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The seven main characters on SpongeBob SquarePants were supposedly based on the seven deadly sins:
Sloth: Patrick
Wrath: Squidward
Greed: Mr. Krabs
Envy: Plankton
Gluttony: Gary
Pride: Sandy
Lust: SpongeBob
That’s right, a talking sponge that wears pants represents lust.
In a memo to the writers of The Unit, David Mamet (the show’s executive producer) provides a short but master class in writing for television.
THINK LIKE A FILMMAKER RATHER THAN A FUNCTIONARY, BECAUSE, IN TRUTH, YOU ARE MAKING THE FILM. WHAT YOU WRITE, THEY WILL SHOOT.
HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
(thx, mark)
I’d really like to watch Life, the newest multi-part nature documentary from the BBC, but the version showing on Discovery in the US is narrated by Oprah Winfrey and not David Attenborough. Guess I’ll wait for the Blu-ray version for the full English experience. Or maybe they’ll release a German version narrated by Herzog? Pretty please? In English?
I had no idea how many outdoor scenes on TV shows are shot on a green screen. Here’s a reel with several before and after examples.
(via that’s how it happened)
It didn’t feature an athletic woman with a flimsy bra throwing a hammer through a screen, but I thought Google’s Super Bowl ad was pretty well done:
I couldn’t find the entire first hour of the season six premiere of Lost that was supposed to have leaked online, but this contains the first two minutes (plus two minutes from last season):
Update: I’ve gotten some angry emails saying that I have spoiled the Lost season premiere for people by embedding this video showing the still frame of Jack on an airplane. To rebut:
1. Lost is unspoilable. What you think is happening either didn’t happen, won’t happen, will happen again, and has nothing to do with with happened previously or afterwards.
2. Seeing the first two minutes of a TV show doesn’t spoil the TV show…that’s just watching the show.
3. At the end of last season, if you picked the most obvious scenario for season six to open with, it would have been that the bomb reset the timeline and then seeing everyone on Flight 815 headed safely for Los Angeles, oblivious of all that we’ve witnessed in the past five years. You can’t spoil the obvious.
Update: Ok, here’s the first hour of the season premiere (starts at around 1:35:20). It’s a poor recording with even worse sound, but it’s watchable if you have to know RIGHT NOW. (thx, jeffrey)
All 101 episodes of Lost are available on Hulu right now (US only). The season premiere is in 5 days…plenty of time to catch up on all ~73 hours of plane-crashing, hippie-communing, smoke-monstering, eye makeup-wearing, nicknaming, time-jumping weirdness.
We’re about a week away so this synchronized view of the crash of Flight 815 in realtime is a good amuse bouche for the season six premiere of Lost.
Actual football played in a 60-min NFL game: about 11 minutes.
So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps.
Of course Andy Warhol made a TV show for MTV called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.
The whole thing is a perfect snapshot of everything to love and hate about the 1980s: the art bull market, Manhattan, fashion’s hardworking LGBT backbone, and the nature of celebrity in the dawn of the fractured and streaming media world we live in now.
The link above has pointers to downloads of footage from three shows. (via fimoculous)
Ryan (the intern) from The Office has a photo blog.
Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.
Here’s the trailer for The Avon Barksdale Story, a documentary about the real-life Baltimore gangster than inspired the Avon Barksdale character on The Wire.
Barksdale’s real name, Nathan Avon Barksdale, and his nickname, “Bodie,” were both used in the series as composite characters. Avon Barksdale was The Wire’s first season’s central character. The storyline focused on the Barksdale clan and their ruthless hold on Baltimore’s underworld and the intense efforts of law enforcement to stop them. Barksdale was a real crime figure in Baltimore.
(thx, mark)
A bunch of clips from movies and TV that show people enhancing things on computer screens:
And a more artful collection of hyperspace scenes from movies:
Both are via Andy, Mr. Supercuts himself.
Loosely based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, The People Speak is a show that features well-known actors reading famous speeches and letters from American history.
Using dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans, The People Speak gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice.
The show starts airing this Sunday but many of the performances are already available online.
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