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Swimming With The Megalodons
When the media world’s most predatory shark realizes he’s about to be someone else’s lunch, you have to wonder whether we all might need a bigger boat. Only four years ago, Rupert Murdoch was circling the waters of Time Warner in the hope of hooking those prized assets and feeding them into his own 21st-century entertainment factory. Today, he is the one hocking most of the family jewels to the Walt Disney Company in a $71.3 billion deal that leaves his clan with a stripped-down entity focused on live news and sports, as well as a passive stake in a […]
by Colin Brown on Sep 17, 2018 -
“I See It More as a Visual Poem”: Animator Glen Keane on the Interactive Film Duet
Glen Keane made me want to make movies. As a head animator at Disney from the 1970s until just a few years ago, when he left to create his own company, Keane created iconic characters like Ariel, Aladdin, and Tarzan, plus gorgeously drawn animals like the bear in The Fox and the Hound and the eagle Marahute in The Rescuers Down Under. But what held me spellbound was the moment when the Beast — his character — and James Baxter’s Belle walked into the computer-animated ballroom during the title song of Beauty and the Beast: I’d never seen anything like that before, and I […]
by Randy Astle on Dec 8, 2014 -
Lost in Translation: Public Hearing
If you want to make a movie, you need a good script. Or, at least that’s what they tell you. A script gets the talent, which gets the financing (the two are really synonymous). The other thing you’ll need, of course, is luck. First-time filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins can thank Google for both (not the money part though). While cruising the Internet in 2007, Wilkins came across a transcript of a public hearing on a town hall website. It described in detail a well-attended public hearing in Allegany, New York, population 8,000. At issue was a proposal to replace […]
by Paul Dallas on Mar 7, 2014 -
The Future of Compression: Google Attempts to Replace H.26X… Again
For a second time, Google is attempting to pitch a compression format as the replacement for an H.26X compressor. They tried to do it three years ago for HD video when they pitched VP8 as a replacement for H.264 and had little success. Now they’re back with a new angle: VP9 is the format for 4K, and they are putting it up against H.265, the new 4K compressor that is also referred to as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Should you care? Compression codecs can be fascinating, frustrating and their naming confusing. For example, everyone’s heard of H.264 and AVCHD, […]
by Michael Murie on Feb 26, 2014 -
Did George Lucas Mastermind an Illegal Wage-Fixing Conspiracy?
A class action lawsuit alleging that a group of Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Apple, Pixar, Intuit and Intel, conspired to fix the wages of computer engineers has been cleared to proceed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Writes Mark Ames at Pandodaily, “…Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.” The suit is the result of a 2010 Obama Department of Justice anti-trust investigation. Pando has extensive details and has also […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2014 -
How Google Search Drives Moviegoing
When I sit down with a filmmaker to discuss their latest project I almost always discover that in their rush to build an audience and leverage the power of social they have completely forgotten about search. This baffles me — you only have to look to your own browsing habits to know that the major search engines are the portal through which most of us experience the web. Google collects untold amounts of data about our search habits and viewing patterns as we use their sites. They then take this enormous sea of data and analyze it to try and establish links between […]
by Kieran Masterton on Aug 8, 2013 -
Sundance: Death by Twitter, Computers vs. Brains
You are at the premiere of your own film. The screening is packed. The credits begin to roll…and 500 glowing screens appear in the darkness. You sit there, watching the phones, helpless as strangers and bloggers decide your fate 140 characters at a time. Perhaps the Variety critic delivers the first blow: a decisive mediocre. The indieWIRE stringer declares the audience underwhelmed, #sundance. At a party that night, people tell each other that they heard the movie was “only OK.” In the olden days, crowds of press and industry would gather outside the theatre to discuss their thoughts and settle on […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 23, 2013 -
GOOGLE FIBER
If you live in Kansas City, MO or Kansas City, KS, you might soon get first-world Internet service courtesy of Google Fiber. As of April 2012, almost two-thirds (66%) of American adults could access some form of broadband connection from their home, whether via DSL, cable or fiber line or via a wireless service. However, about a quarter of local Kansas City residents have no broadband access from home. The Google network will deliver symmetric (i.e., two-way) 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) connectivity to households across the city as well as to schools, libraries and hospitals. The 1 Gbps data […]
by David Rosen on Aug 27, 2012 -
Google Glass and the 21st Century Panopticon
If you’re like me, you watched the product demo for Google Glass, found its hipster-targeting — learning about a new band from a street poster? — silly and didn’t think too much more about it. I mean, don’t we need to find a way to interact with our personal computing devices less, not more? But this morning after reading Jon Evans’ TechCrunch piece, “Heads Up! This Was Google’s Apple Moment,” I’m changing my mind. As a product category, Google Glass has a lot of potential — potential that’s fascinating and scary. In the fascinating category are some immediate uses for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 7, 2012 -
YOUTUBE ALLOWS DIRECT KICKSTARTER, INDIEGOGO LINKING
Big news for crowdfunders — Google announced today that YouTube videos can now be directly linked to projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. (Actually, in Google speak, that’s “Using annotations to help fund your creative projects.”) Given the expansive reach of the user-generated video giant, this means that many more eyeballs will land on projects seeking coin on these platforms. From Google’s announcement: Over the past year, crowdsourced fundraising has exploded as great way to raise money for creative projects. We’ve seen lots of you using platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund projects, and we want to make it easier […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012
