and authors you shouldn’t have much trouble tracking them down yourself.