Who draws the GOOGLE doodles?

 

My name is Dennis Hwang, and I’m the guy who draws the Google doodles. But the doodle tradition started here before I did. The first doodle was produced by (who else?) Larry and Sergey, who, when they attended the Burning Man festival in summer 1999, put a little stick figure on the home page logo in case the site crashed and someone wanted to know why nobody was answering the phone. By the time I began an internship here in the summer of 2000, the company was producing doodles on a regular basis. At the time I was a Stanford undergrad majoring in art and computer science, and, although I hadn’t been hired to do anything remotely related to logo design, I eventually stumbled into my first doodle gig (Bastille Day, July 2000, for which I did a fairly boring flag motif).And I’ve done all the doodles ever since; I’ve produced almost 150 by now. The doodles are only a small part of my actual job (as Google’s international webmaster, I’m responsible for managing all our international site content, which keeps me plenty busy), but it’s definitely my favorite. Holding up my mockups and then holding my breath while Larry and Sergey do their “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” emperor thing is never boring, and I love the fact that my little niche within this company turned out to be something so cool and creative and, well, Google-y.

What doodles will I be doing next? Well, telling you in advance would spoil the fun of it, and I have no idea anyway. If you’ve got any ideas of your own, feel free to send them in. Who knows; you may just make a little Google history yourself.

PBS Revives a Show That Shines a Light on Reading

Steady work has been scarce for actors in gorilla suits since “The Electric Company” went dark in 1977.

But all that changes this week as shooting begins in Washington Heights and the Lower East Side on an ambitious reboot of the PBS literacy series that turned on a generation of schoolchildren to the rudiments of reading. The first graduates of “Sesame Street” found in “The Electric Company” a companion piece that relied on pun-filled sketches, Spider-Man cameos, and lots of primate shtick, all backed by a Motown beat.

Refitted for the age of hip-hop and informed by decades of further educational research on reading, the 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self. The series, which is expected to make its debut in January, faces challenges the original never did (trying to stand out amid so much children’s programming and to shake the stigma of educational television) as well as familiar ones (trying to make reading a positive experience for youngsters).

“It’s the old one mixed with ‘High School Musical’ and a Dr Pepper commercial,” said Linda Simensky, senior director of programming for PBS Kids, a block of children’s shows that will include “The Electricity Company.” There’s a touch of “Fame” to it, given its cast of culturally diverse city kids who sing and dance, as well as nods to the original series. (A cameo has been offered to Rita Moreno, a regular on the original “Electric Company,” remembered for her show-opening exultation, “Hey, you guyyyyys!”)

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit media corporation formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop, will once again produce. As before, when the show began in 1971, it is still directed at viewers 6 to 9 years old.

Ms. Simensky, 44, said the rebirth would be happy news for the Garanimals generation. “ ‘The Electric Company’ was my favorite show in third grade, along with Bugs Bunny,” she said.

In keeping with the original show’s ties to theater (many in the cast, like Morgan Freeman, had stage backgrounds), the new head writer is a Tony-Award-nominated playwright and lyricist, Willie Reale, with experience in children’s theater (“A Year With Frog and Toad”).

In the first episode Mr. Reale establishes the show’s conceit: Somewhere in the big city lies a natural-foods diner that is headquarters to a not-so-secret society known as the Electric Company. The four semi-superheroes who meet there — Keith, Jessica, Lisa and Hector — have pledged not only to use their powers for good but also to eat sensible portions of healthy meals. The gang ranges in age from 13 to 20 and can scramble, recall, project and animate words in astounding ways.

Plotting nefariously is a clutch of comical misfits and poseurs known as the Pranksters. “They’re villains without being villainous,” said Scott Cameron, the show’s research director, “just neighborhood kids who cause chaos.”

The show will join an expanding lineup of reading-readiness shows on PBS Kids. It will differ from the original in that each episode will emphasize vocabulary from five “conceptual domains” (animals, the body, weather, ecosystems and the solar system) and tell a story in multiple acts, interspersed with splashes of animated and live-action lessons in phonics. As the last of the Pranksters was being cast in late April, taping had begun in a small studio near Lincoln Center in Manhattan on short segments. They will carry the show’s educational load, a curriculum forged over two years of research and testing. As has been done with previous Sesame Workshop series, “The Electric Company” will undergo extensive testing during production and after its first season’s 26 episodes have been broadcast.

Mr. Cameron and his associates searched for a format that would smoothly incorporate educational goals, the most challenging of which is to reverse negative attitudes about reading among children in second and third grades. Test audiences of low-income students in Baltimore, San Antonio and Carbondale, Ill., provided early indications that the series might be effective.

In the old, dull days of children’s TV “The Electric Company” shone brightly. But it remains to be seen whether a vigorous campaign to build awareness for the revival will cut through the clutter of diversions now available to children.

“Media has evolved and learning styles have evolved,” said Malore I. Brown, the project director, who as a child in Freeport, the Bahamas, picked up “The Electric Company” via a signal that drifted in from Miami. “We want to make this a 360-degree experience.” That includes an online component along with a magazine being developed by Marvel Comics. Sneak-peek video will begin appearing on PBS in September.

The Sesame Workshop hopes to raise $25 million for the project, $17.7 million of which has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through the federal Department of Education. Twenty low-income, low-literacy pockets across the country will also be the focus of an extensive outreach program in the months leading to the show’s premiere.

“There will be billboards, bus ads, notices in their dollar stores, television and radio ads, all about the power of reading,” Randell M. Bynum, who is coordinating the outreach, said. “When the show comes on in January, these communities will have already been primed to the importance of reading and bombarded with resources.”

Ms. Bynum, along with the production team and cast members, has been testing strategies at P.S. 188 on Houston Street in the Lower East Side. A group of that school’s students in first through fourth grades recently screened a 30-minute demonstration of the series, which included a music-video tribute to the transformational power of the silent E, the sneaky letter that can turn cap into cape and at into ate.

Music for the series will come from three people involved in the Broadway rap-salsa-pop musical “In the Heights”: the director Thomas Kail, the co-arranger and orchestrator Bill Sherman and the actor Christopher Jackson.

In a category by himself is the beat-box artist Shockwave (Chris Sullivan). Besides slinging hash at the Electric Diner, he speaks in one-word bursts only — no sentences — and appears in guises like the much missed gorilla and a butcher who cleaves words. But it is his D.J. routine that may be mimicked on playgrounds next year. He appears to be scratching syllables from dueling turntables to form words. It all emanates from his “bruh-bruh-AIN, bruh-bruh-AIN, brain.”

The producers said that they hoped the show would help head off a vexing problem: the wall that struggling students hit in fourth grade, the turning point at which school is no longer about learning to read, but reading to learn. As it was for the first incarnation of “The Electric Company,” the target audience this time is the economically disadvantaged child.

“Lower-income kids are already behind the eight ball by the time they reach kindergarten,” said Karen Fowler, the show’s executive producer. “By second grade language is flying by them, and they have no reference for it. That’s devastating.”

It’s a familiar refrain to Joan Ganz Cooney, the 78-year-old chairwoman of the executive committee of Sesame Workshop’s board who, along with Lloyd Morrisett, led development of the first incarnation of “The Electric Company.” After she previewed the new version, she said in an interview, she told the producers, “Make it funnier.”

Ms. Fowler happily obliged. “We saw that we needed to be sillier at the 8-year-old level,” she said. “Bring on the pratfalls.”

 

(Reprinted from the New York Times)

 

 

Is Claire Dead? Are They Really Time Traveling? Lost’s Bosses Speak!

First of all, damn you guys and this show. It was such a good episode I was up all night trying to wrap my head around everything.

 

DL: Carlton? You know we don’t understand it either.

 

That is comforting. Well, congratulations, I think the fan response has been so positive this season. There were some people who were frustrated in season three and I feel like all those people who were cynical are back into the fandemonium of the show.

 

Damon Lindelof: My feeling about is that it feels great, and we’re enjoying it more than we ever enjoyed it before, for having gone through the dark times. And at the same time, our attitude isn’t, “I told you so we’re awesome,” because I know we still have 34 episodes to go, and it’s a roller coaster.

 

And at the end of the day people put a lot of weight on the finale, because the finale is the taste left in their mouth for the next eight months. Nobody’s talking about the undefeated season that the New England Patriots had—everybody’s talking about the fact that the Giants won the Super Bowl, so until the finale is aired, and people respond to that, there are no laurels to be resting on.

 

Carlton Cuse: Me, I’m just happy, with no qualifications whatsoever.

 

How are you feeling about the finale about this point? Are you feeling pretty confident about it?

 

CC: Yes, we were up until the wee hours last night editing the finale. I think we’re pretty pleased. We want to be kind of cautious in our optimism, but it feels like the film that we are getting back from Hawaii is fantastic. Jack Bender is doing a great job directing it, and I think that people will be surprisesd by the finale. Not in the literal M. Night Shyamalan way that we surprised the audience last year, but I think emotionally satisfying and also intriguing, and we’ll leave people kind of very excited and interested to figure out what season five is going to be about.

 

DL: Yes, there’s a sense of completeness this year in terms of what we set out to do in season four, to tell the story of how the Oceanic Six got off the island, and why they are lying, and what happened in the immediate aftermath of them being rescued, all the way up to Jack yelling at Kate, “We have to go back!” And we feel we’ve accomplished that, and beyond that there’s an indication in the finale of what the future may hold. We’re really glad that we got the extra hour from ABC. That made a huge difference in being able to do the two-hour finale or else it would’ve felt—we were sitting in the editing room last night watching one of the scenes, and we looked at each other, and said, “I can’t believe we ever thought we were going to be able to do this in an hour.” The scope is large.

 

Was this season considerably different then it would’ve been had we not had the strike, or do you feel that you set out what you wanted to accomplish this season?

 

CC: I think in a funny way it was probably better because of the strike, for two reasons. (1) We just put the pedal all the way down to the metal to get everything done with two less hours. A lot of the more languid, contemplative material went out the window. And (2) I think we were fresh after 100 days off. We came back, and we jumped into the show. We were recharged, and we’ve had a real sort of energy to attack these last six episodes. Normally, at the end of a season, it’s like running a marathon. You’re exhausted, you’ve used every good idea that you’ve had, and you have the fatigue of writing 17 episodes. We came in fresh, really energized, and I think that really helped the batch of episodes.

 

DL: It’s crazy because you’ve now seen three episodes of the post-strike work, and we didn’t even start writing them until Valentines Day, and now they’ve aired. It’s a tremendous amount of energy put in by the writing staff, the production staff, the actors and the editors. Right now we literally have four editors and assistants all working around the clock just to get the finale done. And Jack Bender is still shooting today, and we’re going to air this two-hour movie two weeks from last night. So we’re really proud of the fact that we were able to write and produce six hours of television in a 12-week period, which is essentially the same amount of time we had to produce the pilot.

Daniel Dae Kim, Lost

 

And we found out that there will be one more episode in each of these seasons. Are you happy about that?

 

DL: I don’t know where that came from. I think Carlton and I did a KROQ interview yesterday, and they asked what about the two episodes that didn’t get done this year, and we reiterated as we have in many interviews we will probably do 17 next year and 17 the following year. And now everyone’s presenting it to us like it’s an official announcement.

 

CC: Post-strike we always said we would make up the ones that got dropped.

Emilie de Ravin, Lost

 

Obviously the big question after last night’s episode, leading into that finale, is “How are they going to move the island?” which is a fantastic twist and also, “Is Claire dead?” Is that a question that you are wanting the fans to be asking at this point?

 

CC: I think that we want the fans to ask, “What’s happened to Claire?” I don’t think it’s “Is she dead?” I think it’s like “Where is she?” and “What’s going on with her?”

 

DL: What’s fascinating with Lost is there’s a scene where Claire is in the cabin, and she is sitting next to a guy who is dead, and nobody is saying “What’s up with that?” They’re all saying “Is she dead?” I think the more operative question is, “What is dead?” That’s a good question to ask, and one you will certainly be asking over the long hiatus.

 

Can you say if time travel is definitely a part of the series?

 

CC: Yes.

 

How do you keep all of the different timelines straight? I have to imagine that there’s some huge board somewhere where you have all of the timelines, because there’s so much overlap at this point. Is it difficult keeping all of that straight, and how closely do you guard that room where all the secrets are kept?

 

DL: We have a guy, Gregg Nations, who is now co-producer on the show who has been our script coordinator since the very beginning, and that’s been his job maintaining the continuity of the show.

 

The easiest continuity to keep is what’s happening on the island starting on September 22, 2004, up until where we are now, which is roughly like day 100 on the island, as of what you saw last night. That’s fairly easy.

 

And then the flashbacks, they start getting confusing because relative to each other. It’s not that hard to say Jack ratted out his father and got him fired before he went to Australia, but all of that happened after he broke up with Sarah. [What is hard to sort out is] how those scenes take place in relation to Hurley winning the lottery or Sayid leaving Iraq…so that’s all Gregg’s job.

 

Once we moved into the future this year it’s become incredibly daunting for him, because all the Oceanic Six are intertwined, and you will begin to see in the finale as we begin to fill in these missing pieces in the future, sort of trying to understand what were the conditions under which the Oceanic Six left the island, and why are they lying, that that gets incredibly tricky. And you will finally get a sense of when the scene that you saw in last year’s finale takes place in relation to all of these other scenes where Jack and Kate are on the tarmac.

 

So, there is no physical document, it’s all sort of in Gregg’s head. If he were to leave the show or have a massive coronary, it would take Tom Hanks from The DaVinci Code to sort of piece it together, which is how we like it.

 

CC: But he’s just to be clear, he’s the keeper of everything that’s been done on the show, not the stuff that will be done. He doesn’t have to sort of be living in a locked vault because he doesn’t have the stuff that is yet to be seen on the show. It’s enormously beneficial to have Gregg as a resource because we ourselves sometimes have a hard time figuring out where events happened relative to other events.

 

Well, you guys know that the fans are very passionate about how the romantic storylines go on the show. In the last episode, obviously we had some really great Jack and Kate stuff. Does it make it tricky to write the romances knowing that the fans do feel so strongly about it? And how much do you take into account how they are going to react to a Kate and Jack scene or a Kate and Sawyer scene?

Ross Perot

 

DL: At the end of the day, we haven’t done any official polling but it feels like there’s a 50-50 Skater-Jater spilt and sort of Juliet is the Ross Perot. The people who are passionate about Jacket are very passionate, but ultimately the triangle is a product of Kate and will she end up with Jack or Sawyer. It’s not like Carlton and I are both rooting for Jack on any given day. We feel like Kate’s character is bound to explore relationships with both those guys and both those guys are going to be responsive to her various advances. We know who she ends up with ultimately, but we think that the trail there is obviously going to include a little bit of ping-ponging.

 

CC: We’re both Skaters and Jaters at the same time.

Nestor Carbonell

 

This is a question I don’t know if you can or will want to answer…Does Richard Alpert age?

 

CC: Does Richard Alpert age? I think it’s a good observation to say that Richard Albert has been observed in various time periods looking the same, but I think that’s all we want to say at this point in time. However, you will learn a lot more about Richard Alpert as the show goes on. He is going to become more prominent in the future of the show.

 

And it seems like the series has branched off in so many different directions. The scope of what has happened on Lost is just so vast and so intricate. As the series continues for the next few seasons, will things start to come together in some sort of cohesive way or are you still branching out further?

 

CC: We were actually laughing about this the other day. How, back at the beginning, finding water was sort of the crisis, not whether the island can be moved. The stakes have definitely risen.

 

We have two seasons left, so we think there will be more incredibly compelling complications for the characters before we get to the end, but again really the great virtue of the end date is that we will start wrapping things up, and we will be trying to tie up all the story threads.

 

We keep a list of unanswered questions, and we will be trying to answer most of those. Obviously, mystery is a part of life, and mystery is a part of the show. I guess we’ll all have to see at the end of the day how satisfied people are, but it is our intention to try to wrap things up. I don’t know if the show will become simpler, but hopefully in the wrapping up of these questions, it will be satisfying.

 

DL: There are some questions that are very engaging and interesting, and then there are other questions that we have no interest whatsoever in answering. We call it the midi-chlorian debate, because at a certain point explaining something mystical demystifies it. To try and have a character come and say “Here is what the numbers mean,” actually makes every usage of the numbers up to that point less interesting.

 

You can actually watch Star Wars now and when Obi-Wan talks about the Force to Luke the first time we hear him, it loses its luster because subsequently the Force has been explained as, sort of, little biological agents that are in your blood stream. So you go, “Oh, I liked Obi-Wan’s version a lot better,” which in the case of our show is “The numbers are bad luck, they keep popping up in Hurley’s life, they appear on the island.”

 

CC: I heard that Obi-Wan had actually experienced the numbers. That’s actually a big secret that’s now been revealed.

 

DL: But if you’re watching the show for a detailed explanation of what the numbers mean—and I’m not saying you won’t see more of them—then you will be disappointed by the end of season six.

Sonya Walger

 

Do you see Penny and Desmond as a central plot for the show? And if Penny were to die would Desmond die because she’s his Constant? Is that a fair assumption?

 

DL: Desmond and Penny are an incredibly important part of the show, and one of our favorite romances and relationship to write on the show. Obviously, Sonya Walger is an incredibly busy actor, and as a result of that, it limits our ability to go to the Penny and Desmond well, but every time we do it’s very special as something that we do not get to explore every other week. All we can say is that there’s a lot more to tell about that story, but hopefully you will have a better sense of that over the summer.

Lost

 

And how much do you know about what you’ll be doing next season, and do you know who the cast will be for season five? Have you figured that out?

 

CC: We are just starting our mini-camping process for season five. That’s sort of where we take the big ideas for season five and try to break ‘em down into a season-long story arc. So it’s a little too premature for us to say specifically what season five is going to be like, in great detail—and once we figure that out we probably won’t say anything anyway.

 

DL: We just finished our first week of mini-camp. We know what the story for the two remaining seasons is, but the big question on the table now is what goes on season five and what do we hold for season six. We don’t want the audience to think that season five is just a big tap dance. It’s not The Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings saga where it’s just a big battle for three hours until you get to the volcano.

 

CC: We hope it’s going to be more like the Empire Strikes Back, in Star Wars, in which the penultimate chapter in the first saga was the best.

 

DL: We can say as a result of the reduced episodic order though, that we are not shifting out of answering question mode. That doesn’t mean you won’t get some new interesting questions along the way in season five that will pay off in season six. But there are a lot of engaging mysteries that we will be addressing right out of the gate.

 

Source: E!Online