Al Jarnow in person @ Cinefamily - 04/24/10

Al Jarnow is this amazing animator/alchemist/mathematician/sorcerer. If you watched Sesame St. in the late 70's - early 80's, I guarantee you'll remember his stuff. Just watching it gives me these crazy pre-natal feelings of nostalgia:



Cinefamily is screening his work this Sat, April 24th @ 7:30pm. Jarnow will be there in person.

Check out Cinefamily's website for more info:

http://cinefamily.org

This. Is. MindBlowing.

I had to share.

...And We're Back!

Sorry it's been quite a while for an update at the TWM blog, but we've been incredibly busy with the Film Independent Directors Lab. The amazing program gave us a very small budget to shoot three scenes from the script. It gave me the chance to experiment and play around on scenes that I wanted to flesh out more. Here's a still from the group therapy shoot. I'm  really happy with how everything turned out. Big thanks to all the crew who donated their time over the weekend and for the awesome cast that brought my clones to life.

1987 XMAS IN MARCH 2010

So one of my best friends, Joe Ballarini, showed up today with a bunch of old tech gear he wanted to donate to the film. In my wildest dreams I could never have imagined the awesome scope of epic radness that lay hidden in those 4 boxes. BEHOLD...

What we have here is the evolution of the poor man's gaming systems:

Intellivision, Commodore 64, Texas Instruments, Sega, Sega Genesis.

If Carter had won a second term, or Mondale had kicked ass in '84, these would be the systems kids remembered...

Archaeology Magazine Asks, "Should We Clone Neanderthals?"

Five years ago 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut partnered with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died 30,000 years ago.

 Zach Zorich writes:

[John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin], believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. "We are going to bring back the mammoth...the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away." He doesn't think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. "In the end," Hawks says, "we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I'm just sure of it."

Read the complete article here.

Photo by:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Living with Robots

One of the highlights of An's Sundance trip was being introduced to Asimo, Honda's "humanoid robot." Since Honda is one of the festival's sponsors, the child-sized droid made an appearance during the festival. Asimo was able to shake An's hand, wave back when she waved, and walk in the direction she pointed to. The company also premiered the documentary short "Living with Robots" at the festival, directed by Joe Berlinger of Radical Media. The film talks about the history of Asimo's development, how robots have been viewed by society and what the future holds with new technology. This is the sixth short as part of the Dream The Impossible series commissioned by Honda.

View it here:

EARTHLING

In the thick of the Directors Lab so I apologize for the posts being few and far between. Just wanted to clue people in to a trailer for what could be an interesting project...


EARTHLING, written and directed by Clay Liford, tells the story of a handful of individuals trapped on a space station who come to realize they may (or may not) be aliens.

It looks to be ambitious, thoughtful and (our fave 3 words) low budget sci-fi. It premieres at SXSW in March so if you're in Austin, check it out and let me know.