As I came of age in Baldwin Park, California, four teachers had an impact on me and my life. First, the lay of the land. When my parents chose Baldwin Park in 1957, it was still SoCal country. From the late 40s till the mid-50s it had been the home of the Country Barn Dance…
I got a surprise today. It was the last stop on a journey that began on March 18, 2016. I was at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas. Things were wrapping up and I was looking forward to spending a couple of days in Houston with my sister-in-law Mary and her kids. Then I got the message from home. My son Ron had fallen. He was vomiting blood. The doctors said he had a stroke.
Is being creative just like flipping on a light switch, or does it take something more? Photographer/trainers Chris Orwig and Julieanne Kost think it takes a lot more, and provided a plan during their class “Cultivating the Creative Spark” at this year’s Adobe MAX conference.
You can’t teach people to be creative, but you can inspire them to find their creativity. That is what happens at Adobe MAX.
The first three weeks of class were fun, educational, and a little exhausting. I decided to bring cookies this week. Then things got dramatic.
E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, invaded the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 12-16, and left craziness and delight in its wake. I’ve never been a great fan of the shoot’em up games. Instead, I searched the humongous displays in the Los Angeles Convention Center for build’em ups. I found two: a relative newcomer, Farming Simulator, and the newest iteration of a classic, Sid Meier’s Civilization.
The common wisdom is that screenwriters should take an acting class to understand what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a script. I suppose not doing so, would be like trying to design a boat without having ever taken one out on the water. OK, I’m getting on board.
Murphy’s approach is to treat the trailer project like a mini-movie with its own three-act structure.
Ang Lee’s last film was created in High Dynamic Range, 4K, at 120 frames per second and in 3-D. In English that means that, compared to your big-screen HD TV, the film has more colors, four times the definition, four times the frame rate, and depth. This is the most technologically advanced feature film ever made.
The question that dominated many of the VR/AR seminars at SXSW was “How do you tell a story using this new technology?” “New” because the hardware has become affordable for consumers, and game engines used to create VR have become more powerful. The market is attracting a range of companies, from startups to ancient tech giants like IBM and Microsoft.
Can news reporters use virtual reality? This is the question that participants at “Sucked Into the Story: Virtual Reality and News” tried to answer at SXSW. I had the feeling that somewhere around 1950, a similar group of people sat around discussing what the impact of “this television thing” would be on radio news. We may be at a similar juncture.
The Mars 2030 Experience is not just a video game, but a highly detailed and accurate simulation of the surface of Mars, based on data and photographs from the Mars Rover and a European satellite orbiting the red planet. It’s part of a larger effort to determine the feasibility of establishing human habitation on Mars
More sophisticated augmented reality applications can scan your environment, for example, a living room, and place virtual objects on walls and flat surfaces. The user can interact with these virtual objects to play games, or solve puzzles or mysteries.
It’s time to leave for the game. Have we packed everything? Here’s a list to help you answer that question.
Want to become a drone expert? Here are some resources, provided at Interdrone, to get you started!
At Interdrone, the International Drone Conference in Las Vegas, Sep 9-11, John Abbey exposed the crazy quilt of laws that make progress with drone technology difficult, if not impossible. Abbey is nationally recognized as a leader in technology and practices for law enforcement. With over twenty years of experience, including time as a Chief of Police, he lead teams responsible for establishing the 911 number in California, bringing computers to police cars, creating field crime analysis, and digital mugshots.
“On October 20, 2000, they pulled the plug,” explained motivational speaker John Bates. “We had lost $80 million and when you do that, they come in, usually with security guards, lock you out and you have nothing. I was so embarrassed, so crushed, I thought I was going to die,” he explained. But, Bates survived the bursting of the internet bubble and today, as founder/CEO of ExecutiveSpeakingSuccess.com, he teaches executives all over the world how to pitch to obtain funding and achieve other objectives. And, he’s good with a light saber.
(Originally published on Blogcritics.org) At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2015, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, surrounded by every video camera made, virtual sets, lighting equipment, online streaming hardware and software platforms, they didn’t forget that it all begins with writing. In “Self-Editing Basics: The Tools You Need to Improve Your Writing,”…
