Ephemera 2009 (4)

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

-- John August does a great post on The Remnants, his web-pilot, including cost breakdown and cameras used. This is where the New Media's going to come from at first, of course: pros mucking about in the cheap end of the pool. Personally I'd pay a buck a pop to see this every week. And, quite frankly, John's mad not to continue this in webcomic form.

Two casting notes. a.) Ze Frank is pretty good. I'm certainly more likely to cast him in something, having seen him in this. b.) Justine Bateman doesn't have a lot to do here, but she auditioned for Sophie Devereaux on Leverage at a moment when it looked like Gina's visa wasn't going to come through ... and she tore the roof off the joint. Seriously, seriously soulful, dead sexy read, and funny. She did, by far, the best "bad actress" scene in the auditions. Second only to Gina. It's bizarre to think how different the show might have been.




-- My new favorite bit of concept art (click for fullsize). More by the artist Jason Chan here.

-- Sure, everyone loved Paprika, but I'll stick with Millenium Actress.

-- Courtesy Bruce Sterling, a case of kidnapping on Facebook. I don't think anyone's fully plumbed the New Identity in a non-"Hollywood explaining it to executives" way in mainstream narrative (we may not actually be able to). A few years ago, when Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor came to LA, I invited them to a Lucha VaVoom. Standing outside the theater, I suddenly realized that, despite months of e-mail conversations and casual familiarity, I had no idea what they looked like. I called Alice on her cell and guided them in as if on sonar.

-- Turns out synching Google Calendar with your iCal just requires this. It doesn't synch shared calendars as far as I can tell, but it's good enough for government work.

-- James Moran shows off his workscreen. Can't do it, myself -- I need Screenwriter on fullscreen when writing, although the new outlining pane is intermittently useful. I just tried a new workflow on the movie I'm writing, we may take a look at it this week.

-- Ken Levine's doing a series on how actors memorize scripts. I'm calling Mark Sheppard up and getting his answer, seeing as he's become The Guy Who Can Do the Two Page Speech.

-- Speaking of learning (and memorizing) I'm back on the Pimsleur Method for Spanish. I have to say, for a city where one-hour commutes are the norm, language tapes are efficient, and Pimsleur quickly got me to the point where I could read a newspaper and hold pretty decent conversations. I lost a lot of it since I moved to Canada, but now that I'm back in a functionally bi-lingual city, it's coming back. The tapes are mixed with high-school activity workbooks and a favorite trick -- children's books printed in the language you're studying.

Thinking of trying Rosetta Stone online, so if anyone's had experience with it (or has any other language-learning techniques), give a shout in the comments.