Interesting – new trend in travel promotion??? I just downloaded TourWrist – a 360 camera app for iPad & iPhone

http://tourwrist.com/

Great details in the Nieman Journal article here

http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/02/hello-tokyo-the-guardian-experiments-in-imme…

Excerpt from Original Post, read the full post here:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/real-numbers-from-imaginary-movies-the-distr…

JANUARY 31, 2012 | BY ORLY RAVID

“Distribution panels have it tough: There’s always an audience for the information, but the panelists are always loath to give up real numbers. So this year Sundance tried to have it both ways with “Distribution X,” a January 21 panel that asked top distributors to spill the numbers on imaginary projects.

The panelists were very real: independent producer Karin Chien acted as moderator for veteran sales agent Josh Braun of Submarine; New Video co-president Susan Margolin; Tom Quinn, co-president of TWC’s new label RADiUS; distribution strategist Peter Broderick and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain (“Connected”).

Pitching the mock movies were producer Alicia Van Couvering (“Tiny Furniture”) and filmmaker Senain Kheshgi (“Project Kashmir”). Jay Van Hoy, executive producer of Sundance 2012 selection “Keep the Lights On,” also presided, weighing in and doing the math.

Chien asked for “real numbers” and that panelists and audiences work to keep the speakers honest… with the caveat that, of course, the films don’t exist. She compared the panel to a game show; “There’s no right answer,” she said, “just the best guess.”

So with that, here’s the Sundance 2012 episode of “The Gross is Right.”

Case study #1: Documentary, pitched by Senain Kheshgi

This documentary is about the case of the 10 Muslim student alliance kids at U.C. Irvine who protested/heckled the Israeli Ambassador at a speech in 2010 and were charged with federal offenses.

Expert projections:

“Peter Broderick

The cheapest service deal is $25,000.
The film’s budget was too high; it would need to be cut, with monies reserved for distribution costs.
Could see $10,000 revenue from festivals.
Carve out the ability to sell DVD and digital from your own website.
The semi-theatrical component of the release would be the most critical and revenue generating.
Under this plan, you could make 50% of the budget back….”

A bed-ridden boy finds comfort in miniature people eking out an existence beneath his floorboards in the latest Studio Ghibli fantasy to surface stateside.

The Secret World of Arrietty, which is exclusively previewed above and out in America at last on Feb. 17, filters British novelist Mary Norton’s The Borrowers franchise through the lush, patient film language of Japanese animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away), who co-wrote the script.

read the full post here – can’t wait!

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/01/exclusive-secret-world-arrietty/

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

NBC News is launching a book publishing arm to capitalize on growth in e-reader and tablet adoption, the decreasing cost of e-book production and a backlog of over one million hours of video content.

NBC Publishing, as the business unit will be called, will be part of NBC News, a division of media conglomerate NBCUniversal, and will be based in New York at NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

“Over the last two years, we’ve been looking at the tablet market and e-reader market and watching it develop,” said Michael Fabiano, general manager of NBC Publishing. “Consumers are getting more comfortable downloading books with video. None of this is slowing down any time soon.”

The company will produce enhanced e-books using both archival and new NBC video footage as well as traditional, print-based e-books.

read the full post on:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/nbcuniversal-launches-book-publishing-ar…

About

Overview

The mtvU Against Our Will Campaign was launched in September 2011 in partnership with Free the Slaves, GEMS, and Polaris Project. The campaign amplifies America’s college students’ efforts to end modern-day slavery in the U.S., and empowers them to learn more and get involved. The name mtvU’s Against Our Will Campaign, reflects the simple fact that this violation of our most basic human rights is against the will of the college students mobilizing around the issue, against our will as a free society, and against the will of those trapped in modern-day slavery.

Campaign Partners

	Free the Slaves Free the Slaves is one of America’s leading anti-slavery organizations. We liberate slaves in hot spots around the globe, help survivors rebuild their lives, and attack the systems that allow modern slavery to exist. Our research is widely quoted by universities, governments and journalists. Our documentary films and videos about slavery, and news coverage of our innovative efforts to end it, have reached hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. Free the Slaves has student chapters at 16 college campuses across the U.S.
	GEMS Girls Educational and Mentoring Services’ (GEMS) mission is to empower girls and young women, ages 12–24, who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking to exit the commercial sex industry and develop to their full potential. GEMS is committed to ending commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking of children by changing individual lives, transforming public perception, and revolutionizing the systems and policies that impact sexually exploited youth. For more information, please visit www.gems-girls.org.
	Polaris Project Polaris Project is a leading organization in the United States combating all forms of human trafficking and serving both U.S. citizens and foreign national victims, including men, women, and children. We use a holistic strategy, taking what we learn from our work with survivors and using it to guide the creation of long-term solutions. We strive for systemic change by advocating for stronger federal and state laws, operating the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline (1.888.3737.888), and providing services to help our clients and all victims of human trafficking. For more information, visit www.PolarisProject.org.

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Discoveries

The future of cinema?

james martin

Globe and Mail Update, clarified version

Published Friday, Jan. 13, 2012 6:02AM EST

Last updated Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012 10:42AM EST

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It’s cinema’s great creation myth: In 1896, the projected image of a speeding train caused frightened French carnival goers to leap out of harm’s way. Those early screenings are historical fact—the 50-second film, sensibly titled L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, was made by the pioneering Lumière Brothers—but the panicked reactions may be apocryphal. Still, the story persists—it appears most recently in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s love letter to early cinema—because it neatly encapsulates how a passing gimmick redeemed itself through its near-magical ability to plunge us into other worlds.

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Video

Space adventure fun in Quebec

Now a new technology, being developed on a sketchy block of downtown Montreal, promises viewers an immersive film experience to out-plunge the Lumières’ train or Scorsese’s masterful 3D. No glasses required. No chairs, either.

The Satosphere is an experimental cinema located in a building that began life as an actual meat market, before that particular stretch of lower Boulevard Saint-Laurent took a turn for the carnal. The shiny new glass façade stands in stark contrast to the neighbouring porn theatre and transvestite burlesque club, but what truly marks the Satosphere as a new kind of spectacle is the massive dome protruding from the roof.

Eighteen metres in diameter, the three-month-old Satosphere is a round cinema, but—unlike similar planetarium theatres of old—it uses a hi-tech network of eight video projectors and 157 speakers to completely surround (save the floor) up to 400 people with lifelike sound and images. The effect isn’t 3D in the comin’-at-ya! sense recently back in vogue. Rather, it gives viewers the sense of moving inside the images—even, during particularly kinetic sequences, verging on motion sickness.

“It’s like being in a transparent bubble that’s floating through an environment,” says Louis-Philippe St-Arnault, the director of production and immersive development for the Society for Arts and Technology, the digital arts research, training and performance centre behind the Satosphere. The 32-year-old started his career as a set designer for stage and film, but found himself increasingly drawn into the SAT’s science-for-art’s-sake milieu. Five years ago, he joined SAT full-time.

“People have made domed theatres before,” admits Mr. St-Arnault. “But, strangely enough, they still tried to make the viewer look only at the front, like in a regular cinema. We’re trying to move away from that by not having fixed seating. We want people to be able to walk around, to choose their point of view, both by their body position and what captures their interest.”

Two viewers standing back-to-back in the Satosphere would see, and possibly hear, completely different things, making the experience as much about what you miss as what you catch. Sound overwhelming? That’s kind of the point.

“Everywhere you look in the world, there’s too much information,” says Mr. St-Arnault. “If I choose to look in front of me right now, then I’m missing whatever’s happening behind me.” He turns around. “Now I’m missing something else. Nobody in the Satosphere sees or hears exactly the same movie.”

Researchers in the SAT labs spent three years experimenting with the best way to capture and project images. The process starts by creating 360-degree video footage, either by using a six-lens camera (similar to those used by Google to create its Street View maps) to record a real environment, or by computer modelling entirely virtual scenes. The footage is then rendered into a “flattened” image that is texture-mapped over the virtual surface of a 3D object—in this case, the curved walls of the Satosphere, but it could be any surface—making exacting adjustments to the image to compensate for any distortion that normally occurs during projection onto a non-flat surface. It takes about four hours to import one minute of raw footage, but editing, colour correction and other tweaks add considerably to the process; all told, it takes about a year to create two hours of polished video. Throughout the process, footage is test-screened in the laboratory’s miniature dome, which holds a handful of viewers. Once the video works there, it’s ready for the big room.

The Satosphere is actually two domes: an immobile one that protrudes through the roof, and the slightly smaller projection dome that nests inside. The projection dome is a steel frame panelled with thin sheets of perforated aluminum. (The holes, which prevent sound from echoing and distorting, account for almost a quarter of the surface area, but are small enough not to affect viewing.) Special paint prevents too much light from reflecting back from the panels (too much reflection would spoil the image on the opposite side of the sphere) while still allowing high contrast for the projections.

The eight projectors are grouped in pairs near the top of the dome. The highest projectors are angled down to cover the lower half of the screen; the lower projectors point up. Each projected image overlaps with the next by about a foot, but painstaking projector alignments, and a formidable rack of computers, make for a seamless 360-degree panorama that fills every millimetre of the room.

Every millimetre. That’s the important part.

What makes “the magic happen,” says Mr. St-Arnault, and distinguishes the Satosphere from old-school planetarium-style projection domes, is the high position of the projection dome’s equator, or its widest point, allowing images to be projected right to the floor. (The projectors are angled to prevent roaming audience members from obstructing the light beams.) The dome can be raised, and additional rows of panels added, to change the floor-to-floor curve from 180 degrees to a maximum of 230; the higher the equator, says Mr. St-Arnault, the more our brains are fooled and “the more immersive the space because it gives you a sense of having the horizon all around you.” (The Satosphere is a high-tech operation— Mr. St-Arnault will only say the price-tag is “millions”—in every way except one. Raising and lowering the dome is achieved through technology that wouldn’t be out of place in the girders-and-gears Paris of Mr. Scorsese’s Hugo: pulleys, chains and muscles.)

The Satosphere opened in October, 2011, with a performance called Intérieur. Live dancers, choreographed by Marie-Claude Poulin, moved among the audience and interacted with a two-hour video by artist Martin Kusch. (As if navigating through a dance troupe wasn’t enough sensory overload for audiences, a later performance called Salon de massage McLuhan, inspired by the legendary Canadian media theorist, incorporated narrative-appropriate tastes and smells courtesy of the adjacent “Foodlab.”)

Training artists to create more works for the space is a priority, says Mr. St-Arnault, but the SAT is also exploring non-art applications for the technology. The group has already begun brainstorming with Montreal’s Sainte-Justine children’s hospital (one possibility: a safe virtual environment for phobia patients), and Mr. St-Arnault can see architects using the technology to give clients “tours” of proposed buildings (or even to give neighbours an idea of how that new building might obstruct their views). Whatever the direction, he thinks interactivity will be key, with users one day directing the environment by using smartphones as a kind of virtual mouse.

Special to The Globe and Mail

Editor’s note: This corrected version clarifies the process of developing footage.

The original post also has an infographic on the 360 experience & a video demo

Very cool

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/the-future-of-cinema/…

On January 11, 1991, the then-head of Disney studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, circulated an incredibly important memo about the state of the movie industry and the products they were making. It was called, “The World is Changing: Some Thoughts on Our Business,” and it had a simple purpose: to locate the root of a growing problem and to take steps to avoid falling victim to it.

Katzenberg began the memo by stating:

“As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.”

Read the full post here:

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/how-the-state-of-the-movie-industry…