There’s a buzz of excitement this week in the Greensburg rehearsal studio at Stage Right, where a local cast is preparing for the premiere of a full-length musical a year in the making. Anthony Marino, Stage Right’s artistic director, has big plans for “Snow White the Musical” that don’t end at the Palace Theatre. He’s…
The reason they survive to this day, Zipes suggests, is because the classic fairy tales—such as Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, which all have analogues in cultures throughout the world—are perfect examples of “memetic” engineering. Drawing on the notion of the meme coined by Richard Dawkins, Zipes imagines the elements of fairy tales competing for…
Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States. The design won the International Interior Design Association’s 2012 Library Interior Design Competition. MSR stripped out the old ceiling and walls of the building, gave the perimeter walls and bare warehouse ceiling…
Before class, Watch this 10-minute introduction to Modern Interactive Fiction. Watch this 2-minute trailer for a documentary film on interactive fiction. (Optional: a version of the film is available online: GET LAMP… I’m featured at the 12:30, 17 minutes, and around 41 minutes. You may appreciate the snark I offer at 49 minutes.) In order to understand what…
I’m about to introduce interactive fiction in my “New Media Projects” course. I’m glad to find further evidence that the genre continues to be discovered and shared. If you start playing IF and search for people with the same interests to chat with, good resources, and help of any kind, the intfiction forum is the…
What’s it like on your first day rehearsing for the starring role, joining a cast that’s already been working hard for a week? Yesterday, Elly Noble started rehearsing for “Snow White: The Musical,” part of Stage Right! Greensburg‘s professional theatre season, Sept 21-23 at the Palace Theatre. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wOAF-1c8Yo I managed to pull Elly aside for…
I’ve been ramping up my video-editing skills, as I launch a year-long project to train students to add video and multimedia packages to the school paper. Along the way, I’ve found several opportunities to make videos just for fun. This is a video I made to help a local nonprofit theater group publicize the brand-new…
In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published Children’s and Household Tales in the German region of Westphalia and its influence slowly spread all over the world. The Grimms’ book, which they updated in their lifetime, is the second bestselling book in the German language after the Bible. While many in Britain will have first experienced…
Multimedia journalism is a pretty nebulous term. As a result, in my experience, when students try to adopt the role two main problems recur: 1) having a narrow assumption of what multimedia means (i.e. video) and 2) not being able to see the multimedia possibilities of your work. Multimedia journalism is a very different beast…
As gimmicky as “steampunk Huck and Tom” sounds, the characters actually may be quite well suited for steampunk. Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer Abroad was a play on Jules Verne-style adventure stories, and featured a mad professor and his absurd, futuristic airship. And Tom Sawyer had his own mystery story with Tom Sawyer, Detective. However, Twain…
Here’s a fantasy workspace, that I built in Blender 3D, using various Googled images of old books and this awesome steampunk keyboard. Here’s me in my real office. The books aren’t as neat and tidy. I just took some reference photos of the chair… I’ll add it to my fantasy office the next time I…
I was at a youth car wash today, watching my son and the other the kids spray each other (and sometimes the cars). One of the customers happened to be carrying an anthology of dystopian science fiction. We got to chatting, and he told me about this parlor game — which sadly seems to be…
A long-time fan of Edith Nesmit recounts what it was like to be asked to write a sequel. I was flattered to be asked but initially declined: I felt it would be restricting to try to write in another author’s style, especially if they were writing long ago. I did say, just to sound obliging,…
Word. This list was published in 2008, so it’s unthinkable that student could graduate from a journalism program today without these competencies. I’d have to add “the fundamentals of coding a multimedia project” and I want to add “the ability to mine a database for a story.” With all the new changes brought about by…
I have no problem with baby pictures, but thought this was an amusing write up (by a former student). But really, who doesn’t love a baby photo? I do. It’s the perfect way to share in the cuteness of a child, but not actually clean up after one. I’ve followed the lives of some of…
Fantastic series of photos, showing sci-fi spaceships digitally inserted into photos that appear to have been taken at real airshows. To be more believable, we probably need to see more poorly-framed, snapshot-style “here’s my kid standing in front of a Moonbase Alpha Eagle,” but this was still a lot of fun. Sci-Fi Airshow: Guided Tour.
There’s a lot of interest in infographics nowadays, but doing them correctly — and making them look simple — is not easy. From 9to5 Mac: Nielsen released smartphone purchasing data yesterday that depicted Apple grabbing more than a third of the total smartphone market in the most recently surveyed month. Android was over 50 percent. That is almost…
This sounds like a brilliant way to repurpose antiquated technology and improve pedestrian life. The city has converted 10 public pay phones in three boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – into free Wi-Fi hot spots, infusing a blast of modern technology into some of the city’s most notably outdated infrastructure. The project is considered…
Today, I managed to get in a couple of hours of web development and PR/social media work that is stretching my skills a bit. The new pack of iPad styluses I ordered from Amazon has shipped. I’m caught up in the online faculty development class I’m taking. My inbox is brimming with opportunities to collaborate and connect…
Summer vacation means if I am telling my kids steampunk bedtime stories, and the story requires an ether-powered vehicle larger than a life pod, but smaller than the ship-of-the-line where most of the plot takes place, I can visit Wikipedia to look for a class name — I like “sloop” — and then dash out…