Gratuliere, Jungs!

Toller Artikel in der Kaerntner Zeitung! Ich weiss, wieviel Zeit und Arbeit ihr in eure Sache steckt (durch unsere Zusammenarbeit mit Wolfsberg Studios)!

Nochmal, Gratulation, zu den verdienten Lorbeeren! Hier, euer Artikel (www.kleinezeitung.at):

mehr NEWs zu Cleave auf deren Redwired Seite und auf YOUTUBE:

Heavy Greetz! Euer,
Daniel

The new James Bond Quantum of Solace premiered yesterday in London!

In search of the mysterious Organization Quantum of Solace, Bond finds his new enemy, the evil business man Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric). Green manipulates different goverments to reach controll over the world’s most important resource - WATTER (see also: “Living Planet Report", a Study of the Worldwide Fund for Nature WWF: “…we need more than 1,3 planets already!….”)!

Fotos of the Premiere (bild.de)

Austria-Start: 7. November!
USA-Start: 14. November!

I found this in a german movie magazin that I always loved reading, back in Austria:

Translation of paragraph in red letters: “Sometimes you meet people on the set that you get quite close to - then you pack your things and maybe you never see each other again, sometimes without saying a last Goodbye.”

(see SKIP, DAS KINOMAGAZIN)

On the 4th of February I got to see a preview screening of BE KIND REWIND, at MIT. It is Michel Gondry’s newest creation and will come into a cinema near you, tomorrow on the 22nd of February. Michel Gondry was also at the preview screening for a Question & Answer session.

The movie was a blast! (you can read a previous article about the movie on my blog here)

Be Kind Rewind Footage

Continuously thinking about my project CINEATRIX, while already standing in line for the preview screening of Be Kind Rewind, then obviously during the movie and then looking forward to the Question & Answers session, I was quite nervous when it got to the point when the following happened:

“Well, that sounds like a great idea!”

~ Michel Gondry on CINEATRIX

I had a minute to explain over the microphone that was put up near my seat after the showing to explain to Michel Gondry what CINEATRIX was all about. In the end I asked him if he could give me some advice, his answer was:

“Now, just stay motivated and let things happen in front of the camera, without taking to much control from behind the camera.”

~ Michel Gondry on CINEATRIX

To see Michel Gondry’s new movie Be Kind Rewind and to then hear him talk about his works and life was quite amazing. The lecture hall was packed and there were some good questions being asked during the Q&A session. Michel Gondry also said that he loves coming back to MIT. Through my research for this article I found that he was actually a so called “artist-in-residence” at MIT! Here is a little excerpt of a recently published WIRED article about Michel Gondry:

Gondry spent 2005 as an artist-in-residence at Nerdland. That’s the name his 16-year-old son bestowed on MIT, which invited Gondry there to pursue his interest in neuroscience. “They understand the connection between science and the arts,” Gondry says of the school. “It’s very blurry. It was brainstorming all the time.” At MIT, Gondry tried out some unusual notions about special effects. His idea was to combine digital technology and chemistry. “People are always thinking to make everything digital,” Gondry says. “The key would be to do an interface between the digital, for the control, and the chemical, for the reaction. If you can get the two worlds together, you can make the best effects ever.” In one experiment, for instance, Gondry mixed up a paste of cornstarch and water. He placed the paste on a plate and wired it to a speaker, then added a strobe light. By changing the speaker’s frequency, he created reverb on the plate, and the concoction bubbled and spewed into strange and beautiful shapes.

Sounds like an eighth-grade science project. But keep in mind that this same mad scientist pioneered the technique known as bullet-time four years before The Matrix. That bit of inspiration happened after Gondry saw computerized morphing (think of the T-1000 robot in Terminator 2). Instead of merging one person into another, though, Gondry wanted to morph shots of a scene from different perspectives into one take. He placed cameras around the studio to “freeze” the action, then had the shots digitally composited so that the environment appeared to revolve around the center. It took three weeks to complete six minutes of effects, incorporating more than 1,000 digital morphings and several freeze sequences. The result was an award-winning 1995 Rolling Stones music video, “Like a Rolling Stone.” “Michel has this technical side,” says his brother and collaborator, Olivier Gondry, who helped him develop the effect. “He is not especially good with a computer, but he is very good at imagining what a computer can do and then finding the person who can do it.”

I wish I could have talked more with Michel Gondry about CINEATRIX and his work and future projects, but of course that was not possible. As a sidenote, the room was also packed with bodyguards that filmed he audience with infrared cameras during the viewing, for any recording devices that might have been smuggled in (if they had made it by the security check at the entrance of the classroom).

Anyways, I was very glad and honored, which I told Michel Gondry at the beginning of my question, to have been able to speak with this amazing artist for at least about a minute!

Link to CINEATRIX

I. Spracherwerb: Zukunftsvisionen am MIT

Deb Roy, Professor am MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, setzt auf geballte Technik. Und auf die Video-Beobachtung seines zweijährigen Sohnes: Ganz gleich, ob Roy Junior Bauklötze stapelt, mit seiner Mama ein Buch anschaut oder trotzig herumspringt - in den Zimmerdecken installierte Kameras halten alles fest, rund um die Uhr. Mikrofone zeichnen jeden Ton auf, den der Knirps von sich gibt. Dies alles ist Teil eines wissenschaftlichen Projektes zum Thema Spracherwerb. Aus den Aufnahmen - rund 400000 Stunden in drei Jahren - soll eine riesige Datenbank entstehen. Ziel: Entwicklung von Robotern, die die Sprachentwicklung von Kindern nachvollziehen lassen. (quellegeo40/D/EU) ek

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/05/17/mits-speech-recognition-baby
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmafp/is_200605/ai_n16379261

II. Search Engine for Children

QUINTURA! Eine Suchmaschine fuer Kinder! Take a quick tour.

III. Cyberschool (Austria)

Cyberschool ist der größte, österreichweite SchülerInnen-Wettbewerb im Bereich Internet, Mobile und Multimedia, in dessen Rahmen man Know-how in Form von praktischen Projekten umsetzen und präsentieren kann. Mehr dazu…!

IV. Digital Natives - Twitter Blog

Digital Natives

V. Vancouver Film School - Tolle Werke

Schaut’ mal auf deren Webseite!

VI. Planet Science Under 11s

A lot of the content on the site is aimed at the 11 – 19 age group. Some really cool software for kids!

VII. Scratch

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Scratch is available free of charge, go to Download.
Currently available for Mac OSX and Windows

To find more about the ideas underlying Scratch, visit this page for Educators.

VIII. Khronos Projector

Khronos Projector [a video time-warping machine with a tangible deformable screen] by Alvaro Cassinelli

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames.

The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate “islands of time” as well as “temporal waves” are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that “cuts” the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

IX. Diesel Show: Underwater Magic

Fashion show of SS’08 Preview Collection at Pitti Uomo. Journey through time and liquid space to a futuristic world of bioluminescence, giant mechanic cephalopods, futuristic aquanauts and mysterious galactic polips. Witness the first catwalk show with real models showing with holographic models.

X. Projekt ueber erste Eindruecke

Menschen sehen sich ueber eine Kamera, aber zu versetzen Zeiten und muessen die Person beschreiben, die sie gerade sehen: How people perceive each other based on appearance

XI. Fully Illustrated

Check out cool drawings and creatures at Fully Illustrated:

Something like CINEATRIX goes HOLLYWOOD!

and it is great to know that we are working on something similar to the ideas of Michel Gondry:

Does this remind you of something? If you know CINEATRIX, you will know what I mean:

By Kirk Honeycutt (www.reuters.com):

PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - After highly imaginative explorations of man’s natural instincts ("Human Nature") and the interplay of memory, dreams and personal relationships ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Science of Sleep"), Michel Gondry has turned his playful gaze to film itself.

"Be Kind Rewind" wants to probe the interplay among films, their audience and the people who make them. It’s an exuberant, fanciful fable set amid the scruffy outskirts of American society, where people’s need for escapism coincides with their desire to participate in its creation.

Synopsis:

Jack Black and Mos Def star in Be Kind Rewind, a unique comedy from Academy Award-winning writer/director Michel Gondry (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Black stars as a loveable loser stuck in a life that’s too small for his big dreams. But when he unintentionally erases all the tapes in a video store where his best friend (Mos Def) works, he devises a plan to satisfy the store’s few loyal customers by re-creating and re-filming every movie they decide to rent. Be Kind Rewind features a cast that also includes Danny Glover, Melonie Diaz and Mia Farrow. It is scheduled for a February 22, 2008 release.

links:

http://www.redwired.org/CINEATRIX
http://www.bekindmovie.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Kind_Rewind
http://www.bekindrewindthemovie.co.uk/
http://www.youtube.com/bekindrewind

Sweding:

Sweding is re-making something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on:

I am planning to write a book about the stories of CINEATRIX (more infos at www.redwired.org/CINEATRIX)

The book will hold 13 short stories

Der Liebestrank (german, The Love Potion)
Die Mondparty (german, The Party on the Moon)
Der Auftrag aus Mexico (german, The Job from Mexico)
Der Zauberwald (german, The Magic Forest)
Die Drei Superhelden (german, The Three Superheros)
Halloween (german)
Voldemort (german)

House Haunters (english, Die Haus Jaeger)
Invaision on Gamma 9 (english, Invasion auf Gamma 9)
James Bond - Showdown (english, James Bond - Das Endspiel)
The Vampire’s Revenge (english, Die Rache des Vampir’s)
Transformers (english)
Pokemon at MIT (english, Pokemon am MIT)

as well as illustrations and 2 dvds including the movies (English and German, produced in America and Austria) accompanying the stories. The movies can already be found on this blog on the left side of the page, as well as on youtube through the tag CINEATRIX. I am planning to write the book over the summer 2008.

Things to come! were decided at todays meeting with Erich Kucher, current Vorstand of KIMEKI, in Klagenfurt. Many new ideas were discussed, such as future steps for our project CINEATRIX. A brandnew idea might be the incorporation of MIT’s $100 Laptop into future projects and programs of our collaboration.

Klagenfurt, Austria, Fall 2007

iPressl.com
Kimeki.info

Cineatrix is a Kimeki, iPressl and MIT collaboration.

In collaboration with the MIT Edgerton Outreach program and iPressl in Austria in Europe, KIMEKI is working on a new project, Cineatrix.

The original idea stemmed from the knowledge that there is a new generation of children who are digital natives, kids who haven’t known a world without iPods and digital cameras, let alone a comfort level with computers.

An MIT student from Austria, Dipl. Ing. Daniel Pressl, is now working on a new idea for the project, Cineatrix. This will combine film, theatre and comics. There are two main thoughts to this program.

CINEATRIX: First and foremost, as a means of story-telling, children will be able to take movies, add special effects to the movies and be able to tell their stories in never imagined ways. The goal for the end of the course is every child will be able to bring a DVD home, to which they have contributed through filming, editing or storytelling.

KIMEKI: The second aim is that children, between 10 and 15 years old, get to teach their technological know-how in media and videography to children between 5 and 10. This extraordinary, media-pedagogical concept has proven to show great possibilities and a new way of learning for children and has been running for the past 4 years, in Austria.

We run parallel sessions in which the older children are trained on our particular hardware/software to do the filming, editing and other finishing stages, and have the older children then turn around and teach these same skills to the Storytellers, the younger children.
Foto Compilation of Cineatrix in Austria, Fall 2007: