You have to love anything called TeslaCon, and even more when it is a Steampunk gathering. It will be happening in Madison, WI, in November, and just might be a lot of fun. Don’t count on seeing everyone named in this video, it is from last year’s event; check the current web pages guest list for the new names.
Teslacon 2010 opener from Jon Sovey on Vimeo.
Emil Goodman created a very interesting Steampunk video as an initial concept piece for a project known as Henry Waltz. If he gets to build out the entire project, I will definitely be in the audience when it rolls out on the big screen.
HENRY WALTZ – VISUAL TEASER from Emil Goodman on Vimeo.
I am embarrassed to say I missed a Sci-Fi DVD release this week: Never Let Me Go, the new film based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro. He also wrote a little story called The Remains of the Day, but this time around we follow the lives of three people over three decades who were brought to life for a single reason: to be spare parts. This first person story about the lives of clones in an alternate timeline is not a happy tale, but it touches the heart in unexpected ways. This is the kind of movie The Island could have been, if it had someone at the helm who understood what being human was about.
The Rose City Steampunk Film Festival takes place in Portland, Oregon’s Clinton Street Theater on the 13th of February, 2011. The event has several feature length films and a boatload of shorts as well as some music videos and a writers panel. The theater is also running the Steampunk thriller Zenith from the 4th through the 10th, they are showing the classic Valley Girl for their Valentine presentation on the 14th, and every Friday night they run REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA, while every Saturday night they run the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I now have a favorite movie theater in yet another town I have never been to.
ZENITH 2011 TRAILER from Surla Films on Vimeo.
The folks over at Robot Japan just held the 1st Robot Japan Dance Competition on Sunday, January 9, 2011 in Tokyo. This video has some clips from that contest, with several different entrants, and it is worth watching just for the silliness factor. There are a few worth noting for the skill and ingenuity that went into their construction and programing, mostly towards the end of the video.
And one of them, the Kabuki bot, is very reminiscent of the wonderful days when Steampunk Japan was created. From 1600 to 1900, from the Edo to the Meiji periods, Karakuri or Clockwork Dolls were designed and built, mechanical robots who’s movement and logic tree choices were based on mechanical programming rather than electronic. At the beginning it was imported technology, based on Swiss gearboxes (mostly watches and clocks with the occasional Mecha built into a cuckoo clock) brought over by Portuguese sailors. It didn’t take long for some truly smart artisans to grasp the basic principles and start designing their own, starting with a tea serving robot who would bring you your cup, wait while you drank, and take the empty back. To the best of my knowledge this was the very first practical implementation of household robotics in any form, and at the core of Japan’s current supremacy in the field; they have now been building them for 400 years, after all.
Thanks to Singularity Hub for the heads up on this one.
This one comes as Webisodes, which is rapidly becoming the norm as the various flavors of multimedia converge. And some of the folks involved have had a hand in blurring the lines between the various media delivery types for previous shows, like the narrator Amanda Tapping who launched the first episode of Sanctuary online, with the numbers of viewers convincing Sci-Fi to spring for an actual season of the show. So now the Steampunk story of Riese: Kingdom Falling can be enjoyed online, and again there is a good chance the numbers will determine whether the program makes the jump to regularly produced series. Another example of this style of programming launches its web site today; The Minds Eye Series also has a lot to offer. That one is Fantasy rather then Steampunk, but both of these shows bypass typical Big Media companies (at least the worst aspects of them) and bring their stories straight to the audience to see if they can win a big enough share to survive as a series.
I had to grin when I noticed an actor or two as well as some of the production staff was coming from the Sanctuary team as well, and those who were not were equally professional. They are not the first group to do this style of Pilot creation, but they have had more success at it than most. The principle here is to do two contradictory things, and do both of them so well that you create an audience for the show that makes the network eager to add it to their lineup. First, you must create an episode so compelling, and a cast of characters so interesting and engaging, that the audience cannot wait to see what happens next. Second, you must do it while spending as close to no money as possible while having the highest production values.
One of the tricks that actually allows you to accomplish both of these goals is to only shoot the action scenes with the least amount of FX, substituting narration for the bits you don’t have the budget to film. This allows you to concentrate what budget you do have into costumes, props, background, cinematography, and the other details that show the quality of the finished product you intend to achieve. The narration segments must move the story forward with whatever visual footage can be put together that infers, rather than shows, the events being described. This technique has previously been used to bridge missing segments in archival footage (like many Doctor Who stories from the 60s and 70s), but now folks have figured out it can be used to present new offerings as well in an effective manor.
I do appreciate that this is the first actively SteamPunk TV program I have run across so far, and I intend to support it. There are SteamPunk precursor programs, like Legend, Brisco County Junior, or Wild Wild West, each of which took place in the right era and depended on scientific development (and sometimes SuperScience) in order to resolve their plotlines. But this is the first time I have watched video that had many of the protagonists wearing brass goggles with leather clothing of a distinctly SteamPunk flavor, and I am seriously looking forward to more episodes of this series.
The Steampunk Fortnight continues over at TOR, with multiple articles stories and presentations posted each day. One I particularly like is the The Amazing Fantastic Steampunk Timeline of Music and Things by Evelyn Kriete. This presents a very nice chronology of the various Steampunk bands, and ties it to some other events and milestones of the subculture, liberally sprinkled with links to most of the mentioned performers and publications.