Well, it’s still out there, sure, but it hasn’t been updated in quite a while. It is, however, very much worth a visit if you are interested in handmade Visual Effects or in the history of the special effects or animation industries. It covered in several posts many devices and processes used by filmmakers in the pre-digital industry to create effects, and many of the explanations are quite good.

For example, there was a post about the Max Fleischer innovation called The Rotograph that is actually the best, clearest description of this technique I’ve found in any medium. Take a minute to follow that link and read it – it shows how Max Fleischer used this:

To make a Popeye cartoon that looks like this:

Now, I was reminded of this technique because of a post today on Boing Boing pointing to a miniature photographer named Michael Paul Smith who is reconstructing a remembered version of the place and time he grew up using models photographed against live backgrounds:

Per the photographer’s explanation of this photo:

The houses in the background are about 2 blocks away from where I was shooting. At that distance, the model and real houses look as though they are the same size.
It’s always a challenge to find an exterior setting with that kind of unobstructed view. Also with no cars, people or signs in the way.
The Universe smiled upon me that day.

Take some time to click through Michael Paul Smith’s flickr pics, they are full of wonderful model photos taken against real backgrounds. Keep in mind that there is no digital manipulation in most of these images, just keenly constructed miniature sets cleverly aligned with actual backgrounds.

I’m currently working on a short film project that is meant to be set in some difficult to reach locales, and some environments that might be too dangerous to film in or that don’t quite exist. I’ve been looking for ways to film some of it without the budget that might be needed to fly people to a distant location, or pay for access to unusual environments (for example, something like an offshore oil rig). Seeing Michael Paul Smith’s photos today reminded me of the Rotograph and got me wondering how much of an environment might be built using something like this.

Maybe build the set, align it with an appropriate exterior, put portions of the set on movable bases that can be moved slowly at different speeds using electric motors, and maybe film foreground layers of the set separately from background layers, so those elements can have live actors filmed in live environments at the proper distance from the camera inserted in there in post. That sentence makes more sense to me right now than it probably does objectively, but I wanted to get it down here so I remember what I’m thinking.

When I have this sorted properly in my head I’ll make another post with a better description of the idea, and then I’ll try it and post the results.

In the meantime, read through BlueSpill and look at model set photos, and enjoy!

Lo Fi Sci Fi – a name derived from “Low Fidelity” and “Science Fiction”, meant to convey the impression of filmed science fiction created by amateurs or on a very limited budget. I don’t know who first coined the term, but I first encountered it in the ad campaign for the Toronto based independent film Infest Wisely, and thought it described a movement I’ve been seeing quite a bit of lately. Science Fiction as a literary genre has always been composed of enthusiastic amateurs writing primarily for themselves and each other as an audience. Science fiction cinema has always suffered in thematic substance as it has generally been made by commercial interested non-fans targeting a mass audience. In general this has meant employing a heavy coat of science fictional eye-candy to recycled western, war and horror movie plots. Actual thematic as opposed to visual science fiction in film has been rare, but the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement, now that the tools to make convincing amateur science fiction films are widely available, is starting to change all that. In posts of this category I’ll be reviewing films or filmmakers I feel fit into the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement.

Something new this time – I’ve got an interview for you.

A few days ago the popular blog Boing Boing linked to a YouTube video by someone going by the name The Faking Hoaxer. The video showed the orbiting debris of a space shuttle, and was made only from photographs manipulated in Photoshop and animated in Premier. Despite these rudimentary elements, the verisimilitude was astounding. It was some of the best pure lo fi effects work I’d ever seen. His videos aren’t full stories. He seems to be taking still NASA photos, old Apollo and Space Shuttle footage, and manipulating them in photoshop and then mixing them in After Effects. There seems to be very little, if any 3D work in any of these, just incredibly skillfully manipulated and mixed found-photos and found footage. The results he is getting are astonishing. He shows an inspired understanding of how to use sound and staged videographic errors to impart plausibility to simple tricks. I’d argue what he’s doing is closer to a form of stage magic than it is to the contemporary sfx industry. He is more Méliès than Weta Workshop. His videos stand as a great proof of the notion that intelligence, subtlety and creativity combined can produce high quality out of simple, inexpensive tools.

I contacted him via YouTube to find out more about how he got started doing what he does, how he developed his techniques, and what he was looking to accomplish.

OB: What is your background with relation to digital art? Are you a professional in some form, or a pure amateur? What are the tools you use most often and how long have you been using them?

TFH: I really have no background in digital art apart from the creations I have made for my youtube channel. I am a pure amateur who has many ideas floating around in my head and have found a way to create them using consumer tools. Mainly the Adobe products, digital stills camera and camcorders.

OB: Watching your “making of” videos, it struck me that someone could do essentially the same sorts of things using free software as well (Gimp for Photoshop, Blender for 3D, as well as some aspects of After Effects and Premiere). Many people, hobbyists especially, get hung up on thinking they need the latest of the best to get good work done. Clearly you show that this is not true. Was there a moment you realized what you could pull off with the tools you had at hand? What was the thinking that led to you devising your techniques?

TFH: The moment I made and released the ‘Midlands UFO’ Hoax video and people believed it was real was the start of TheFakingHoaxer. I used to post hoaxes on several websites under various names (some I have not to this day owned up to) and gauge the reactions to them via peoples comments. The more amateur the videos looked the more people believed them. This lead me to devising the really shaky, out of focus look that makes a video look real. After all a professional cameraman with a tripod never captures ufo’s.

OB: How long does it generally take you, from idea to YouTube posting, to create these pieces? Can you talk a little about your process?

TFH: Anything from 1 hour to a few days. It usually starts with listening to music, film soundtracks mostly and classical. I daydream out of the window as the music plays and then when an idea hits I start with the background image or video footage and then build it up from there. Its really difficult to give you the exact process as it can vary depending on the idea but music for me is a first key element.

OB: Have you deliberately looked outside the digital world for tips on technique? Can you talk about any technical influences you might have outside of the usual blockbuster suspects?

TFH: Having watched the ‘making of’ to every film that I have seen it strikes me that a lot of unnecessary effort is put into visual effects. I admire the days before CGI where everything was done ‘in camera’ and using models. These techniques made the old Star Wars Trilogy fantastic but CGI has ruined the new trilogy and to some degree the old ones. George Lucas said “you can ruin these things” and he has. I really have not looked outside the digital world, its just easier for me to use a PC than make models etc.

OB: Why did you decide on UFO encounters and imaginary NASA expeditions?

TFH: I’ve always had an interest in UFO’s and Spaceflight and I think anything that’s paranormal is kind of cool. That’s it, its all just kind of cool.

OB: Can you tell me more about how sound plays into your illusions?

TFH: Sound adds to the believability and gives a little more to the story. With hoax videos you have to be careful that it doesn’t sound like bad actors reading a script, that’s why I tend not to use actual people in my videos. I will use more sound effects as I move from hoaxes into more cinematic videos.

OB: Were you doing these before you found YouTube? When did you start circulating your work and how was it received?

TFH: No I started all this because of Youtube. I started in July 2008 and on the whole people like my work but I have many haters too and have been banned from several forums.

OB: Despite such obvious giveaways as the “making of” videos you’ve posted, and actually calling yourself “TheFakingHoaxer”, the comments on your videos still attract some credulity. Certainly some of it is from people trying to get a rise out of other commenters, but some of it I suspect is sincere. What is your relationship to that desire to believe in occult occurrences, regardless of the evidence?

TFH: I’m always suspicious of people that’s claim to have seen a ghost or aliens and then are perfectly happy to get on with a normal life. If I ever saw anything like that it would change my life and I would never be the same again. I have no desire to believe in this sort of thing and I will only trust my own eyes but there are people out there that do believe and nothing will convince them otherwise. People see what they want to see, not what they are actually seeing, they see with their heart.

OB: Now let’s talk about some of the videos themselves…

Midlands UFO

OB: This one was really convincing, I was actually surprised to see that every element was digital. I thought it was a real tree and real houses in the foreground, and that your only trickery was in the lights. But it was all CGI! Did you sculpt your own 3D elements (houses, tree), or did you use premade ones?

TFH: This being my first hoax I had to use pre-made objects, I hadn’t got the skills to model in 3d until a while later.

OB: It seems to me getting the excited camera motion to seem authentic is a real art, especially as there is no camera. Did you have to practice this a lot? How long does it take you to get just right, and has it gotten easier to pull off?

TFH: I first used ‘Wriggler’ which is an Adobe After Effects tool. This looked terrible and fake so I got a piece of white paper, drew two small dots an inch apart in the middle then filmed the paper with a camcorder making the movements and the zooms. Then importing this paper footage into After Effects, I tracked the dots then applying that movement data to the cgi scene made it look so much better. I do record new dots for every video and its become quite easy for me now.

Wind Turbine UFOs

OB: The sky ballet of these lights is really quite affecting. What do you think the role of gracefulness is in something like UFO fakery?

TFH: I think the music made it graceful, watch it without music and its just lights moving in the sky.

Crossing a Star

OB: Clearly this one was inspired by that brilliant photograph of the space shuttle silhouetted against the disk of the sun:

OB: So many of your pieces suggest a deep familiarity with NASA and general space exploration picture archives. Those are a wonderful treasure for all of us. Do you follow current developments in the various global space programs closely? Have you always been a NASA fan?

TFH: Not closely but always watch launches on the TV and view the latest photographs from Hubble or Mars etc.. and yes, always been a NASA fan.

OB: I love that you link back to an Amazon MP3 of the Adaggio you’ve used as a soundtrack… do you put those ads up yourself? Do you have any thoughts about the nature of shared culture, of mixing, or of the creative commons movement? Do you have any kind of a plan for turning your own creative work into a source of some income? It’s a hard problem everyone is still trying to figure out.

TFH: No the adds just appeared. If I could find a composer to work with that would be great but for the moment I have to use music that’s already out there. I give the composers name in the end credits to my videos and that’s all I can give really. I don’t make money from these videos so I feel its okay to use other peoples work as long as I give them credit. I have made a few £’s from creating works for people. The next step for me is a website where I can sell my cgi creations/elements.

Space Shuttle Destroyed

OB: This is the one that seems to have made a wider splash. This seems like one of your most layered and complex pieces, and was actually rather tragic. I’ve noticed commenters on other blogs that have linked to this saying that they had difficulty watching it, even knowing it wasn’t real, because of the distress the imagery caused them. Did you imagine as you made this one that you’d get that kind of a reaction out of people?

TFH: Yes, its the music that makes people emotional. Without that brilliant James Horner score it would just be a video of a damaged shuttle.

OB: How did you so convincingly destroy pieces of the shuttle?

TFH: By searching on the internet for real photographs of the space shuttle and of plane crashes, then in photoshop cut, cloned and pasted it all together. The whole video only took a few hours to create but has become the most popular.

OB: Does this story get any more elaborate in your mind? Any plans to expand this one out?

TFH: I can see a film like Apollo13 coming from this video. But I have no plans to expand on what caused it, I will leave that a mystery for people to talk about.

OB: Did you script and perform any of the audio in this one, or was it all found audio? The radio chatter is very authentic sounding, yet seems to apply better to the images than I’d expect for found sound.

TFH: No, all the audio is from real NASA footage.

Into Mars Orbit 1973/74

OB: A trip to Mars in the 1970s! I had a smile on my face through this whole piece. Mixing in the Apollo astrounaut footage was a very nice choice, and points to a path I wonder if you are considering pursuing further – by constructing fuller stories using found or stock footage, skillfully mixed with your effects work. I’m reminded that legendary B movie director Ed Wood attempted at times to pad out his ultra low budget films with voice-over enhanced stock footage. The practice has had the feel of cheapness in the past, but I think that was largely due to its poor execution and that the culture was not at all familiar with the idea of sampling and mixing as an art form in and of itself. In the post hip-hop world, mixing has gained significant respectability, though I haven’t seen it explored in any kind of full way in video. Though we’re starting to see that now, with remixed movie trailers like that “The Shining” romantic comedy parody, or in the Disney/Pixar film mashups of DJ Pogo. Have you considered trying to produce a found footage mashup natrrative film? Can you think a bit in writing here about how something like that might work if you were to attempt it?

TFH: I have made several works like this for contemporary artists and they have been exhibited in several galleries in London but they will never appear on my channel. I have a mind full of ideas for short films but I’m sorry to say I’m keeping them to myself at the moment.

Returned to Sender

OB: So you’ve got a trailer up for a film you’d like to make. In a way it’s reminiscent of the big reveal at the end of the first Star Trek motion picture – a certain Voyager has returned home, and not unaccompanied. It’s a great jumping off point, and I’m really intrigued at what you may be thinking of doing with it. Can you say anymore about this project without giving too much away?

TFH: I’m not a StarTrek fan (and I detest Doctor Who by the way) and have never watched any of the films so its a pure coincidence that its similar to that. The film/s I have in my head is of a Gigantic Cinematic Trilogy, has touches of the book ‘War of the Worlds ‘ but with a very different ending. Geeks, like me, would be able to buy and build model kits of the cool ships and vehicles from the film something so lacking in present times…. If I say any more I would spoil it.. so I will stop myself there.

OB: You describe Returned to Sender as a film you’d like to make if only you had the money. To what degree have you thought about giving it a go with your current resources, and bootstrapping your film into being? You already have found ways to wring surprising quality visuals out of some fairly basic imagery and tools. Can you think of ways you could approach your larger film idea with the same ingenuity, applied to all aspects of the filmmaking process, not just the visuals?

TFH: True, I could make it independent of Hollywood cash. But I need to start making short low budget films first and then, after I have some knowledge and experience, I can tackle ‘Returned to Sender’. I would hate to jump into it now and have some cheap crappy actors spoil my vision.

OB: Can you summarize in a handful of items what are the things you need to think about to devise and execute your visual hoaxes?

TFH: A hoax must worship believability. Could it happen and could it be captured on film.

OB: Last question – do you have friends who do strange, creative things as well? Would you see yourself as part of a community of creativity, or more of a lone operator? Which do you think you’d like better?

TFH: I suppose I’m a loner, always thinking outside the box because I know there is no box. It would be great to work with creative people but on the other hand I like to be in control of what I do.

I’ll be keeping on eye on The Faking Hoaxer’s YouTube Channel, and will certainly be keeping his techniques in mind as I look at my own projects.

The sun will come up on the last day of 2009 soon, and I’ll probably do a rambling post on the decade gone, the first decade of THE FUTURE, kind of at an angle to what we all thought the third millennium AD would bring us. Some time this weekend. I need to gather up a first draft of thoughts on the last 10 years, in order to better know how to set upon goals for the next.

One thing I’d like to do again some time in 2010 though is some deep reading.

In sorting through some papers in preparation for a possible move, I found some old university lit class essays. Many of them are painful to read now. Not because they are poorly written (some are, some aren’t), but because a lot of them are obviously, blatantly parroting back whatever political or philosophical opinion the instructor of that course held. It’s really embarrassingly obvious that I had no ability to form a real opinion of my own. I know I wasn’t trying to ingratiate myself for the sake of good grades, though (surprise) all the papers I have that reflect back the instructor’s beliefs got very good grades. I liked these teachers, and I was fascinated by their opinions, and I think at that time I was unconsciously trying their worldviews on to see how they fit.

I’m quite a bit older now, and though I’ve continued to read voraciously, I haven’t read anywhere near as analytically, or as deeply, as I did in those classes.

For example, here’s a bit of an essay on The Duchess of Malfi:

Men like to ride horses to exhaustion in this play. “Castruccio is come to Rome, Most pitifully tired with riding post.” Ferdinand “hath took horse, and’s rid post to Rome.” Later in the same scene Bosola says, “Pluto, the god of riches, when he’s sent by Jupiter to any man, he goes limping, to signify that wealth that comes on God’s name comes slowly; but when he’s sent on the devil’s errand, he rides post and comes in by scuttles.” Keeping within the play’s metaphoric structure, we can believe that both Castruccio and Ferdinand have ridden to Rome on the devil’s errand…

I used to love to tease out textual clues like that, and find clever ways that the structure of something, or the images it referenced, supported character or theme. It was a useful pleasure when I was an actor, since finding out these little connections was the key to building a nuanced performance. But I’d guess in the last ten years I haven’t tried reading anything this deeply at all.

I recently finished a first read through Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, but even though that book really demands a close reading I found I wasn’t able to muster up the attention for it. I glossed a lot. Then, in doing some digging around online for other people’s impressions of the book, I found this essay that suggests that an odd, throw away reference that Pynchon put into The Crying of Lot 49:

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo…

In his essay Pynchon’s Inferno, Charles Hollander argues that this reference is meant to make you curious about Remedios Varo, lead you to try researching him, discover little information but be exposed to the name Marcus Terentius Varro (whose name is a cognate of the painter’s), an ancient Roman satirist who wrote in a style called Menippean Satire, a form which:

He developed the form into a medley, or mixture of humor, philosophy, song, and rhyme on any topic that struck his fancy at the moment, managing to scoff at all the fad and fashion of the time while avoiding, or submerging, any political bitterness he might have felt.
- Hollander:Pynchon’s Inferno

This is also the form that Gravity’s Rainbow takes, and Hollander is convinced this odd clue in The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon tipping his hand to anyone who happens to be looking, revealing the workings behind his chosen style.

Now, that’s all quite a stretch, and these days information on Remedios Varo is not hard to come by. Maybe Pynchon just knew his paintings, and one he remembered fit his purpose for the image he was looking for. This could be true even if he was intentionally working in the style of Menippean satire. This could all be essentially an elaborate conspiracy-theory-style chain of concoctions unintentionally invented by a source happy scholar digging for influences. But so far all the Pynchon I’ve read is very keen on conspiracy theories, and it does not seem so unlikely to me that he may be playing games with scholarly readers like this. His novels do echo the form of satire described.

Coming up with potential clues like this is the kind of depth I would like to go into again in reading something this year. I don’t know what yet. Maybe more Pynchon. Maybe something else.

A possibility is this great program I read about here, the St. John’s College Summer Classics in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

A Summer Classics seminar is not a lecture, nor is it a book club. At St. John’s, seminars are lively, in-depth, highly participatory conversations on the reading at hand. Discussions begin with an opening question presented by a tutor, but can take on myriad dimensions. Everyone contributes in some way to the conversation, bringing ideas to the table whether they have familiarity with the topic or not. Listening is just as important as speaking, as connections among ideas make for stimulating conversation. No previous knowledge of the author, text, or subject is required; participants should refer only to works the group studies together. Our conversations are not debates. Challenging others’ ideas or offering alternative thinking is encouraged as long as the goal is insight, not didacticism.

These week-long seminars take place in July, and are limited to 16 participants each. Groups are led by two members of the St. John’s College faculty, or occasionally, guests from other institutions.

Frankly it sounds like heaven. These last ten years have just burned by too fast. Time to limp a bit in Jupiter’s service.

(See how I brought it back around there!)

And this is a major studio Hollywood release opening wide across the US, and starring Brad effing Pitt.

Then I watched this Bruce Sterling Layar Keynote linked to from Warren Ellis’ blog recently, in which Mr. Sterling, observing the list of top ten cities in which Augmented Reality technology is being R&Ded, marvels:

Google Trend “Augmented Reality”; where are they interested, you might ask? Seoul! Number one, Seoul South Korea. Number two, Singapore. Number three, Munich. Number four, Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur! Number five, Auckland. Auckland! Taipei, Amsterdam, Delhi, Lisbon. San Francisco, last. That’s Silicon Valley.

If you’ve got about 50 minutes time, watch or listen to the whole thing:

Video: Bruce Sterling’s Keynote – At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

Cultural gravity precesses around the globe over time. For a while post WWII it settled under the United States and innovation in culture and engineering all seemed to follow threads that took them through Manhattan, Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I’m guessing that was largely due to the relatively open welcome the US maintained to the world’s intellectuals and creatives in those post war years. Whole swaths of brainpower from the countries swallowed by Fascism at that time transplanted to the US. During the cold war, if you were smart or creative behind the Iron Curtain and wanted out, and could get out, the US would take you in.

Those days are gone, and Europe, written off by American Nationalists as moribund, has made itself a more attractive environment for global creatives and is seeing the gravity of invention returning.

In design, green tech, augmented reality, mobile communications – basically in every cornerstone of tomorrow – it is Europe that is moving forward and the US that is moribund.

Personally, I hope the US can shake itself out of the grumpy sulk it currently persists in.

But I have to say it’s very nice to see the names of cities other than San Francisco linked to next generation web development – and to hear languages other than English spoken casually in mainstream American films.

This osseus dome, once arched nobly over the seat of one man’s reason, now reduced by time to the state of a broken cathedral, abandoned, cast in plastic and sold over the counter at Puzzle Zoo.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

It’s an iffy recording of a good performance. If you already love this song you know everything about what I’m going to write here. If you don’t, but you want to, get the album Homogenic, put on some headphones, turn the volume way up, call up the pluto track, and listen with a vulnerable brain…

I can’t claim Björk as my savior – but I can say that there was a moment which I can still remember when her music became completely necessary for me. It’s not that I dismissed it earlier, it’s just that it was only music, sort of in the background, interesting in a kind of detached, intellectual way.

Then one night I was frustrated with some mess in life, and knocking about aimlessly in my apartment with Homogenic on a bit too loud, and pluto comes on. You know how that one goes. Few words, and much pained keening.

As it went on in that middle bit, where the ratcheting tense rhythm is cranking tighter, tighter, and her voice is just moaning in a grating key with more pressure, and more pressure… it might have been the mood I was in, or the music being too loud, or maybe both, but it was making me feel real rage. I really couldn’t think in actions, I was just irritated to the point of rage by the noise of the song and her voice and then, just when the whole thing was on the edge of unbearable, her anguished keen flips into this incredible squeak of delight.

It was like the back of my head flipped open at that squeak, and the fury I was feeling spread out into the space all around me as joy.

It seemed to me then that rage was just joy in a state of confinement, and you need to find a way to pop the pressure on it to let it out into the world. I was sort of ecstatic the rest of that night, due entirely to that one song.

I realized that Björk doesn’t actually make songs – she orchestrates emotional experience. I still turn to pluto for release when I can’t work myself out of an emotional corner alone.

Pluto is the god of death, and death is the conversion of flesh into ideal. Life is a ratchet of frustration, tightening only and never loosening unless you can find a way to just snap. That may seem horrible, but it isn’t. There are ways to snap beautifully, and spend all the energy stored in frustration in an explosion of joy. Snap the right way, and the explosion can be self sustaining, like nuclear fire. This song showed me how to die/change/be otherwise, when you need to, with a spastic blaze of grace.

What does it do to you?

mojojoseph

goodeyesniper

Happy Easter too, I guess!

After my previous post titled Printcasting I was contacted via comments by Dan Pacheco, who has founded a company actually called Printcasting that does a bit of what I was going on about in that post. I took a look through his company’s site over the weekend and it’s neat – so here’s some more info about it.

Printcasting – people-powered magazines

The basics are laid out in more detail here, but the main points as they appear to me:

• The Printcasting site provides an automated method for aggregating RSS feeds from any source into articles laid out in an automated fashion for printing, alongside ads.
• In addition, the site provides the ability to view the periodical online in a sort of page flipping fiew, and these can be distributed via a small variety of web based widgets.
• You do not have to make a magazine just to contribute articles. If you set your blog up with an RSS feed that delivers full posts, you can hook up your feed to Printcasting’s service and anyone on the service who is making a magazine can include your posts as articles in their publications.
• You do not need to provide your own content to make a magazine. You can use any of the registered RSS feeds to fill your magazine with content. You can also just do it all with your own content if you want, but you don’t have to.
• As an advertiser, you just set your ad up with the Printcasting service, and it is automatically placed in the magazines created by users. You do not have to do any negotiating. Ad placement will eventually cost a small fee, but at the moment I believe it is free.
• As a publisher, you do not need to solicit ads, they will be automatically placed in your magazine for you by the service.
• There is a plan to share revenue from ad placements with publishers.
• From what I can see, there is no built in step to automatically print your magazine, that is, I think, left up to you to arrange yourself once it is produced.

That seems to be the basics. Dig into the site for more detail. To me, the strength of this model seems to be the automated assembly, pretty hands off and helpful in creating newsletters and local interest small run, leaflet like periodicals. It doesn’t look like a newsstand magazine, it looks more like a newsletter, and the automated layouts are pretty basic and vanilla. It doesn’t look like you have much control over what the ads you accept look like or how they are placed, it all follows a basic set of templated looks that will not wow anyone in a graphic design way. But it is a quick, cheap, uncomplicated way to assemble information of interest to narrowly targeted groups into an easily distributable, printable format.

Another company that requires more upfront effort and design skill on your part, but produces a magazine that looks pretty much like the kind you see at newsstands, is MagCloud:

From their About Us:

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
How much does it cost?

It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud. To buy a magazine costs 20¢ per page, plus shipping. For example, a 20-page magazine would be four bucks plus shipping. And you can make money! You set your issue price and all proceeds above the base price go to you.
How are they printed?

MagCloud uses HP Indigo technology, so every issue is custom-printed when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publishing expense. Magazines are brilliant full color on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers. They look awesome.
What do I need to do to participate?

You’ll need a PayPal account or major credit card to buy magazines, and publishers will need a PayPal account so we can pay you earnings. To create a magazine, you’ll need to upload a PDF, which means you’ll have to create your magazine in a program that outputs high-res PDFs like Adobe® InDesign.

During our Beta orders must be sent to a US shipping address.

This is a pretty cool looking POD magazine publishing service, which is capable of producing what appear to be really slick periodicals.

MagCloud looks like a real magazine. It doesn’t aggregate content for you, you have to do all the content and layout work, and produce a high res, quality PDF to send them, but from there they enable POD magazine sales, apparently worldwide, or at least that is the intent. The Beta seems limited to the US. You don’t seem to have to pay to set one up, your buyers pay per issue at a 20 cent per page plus whatever profit margin you tack on rate when they order one, and it looks like MagCloud will pass on your cut via paypal. MagCloud takes the orders, does the printing and mailing. All you do is all the layout and creation work, and upload files to the service. MagCloud does not help you find advertisers or in any other way subsidize your effort.

MagCloud doesn’t look like it gives you a fully readable online option, but it does provide a preview page flipper thing. Click the “show preview” button on this sample to see one.

I think MagCloud is an HP initiative pointed at selling the POD presses to many local print shops, but as a result it seems to set up a really classy looking POD magazine solution.

I wonder what comics pages would look like in one of these things?

The above two services are geared toward putting digital content onto a printed page. This next one looks like it is being used to put printed content into a slick digital presentation, and to serve as an online platform for native digital publications formatted in magazine fashion:

Issuu

From their About Us:

Issuu makes your publications look good

Issuu turns your documents into beautiful online publications. Publish to an audience of millions and get your message across to anyone, anywhere. It only takes a minute and it’s free.

Features and benefits

* Upload your documents and we turn them into professional online publications.
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This looks really astonishingly slick. It might be a great way to make your POD MagCloud zine readable online as well. It has tools that allow embedding. For example, here is a back issue of Juxtapoz from their library:

There are many, many layers of POD/online publishing possibilities available, and more being born every day it seems. If you want to make beautiful things in both the virtual and real worlds, you have even less excuses not to do it. The tools to enable you are quite literally tumbling out of thin air into your lap.

Hat tips: to Dan Pacheco for Printcasting, Andrew Sullivan for MagCloud and Rick Evans for Issuu

Great discussion of Print on Demand is often had at Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel Forum.

Lo Fi Sci Fi – a name derived from “Low Fidelity” and “Science Fiction”, meant to convey the impression of filmed science fiction created by amateurs or on a very limited budget. I don’t know who first coined the term, but I first encountered it in the ad campaign for the Toronto based independent film Infest Wisely, and thought it described a movement I’ve been seeing quite a bit of lately. Science Fiction as a literary genre has always been composed of enthusiastic amateurs writing primarily for themselves and each other as an audience. Science fiction cinema has always suffered in thematic substance as it has generally been made by commercial interested non-fans targeting a mass audience. In general this has meant employing a heavy coat of science fictional eye-candy to recycled western, war and horror movie plots. Actual thematic as opposed to visual science fiction in film has been rare, but the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement, now that the tools to make convincing amateur science fiction films are widely available, is starting to change all that. In posts of this category I’ll be reviewing films or filmmakers I feel fit into the Lo Fi Sci Fi movement.

For our second installment of Lo Fi Sci Fi, we’ll turn 180 degrees from the high production value of Neill Blomkamp’s shorts to a piece that is almost pure ideas, with fairly amateur execution (and was also the film that got me thinking about Lo Fi Sci Fi as a movement in the first place); Infest Wisely:

I first read about this project in a couple of posts on the blog of science fiction author Peter Watts.

The background here seems to be that science fiction author Jim Monroe, after having a novel published by HarperCollins and being unhappy with the experience, walked away from his publisher and plunged into self publishing his work. He has quite a substantial body of work now.

Among the things he made was Novel Amusements – an annual DVDzine (A compilation of short videos on CD-ROM and DVD-R) anthologizing low budget, inventive films. In the course of this project he met six directors who he decided to collaborate with in the making of a very low budget science fiction feature. He wrote the whole film himself, but in seven segments, one targeted to each director’s particular talents:

“It was awesome,” Munroe enthused. “Jon made a fake ATM machine from scratch. Kirby shot a sex scene the rest of us were too nervous to. Craig crafted a bunch of amazing special effects. Chris staged a punk rock show. Rose got us a tiny city to rampage through. And Benny did some chase scene stunts with his crazy art-bikes.”

You can sense his enthusiasm, and when you watch the seven segments that comprise the film, you can see that the filmmakers were really creatively and intellectually engaged in the spirit of this project. They cobbled it together with materials ready to hand, and wrote it to their resources, which basically means it is a science fiction film about ideas primarily, and not about set piece effects sequences or dizzying action.

And great ideas it definitely has. What it’s missing is good, or often even just watchable, acting. It’s a shame really, as you will often have to look past some really atrocious performances to see the brilliance of some of the ideas at play. I hesitate to hold this against the project, as it was very, very low budget and was cast with enthusiastic amateurs. I still think it is worth your time to watch it. I just want to prepare you honestly for what is ahead, so you don’t throw in the towel before the end.

There are some great things in here. There is scary math, nanobot chewing gum, bicycle flash mobs with duct taped mouths, gene swiping assaults in public restrooms, alien art patrons and a floppy diskette that might just save humanity. It’s the stories of multiple protagonists woven together, and though at times it seems the plot threads are only vaguely related, have patience, it all weaves together in the end.

Some of the more poorly performed scenes seem to have been written on the verge of farce, which might have been a misstep as the actors they had are far more passable when just doing regular life – and sometimes the farcical elements come off a bit heavy handed. The anti-corporate stuff is pretty clumsily handled, though understandably so given the writer’s outspoken independence. The thing with the cats near the end was, I think, meant to be weird and disturbing, but comes off a little too flip and precious. I can’t go into that any deeper without giving away a big spoiler. I’ll just say that element could have been handled in a more unsettling manner, and would probably have been more effective. Instead, as the global hazard presented by the “infestation” of the title becomes truly dire, the film staggers a bit in tone between weird bio-thriller and 1970’s Disney live action children’s film, only with ugly political implications.

I guess even that sounds interesting.

It’s a hard film to critique – it is what it is, and it’s very much worth your time to view it. The entire film is available online here (including a very interesting to independent filmmakers commentary track), and you can buy a DVD of it here.

Also, and this is an important thing to look at, check out the excellence of their website. This is how you put your best face forward with independently produced work!

So, to sum up, a very low budget, very rich in ideas, problematic in execution but ultimately successful experiment in independent, smart, Twenty First century science fiction. It is often said of mainstream feature Science Fiction that the films lag ten or twenty years behind the literature. I think it’s actually worse, and the films are really mostly mired in tropes right out of the 1930s pulp era. Fun though that might be, it offers little challenge to the brain and offers no valid reflections on possible future paths from the present moment. Infest Wisely does not lag the literature by even a day, it’s right out there on the contemporary edge, looking clearly, and with deep skepticism, at some very troubling ways into tomorrow.

All that, and it’s free-as-in-beer. So go watch it, and tell me what you think!