Yearbook Yourself

Upload your picture at Yearbook Yourself and see yearbook photos of yourself in different eras.  Click HERE to try it out.

 1956

1976

1982

The Alien Abduction Lamp

Lasse Klein designed this clever Alien Abduction Lamp that will appeal to Science Fiction fans of all ages!  Klein hopes to bring this concept model to market soon.

 

A light bulb inside the metal UFO lights up the beam and the windows. The glass of the beam is frosted to distribute light in all directions. 

 

You can see more images and read more about this unique conversation piece HERE.

 

My Review of the iPhone 3G

I have had a plethora of cell phones and PDA’s through the years and the new iPhone 3G is my absolute favorite.  It combines the best of both worlds with an intuitive operating system that is easy to use and simple to understand.  As a kid, I would dream about having some form of device that would be a personal communicator and video device – Dick Tracy stuff and now it has become a reality.  The form factor is typical Apple – sleek, ergonomic, desirable and intelligent.

 

I recently flew to California to visit my in-laws. I occupied my time on the plane listening to music, watching a movie, catching up on a TV show and finally playing Scrabble all from a little black handheld device.  Before the flight, I was able to check the gate, schedule and weather using the Safari web tool.  It was pleasant not to have to hunt down a Wi-Fi hotspot as the iPhone has internet available 24-7. To ensure I wasn’t late, my phone reminded me of our itinerary for the day with the great calendar function.  I even checked and responded to some work e-mails in between flights. (Setting up my work and personal e-mail was a breeze and took only a few minutes).  At the gate, I downloaded a car racing game using the App Store feature and in a matter of seconds I was playing a new game.  The App Store has many free programs too, roughly 25% of their inventory that allow you to choose from categories such as productivity, business, games, lifestyle, etc.

 

The phone has one of the best interfaces that I have ever utilized.  The visual voicemail is a great feature that makes it easy to prioritize and respond to a task list of incoming calls that require a response. 

 

The Apple experience in purchasing the phone was exceptional.  On the day that I purchased the phone, 10 personal shopping assistants helped 10 different customers at various spots in the store using handheld registers.  This alleviated the typical frustrating wait in a long line.  It took 8 minutes to setup my phone and my Apple Assistant provided advice and suggested accessories without being pushy.

 

Like any product, the 3G is not perfect and does have its flaws.  In the comic book “Spiderman”, Peter Parker’s uncle explains that with great power comes great responsibility.  If he were talking about the iPhone the statement might be, “With great functionality comes reduced power”.  The battery simply does not last that long and requires frequent charges.  At home and in the car, my iPhone is usually charging. That’s my major complaint but here is my wish list for the next software upgrade or iteration of the phone. 

 

My top 5 requests are as follows:

 

- Copy and Paste: This is such a basic feature. Having copy and paste makes it easier to type out text messages and e-mails.

 

- Sync notes:  There needs to be a bidirectional sync function that allows you to add existing notes from your computer to the phone and vice versa. 

 

-Viewing/Editing Office documents and PDF files: Today, I carry all my documents as email attachments. I would prefer to have a preview like application on my handset to conveniently sync and view documents. Editing capability would also be very helpful.

 

-Improve memory:  There is a 32GB iPod touch available today so I can only assume a 32GB or greater iPhone is looming in the future.  I have lots of songs, movies and picture that are clamoring for some showcase space.

 

-Video: Most smart phones have this feature today; it would be a welcome addition to the iPhone.

 

In summary, Steve Jobs, if you are reading this, please consider my request list?  I hope you can comply as long as it’s not in the form of the new improved iPhone 3G (2.0) to be released next week at half the price I just paid for mine…please give me a little time to enjoy my new toy.

 

 

3-D Movies: Coming Back at You

The brick road wasn’t just yellow. It was school-bus-parked-on-the-surface-of-the-sun yellow. That’s because when The Wizard of Oz premiered in 1939, Hollywood was still testing its newest toy, three-color Technicolor, and studios wanted to astonish audiences with supersaturated hues.

 

Today Hollywood is looking to 3-D movies–now enjoying a digitally fueled renaissance–to make an impression as lasting as Dorothy’s ruby slippers. The first feature films shot and shown in digital 3-D–bugs-in-space toon Fly Me to the Moon, Brendan Fraser’s volcano-diving Journey to the Center of the Earth and concert movies by U2 and Miley Cyrus–leaped into moviegoers’ laps this year. In 2009 at least 10 more 3-D movies will arrive, including James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar, DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens and Pixar’s Up.

“Over the next couple of years, we’ll get our Gone With the Wind and our Citizen Kane,” says Michael Lewis, CEO of Real D, a company that equips movie theaters with digital 3-D technology.

 

Techno-impresarios like Lewis have been trying to push 3-D movies beyond newfangledness virtually since the beginning of cinema (see box). But there’s good reason to believe that today’s audiences will enjoy 3-D as a quality that’s essential to any blockbuster, like color and sound, even if it does require those retro glasses.

 

Making a 3-D movie involves filming an image from two perspectives: one representing the left eye, the other the right. When synchronized and watched through glasses that allow each eye to see only its own movie, the two films create an illusion of depth. Until recently, perfect synchronization was nearly impossible, and production and exhibition were cumbersome. Digitization has eliminated many of the flaws of old 3-D movies–like nausea and headaches brought on by poor synch ing–and has motivated studios to push the format on exhibitors and filmmakers. “It’s an important part of our business going forward,” says Alan Bergman, president of Walt Disney Studios, which will release an animated canine-superhero movie, Bolt, in 3-D in November, as well as all its future Pixar films.

 

Studios have plenty of reasons to back the format. Screenings in 3-D create an experience that audiences can’t get on their sofas–or pirate. (At least not yet.) The 3-D-capable home-entertainment systems widely available in three to five years won’t replicate theaters either, because giant screen size is the key to creating the sense of depth. The first batch of films released in both regular format and 3-D made nearly three times as much money on 3-D screens, thanks to higher demand and ticket prices (3-D movies cost $1 to $5 more). However, only about 1,000 U.S. screens are currently equipped to show digital 3-D movies, not nearly enough to fuel a blockbuster like The Dark Knight, which opened on more than 9,000 screens. By 2010, industry analysts expect more than 7,000 digital 3-D screens in the U.S. To persuade more cinema owners to make the switch, studios are relying on an early crop of films to show the medium’s potential.

The New Pioneers

 

Today’s digital 3-D directors are flaunting what they’ve got, which is the power to make a bodily, almost primal impact on audiences. “You react to a film intellectually with your head and emotionally with your heart,” says Ben Stassen, director of Fly Me to the Moon, a tale of three tween-age houseflies who hitch a ride on Apollo 11. “But in a 3-D film, you have a very strong physical component: you can actually make your audience duck.” When Stassen’s houseflies buzz over a field, it’s like riding in a bug-size roller coaster, weaving between giant blades of grass.

 

Playing to those expectations, Journey to the Center of the Earth director Eric Brevig booby-trapped his movie with zooming yo-yos, flying fish and skittering bugs. “I felt I had to do things I wouldn’t do if I were making the same film in five years,” says Brevig, whose experience creating films for theme-park rides reveals itself here. “People putting on 3-D glasses or paying a little extra to see a movie in 3-D at this point in cinema are expecting to have things blatantly launched into the audience.” But in a scene in which incandescent birds appear to flutter out of the screen, Brevig shows 3-D’s subtler potential: the effect transplants viewers from their theater seats to the lush core of Jules Verne’s earth.

 

Such transporting moments make it tempting to imagine what directors outside the action and animation genres might do with 3-D. Would the Parisian courtesans in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! cancan off the screen? Could the leaves of Terrence Malick’s Edenic New World brush our cheeks? “3-D can be intimate, scary, claustrophobic, expansive,” says Charlotte Huggins, who produced both Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fly Me to the Moon. So far, most 3-D-movie makers agree on one criterion: “If the movie takes you somewhere that you dream about going to and probably aren’t going to get to, it belongs in 3-D,” says Greg Foster, president of IMAX Filmed Entertainment, which transfers regular-format movies like Polar Express into 3-D and is rolling out a new digital 3-D system this year.

 

On the other hand, says Foster, “If someone decides they want to do My Dinner with Andre in 3-D, it’s not for us.” It’s estimated that 3-D increases a film’s below-the-line production costs 25% to 30%, and for some actors, the notion of wrinkles and love handles in 3-D adds considerable anxiety. Then, too, at this point only a small niche of Hollywood has the technical know-how for the process.

 

What worries some 3-D trailblazers is that studios might see the format as a way to punch up a mediocre story. That shortcut may work for a while, but eventually the hope is that 3-D will become just another weapon in a filmmaker’s arsenal, as useful and unremarkable as the color yellow. (Reprinted from Time Magazine)

 

Justin Marks Talks Supermax: The Green Arrow Film

Justin Marks spoke with MTV Movies about the upcoming Green Arrow film. This is an ambitious project mainly because it has the makings for being the ultimate crossover film.

 

His secret identity is Oliver Queen, billionaire activist of the fictional Star City. Dressed like Robin Hood, Green Arrow is an archer, who invents arrows with various special functions, such as a glue arrow, a net arrow, or a boxing-glove arrow. The script borrows from both the original origin and from Green Arrow: Year One.

 

Now according to Justin Marks’ interview and what we saw in the script, the real star of this film will be the prison itself.

 

“It’s a very, very awesome prison. I majored in architecture in college, and design is how I actually started in. For ‘Super Max,’ designing that prison, it had to be the kind of thing that was a character in and of itself,” Marks said. “We’re in a world where instead of just trying to contain a guy who’s really big, you’re trying to contain a guy who can — in the case of Icicle — who can freeze things.

 

This worked before in the Shawshank Redemption where the actual prison had all the charisma and menacing charm, while the characters were actually an after thought to the story.

 

As Mark’s puts it, “to escape from Super Max they have got to go through the most elaborate heist we’ve ever seen, involving superpowers. Because the prison itself kind of has superpowers!”

 

As stated in our script review, “the prison changes shape, cells rearrange, and reconfigure every night to disorient the prisoners from breaking out. A transforming super prison!”

 

“I see him as the Jason Bourne of superheroes, a guy who exists with his own sort of set of tricks. And I think the difference between Ollie Queen and a guy like Bruce Wayne — they’re both rich. They both have their things. But Batman is about his equipment and is about his theatricality and about his detective skills. And Green Arrow is a guy who’s really just the sort of MacGyver type,” Marks said. “In his hand, anything can be a weapon.”

 

“I heard a rumor somewhere that Matt Damon was in negotiations to star as Ollie Queen/Green Arrow. He certainly has the physicality and chops for the meaty role considering how bad ass Damon was in the last Bourne film” (From Latino Review)