This is an Italian animated TV series about an inventor who gets sucked into the virtual world inside his cell phone. You know… like most Americans do… while they are driving at 75 mph on the freeway and they smash into a concrete pylon, spattering their dull brains across five lanes of traffic. And most deservedly so. But this little animated preview looks inviting. I like it. The series is made by Marco Bigliazzi and Fabrizio Bondi of Toposodo Episodic Productions. The series has its own web site.
Tag Archives: TV
Salvador Dali on ‘What’s My Line?’
Because he is 100% truthful, he drives the show’s host a little bit crazy.
Batteries Not Included – Vintage Toy Commercials
A collection of vintage toy commercials put together by Jon Behrens. Do kids play war anymore?
Animation by Evan Mather: The Patron Saint of Television
Filmmaker Evan Mather made this beautiful animation about the life and visions of St. Clare of Assisi. I had no idea that television was divinely protected.
Makes me miss that old cathode ray.
Evan Mather produces films for his Hand Crafted Films company.
This is a very sly and clever filmmaker who seems to enjoy thinking about what makes certain film genres tick. He works with language as easily as he works with images. There’s lots more to post from him but you can go and explore his work on his Vimeo page.
R. Crumb and the Corporate Mono-Culture
Cartoonist Robert Crumb gets interviewed by a Los Angeles Times writer and talks about his living in France and his hatred for the pervasive corporate mono-culture that Americans seem unaware of. He can’t stand it and chooses to live outside of it.
Really good perspective.
In a culture where you’ve got a Supreme Court actually giving corporate entities the rights of individual human beings, you’ve got total corporate control of every single living man, woman and child. You can see this complete robotic control on very prominent and horrific display in the current president of the United States. He a corporate hologram who moves only when commanded to by his boardroom overseers. The entire country is oriented around cop/lawyer shows on television which are specifically designed to make you feel close and personal with the state/corporate stooges who work for police departments and gleefully lay disadvantaged people out on their faces on subway platforms and slaughter them with bullets fired straight into their backs from six inches away. ‘The Mentalist’ is probably the supreme example of this attempt to make the corporate/police control mechanism seem odd and quirky and just a little cutely but intelligently eccentric. ‘Medium’ is another. The individual with oddball abilities or perceptions is entirely consumed and controlled by the state apparatus. All cop shows are meant to make as many viewers as possible feel completely comfortable being visited by and talking to the police. That is the entire truth of American television. It’s message is simply this: when we come knocking, open the door.
That is the true subtext of every single show ever produced by American broadcasting companies.
R. Crumb is totally right.
Charlie Brown Halloween: I Got a Rock
Tiny Japanese Kids Fight With Zombie
Oh this is Halloween for real now! These tiny kids take all the ruckus very seriously and handle the terror of the situation with some admirable creativity. My favorite part is near the end where the little guy starts yelling at the adult in charge. That zombie really is pretty terrifying.
Animation: Don’t Get Carried Away for the Holidays
PBS has a show called Fizzy’s Lunch Lab that teaches kids and families about good nutrition. Their band, Freezer Burn, has released a special single for the holidays.
YouTube Launches Open-Source Application for Citizen Journalism
YouTube has built an open-source application called YouTube Direct that allows news organizations to request and accept uploaded videos from citizen journalists anywhere in the world. The idea is to give news organizations the ability to put out a call for videos on a specific news story and then review the direct uploads to select the ones they want to broadcast on their web sites or even over the air. The video creators get to keep their videos on YouTube for access just like any other video on the site. There’s more information available in their Citizen Tube information area.
The camera in the hands of the average citizen has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful tool for news-gathering over the past few years. Instances of police abuse, natural disasters, and political turmoil have been captured by cell phone cameras all over the world. This seems like a very smart move by YouTube that could have a profound effect on the news. I can see this as a major benefit to smaller start-up news organizations that mostly rely on the web.
It remains to be seen, however, if YouTube makes this widely available to small sites and creative outlets, or if they stick to a larger scale more corporate membership. That would be disappointing, but it would still broaden the availability of citizen journalism.