Videos&Art to inspire SF / FANTASY ideas? Post YOURS ?!

The Flying Saucer Incident.

And give it about ten seconds for the pay-off. Really.

And imagine if there were some effectively eerie, then shocker music ... and some dialogue setting it up ... and you'd have something pretty decent.

I think that might be the lesson here for WRITERS (not that any of us need such simple advice, but: Set it up with character and mood ... and THEN the payoff!)

http://www.vimeo.com/2589504

I don't know who the guy is, but he's got skillz I'd luv to learn!
His demo reel with some animation insights:

http://www.vimeo.com/4955182

Hah! That's great. Although ten seconds is pushing it for the payoff, it's almost like putting the hook on page two.

'Be afraid ... be very afraid.'

Then click the link. The magazine talks to you. The centerfold ... well ... they'll think of something for the centerfold to do, I'm pretty sure!

http://www.psfk.com/2009/08/embedded-video-ad-in-print-magazine.html

In the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, a CBS advertisement features the first video player embedded in a print magazine. The tiny video screen automatically plays when the reader turns to the two page spread promoting the coming fall lineup of CBS shows.

Americhip developed the paper-thin hardware and the loud video begins after a brief pause when turning to the page. The battery powered technology allows the player to show up to 40 minutes of video, including sneak peaks and featurettes. The advertisement will only be featured in magazines sold in the New York and Los Angeles markets. For those not able to see the video-in-print magazine in person, here’s a brief and painfully clamorous video of it in action:

That is freaky.

Steve

writerdarkly.blogspot.com

'Be afraid ... be very afraid.'

Then click the link. The magazine talks to you. The centerfold ... well ... they'll think of something for the centerfold to do, I'm pretty sure!

(cue)

My blood runs cold!
My memory, has just been sold!
My angel is a centerfold... Angel is a centerfold...

Well, that's it then. Print media has finally surrendered to video.

Not.

Cute (and appropriate characters for the clip - I love Big Bang Theory). I'm sure we'll see this tech turning up in greeting cards real soon, but it has a ways to go. I remember when National Geographic did the first-ever hologram cover, but about all you see that tech used for is anti-counterfeit stickers on credit and ID cards.

On the other hand, they're making great strides with printable circuitry (printable via specialized inkjet printers). From there to transistors and LEDs that can be printed via offset press (for high volume) may not be that long.

On the gripping hand, why bother if everyone has full-color ebook readers?

My angel is a centerfold... Angel is a centerfold...

Heh. On that note, I discovered this video for the Beach Boys' The Little Girl I Once Knew over the weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZWFItQPf_k

It does have a writerly tie-in, the images are from book covers. And I wonder if any of them were written by some of the older Big Names back when they were breaking in. I know some of them wrote such under pseudonyms (and a couple of big names do show up).

My angel is a centerfold... Angel is a centerfold...

...
And I wonder if any of them were written by some of the older Big Names back when they were breaking in.

heehee. If one of the SF greats didn't write the one called LUST IN ORBIT, they should've! (Anyone watching ABC's DEFYING GRAVITY? heh heh)

I almost wrote the above title "Lust In Space" ... and if that title hasn't been taken, some hack isn't doing their job either!

Well, that's it then. Print media has finally surrendered to video.

Not.

Well, those animated screen billboards are certainly cooler than the old style things you see along highways! There's a KFC screen in town that has some weird permutations, it'll suddenly start stuttering and then kicking out fragments that look like alien heiroglyphs, then freeze in curious positions.

The only thing cooler than new technology is watching the old technology die. We don't need to tell that to the AI's of course ...

Or mention the Neanderthal skeleton they found in a Spanish cave that shows the evidence of being killed by a thrown (and thus modern human, not Neanderthal) spear.

But video-on-the-page a la Harry Potter wizard tabloids? Kindah nifty Tom Swifty imo! Hopefully not so much Farenheit 451 tho. (and if I mis-spelled that, I blame mtv!)

Ray Bradbury talks about writing "my first beautiful story"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlYAhSffEDM&feature=related

Completely off topic.

Has anyone noticed the red-headed bombshell in "Mad Men?"

I never watched MM before my wife got into it, and then she kept raving about this buxom red-head who managed to steal every scene with her coke bottle figure.

My wife wasn't kidding!

Christina Hendricks:

Oh, and MM is a pretty darned well-written show, if I do say so. Not a feel-good program by any definition, it nevertheless manages the trick of being entertainingly complicated without leaving an icky film on your skin, the way "Glengary Glen Ross" did.

AMC did well with this one. Giving the pay channels an absolute run for their money.

And for the ladies, there is Jon Hamm as the mysterious, womanizing, compelling, romance-novel handsome Don Draper:

haha there needs to just be a new thread called "Hot People"

haha there needs to just be a new thread called "Hot People"

True! True!

That's not a Coke bottle, that's an hourglass.

And a mighty fine hourglass it is, aye.

Completely off topic.

Maybe we can consider MAD MEN to be an "alternate reality" tho. The '60's ...

Both Christina Hendricks or Jon Hamm certainly qualify as "fantasies" for persons of both sexes ...

Ha! Actually, I work with a girl who'd eagerly take to either or bothof them ... Put her on a starship and give her a story arc and she'd be a series on SyFy all by herself.

MARNEE~SOLSTICE OF THE SUN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XHBzREIcQw

This little Indiana girl Marnee wails ... and if the Fantasy creators and fans amongst us can imagine both Unicorns and Robert Plant / Led Zeppelin weirdness frolicking on stage behind her, she's really a very cool 11 years old!

This song, I decided is about the Exile of the Elves from Eden ... though maybe they ended up at a bordello in New Orleans from the tone of this song (imagine elves shooting up in The House Of The Rising Sun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmA-77HUQbs

also

anyone got Cool Science Fiction cd art?

Strangely enough, the album art for one of the coolest Sci-Fi themed albums of the '70's ... is homage to classical Persian art:

I guess great futurist SF can still resonate with very old Fantasy themes (to suggest the obvious)!

Every picture may not tell a story, no (for that we go to the writer for Refuge) ... but a picture can sure as heck evoke one or a dozen!

ETA: I hate it when pictures disappear, or are disappeared. On the other hand ... "green cats" ... who can demand appropriate behaviour thereof?

Megan Fox is scheduled to host the season premiere of Saturday Night Live this weekend!

darn it ... I knew I shouldah paid a lil more and gotten the extra-strong handcuffs for my attic

"I was busy working on my WOTF entry. I guess I was inattentive. And when I looked up ... mah baybee wuz gone gone gone ..."

Megan Fox, by the way, turned out to be a superiour actor "live" compared to many of the hosts (movie star, tv star, etc) SNL has! Many of whom you watch painfully as they grope aside with their eyes for their cue cards during the live show. (Live theater actors undoubtedly have the advantage on live tv, trained to perform live every nite. You think your fav movie actor was great? yes ... the tenth time he read the line, he was great, and the nine bad takes were cut out, etc)

I liked the TRANSFORMERS digital short, where a gulible Megan Fox "met Optimus Prime on the set" and now he's her parasite-houseguest, sitting around the apartment in a mask and bathrobe ...

Sci-Fi on SNL

http://www.hulu.com/watch/98358/saturday-night-live-digital-short-megans-roommate

Well, you've heard about it or soon will ... but it's obviously a killer marketing campaign to build a "buzz" for the (supposedly) $11,000 DIY movie that will become the next Blair Witch Project etc etc

The trailer of the scary movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074&NR=1&feature=fvwp

The trailer about how scary the movie is supposed to be:

http://www.vibe.com/mt/2009/10/trailer-park-paranormal-activity/

Which grabs you more? The hype OF the movie itself ... or the hype ABOUT the movie ... ?

Movies are good at that, good at becoming the EVENT that you need to see if only because everyone else is talking about it (because everyone is is talking about it, etc)

Sometimes BOOKS become that (um ... Dan Brown?) ...

But in film is it about the Experience and with Books it's about the Idea? Or something else?

Successful marketing ... it's a whole separate layer of the onion skin ...

No dis on Megan, but for my money, Lynda Carter is and always will be the definitive screen Wonder Woman.

She could tie me up with her golden lasso ANY time.

Well, I'd puff myself up like a many-spiked blowfish ... except Fox's latest, the R-rated teen horror romp JENNIFER'S BODY, opened with a barely $6 million weekend.

Sic transit gloria hawtness at least for this round

Doesn't mean I would put her in something, though. Just wouldn't pay her $20 million right now until she's in a hit without transformin' toyz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzIE4j3TOlE&feature=PlayList&p=431B8300E6AF9DB8&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1
Heather Nova -- Walk This World

Well ... there's this passage in the book of Job where God asks the Devil "Where you been?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT4qP_1o6N8
Tonic -- nice conspiracy-of-love vibe

"Obama receives Nobel Peace Prize, Launches unprovoked bombing attack on peace-loving Moon!"

Oh, the irony.

http://www.samaylive.com/news/nasas-moon-bombing-first-rocket-hits-moon-surface/661107.html[/url]

Who sez you can't tell a wonderful story in a shortshort?

http://gdpit.com/avatars_pictures/animated/gdpit_com_63508937_174.gif

ETA: Edited it to become a link because the image had disappeared.

(gee, I miss Carl Sagan. I miss the pop culture being excited about the whole idea of science-as-wonder like when Cosmos was on)

I was a massive Carl Sagan fanatic through my teens and 20's.

Then my wife bought me his bio, and the man fell off the pedestal.

I came to realize that what I adored was not Sagan, but his ability to make the mundanity of science and space exploration seem endlessly fascinating and, even, adventurous. I'm proud to own COSMOS on DVD and I am pretty sure I could quote entire sequences from it, verbatim.

Alas, Sagan the man was flawed in many ways that I found personally distressing, such that I had to admit I'd been hero worshipping and foolling myself badly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB4QnZtIrZg

Breathtaking, beautiful, bittersweet animation art by Frederic Back:
Tout-Rien (All Nothing) ... Heartbreaking stuff. It made me want to cry, really.

I watched it today in an Intro to Media class at a local Christian university, the professor made a comment to the class that if current Christian cinema reached out to the secular world with art like this, instead of the too-often mere propagandizing "What a different world we might reach and help shape from our spiritual perspective."

His comment was: Art doesn't offer a repeating of a bland and safe cultural answer you learned in Sunday School ... ART poses a challenging and often disturbing QUESTION to its audience.

"Some Christians don't like artists commenting on the Creation myth, but this is another culture's insight, and if it's moving might it not contain some kind of human truth too?"

A quite captivating message to be telling thirty or so kids at a supposedly-conservative school, I thought to myself!

Okay, I luv visual SF and Fantasy (cover art, illustrations, movies, etc) ... so here're a few gazillion covers. Put yer lil computer arrow on a book and it pops up bigger so you can see it, order it, etc.

http://www.coverpop.com/pop/horror/

But I suppose the zen of the site is to remind us (2x4 lumber, allow us to introduce you to Mr. Skull. WHACK!) how our precious work, even when published, will inevitably compete with a gazillion others in the darwinian jungle (red in tooth, read in claw) of the marketplace!

In it's own way, a truth as tragic as the animation to watch above!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYgaywoKTeQ

Michael Stipe could turn you inside out ... ... but imo the song works as both a comment about evil corporate manipulation of the mass awareness via advertising and subterfuge ...

Or just some bizarre SF future dictator addressing a Nuremburg rally, I suppose!

Anyway, another video or visual that just takes the Imagination in unexpected directions ...