This lovely shadow puppetry in Lior’s I’ll forget You is the work of Stephen Mushin, Anna Parry and Sarita Ryan from Stories from the Ground Puppet Collective, a micro-theatre shadow puppet troupe, and Starkraving Productions. Both are based in Melbourne. This year Stephen and the Anna have been touring with Lior’s Shadows and Light Tour, performing live. Spiltpin Limbs is an offshoot of Stories from the Ground, now ‘a major branch in its own right’. I’m not sure exactly how the two relate, except that they look closely allied.  This behind-the-scenes video is really cool, too.

Here are two behind-the-scenes video clips from the makers of the Fantastic Mr Fox movie, showing more of the puppet making, among other things.  In the first, Roald Dahl’s wife Felicity thinks he would have loved it.

Previously: Fantastic Mr Fox trailer

This week’s episode of The Media Show with Erna and Meena looks at fearmongering in online safety ads (via @zephoria).  The show is made by After Ed who ‘create videos about the evolving education sector’. They have given more information on the statistics they worked from.

Campaign Brief has a little more background, and I was not surprised to see direct reference to Royal de Luxe‘s giantess:

‘Lam and Ross took Inspiration from a Mexican Festival puppet and a 7m French puppet.  The French puppet is believed to have cost $2M to build, yet this project didn’t have that kind of budget. The Cox created walking doll is generations ahead of the overseas inspiration in terms of her very advanced mechanics and instant physical appeal.

The Mexican puppet must be Luca. (I have some more information on Luca, but for another post). I think the  ‘generations ahead’ aspect in the case of Royal de Luxe is rather meaningless, and a bit of chest puffing. The fibreglass/plastic look versus the wood/steampunk look is an aesthetic choice, appropriate in each case;  and the movement of RdL’s giantess does not appear mechanically inferior, especially when you see the Allen’s doll’s feet kind of clap on the ground at each step in one of the videos,  and she seems to tilt backwards too much at times.

This cute Sesame Street style video won both the Critics’ Choice and People’s Choice awards in the ACS Nanotation NanoTube ‘What is Nano?’ competition for a video tutorial about nanotechnology. It was a ‘collaborative effort by a group of researchers from University of California, Berkeley including Patrick Bennett, David Carlton, Molly Felz, Nola Klemfuss, Glory Liu (singer), Ryan Miyakawa, Stacey Wallace, and Angelica Zen’.

Andrew Bird – Lull (daytrotter version): cool music, interesting shadow puppetry and animation.

(via Loobylu Tumbles)

Before Tony Robinson played Baldrick in Blackadder and hosted Time Team and The Worst Jobs in History, he did a great little kid’s story show called Fat Tulip’s Garden. Imagine my delight to find a few of the episodes on TouTube. It’s interesting to see it described as a cult classic – I thought it was just me!

My little kinetic sculpture of the lovely Twitter Fail Whale, based on the image by Yiying Lu that is used when twitter.com is over-capacity. The image is called ‘Lifting up a Dreamer’. I’ve wanted to make this since I first saw the image some weeks ago.

This is a short video of it in action, complete with twittering birds!

More photos here. (Update: fail whale widget here)

I remain optimistic and supportive of Twitter in the long term, because I think the real-time courier service rationale that was the founding impetus of the service constitutes a new branch off Doc Searls’ live web, and makes our online interactions a quantum step closer to Allen Searl’s original vision of  ‘a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time’. Twitter’s track facility, presently down but still promised, provides the real-time search of people and and what they are talking about right now.

Maybe the progression of branching-off goes a little like this:

static web > live web > real time web
google > blogosphere > twittosphere
our property > our history in time > our real-time conversation
search by sending out bots> search by listening for pings > search by tracking people and words in real time

It may be that Twitter’s primacy will be usurped by some other real-time service that gets up ahead of them in the race; I hope not. But many great progressive ideas start off serendipitously or in fun without their full implications or potential being known, and in those circumstances it’s silly in hindsight to say the founders ought to have seen further, planned better and acted quicker than they did.

Now playing – strange trajectories, the 2007 ANU School of Art Emerging Artist Support Theme (EASS) award exhibition currently on at the Alliance Francaise in Canberra, is featuring the work of Michal Glickson (painting) and Anna Madeleine (photomedia). Anna is my daughter. She has two cool new video art pieces in this exhibition. She has also recently done the album art for Casual Projects new CD, No Rest, and is showing one of those images at PhotoAccess’s Open all areas 2008.

Previously:

• Play me something…

Mary Black and Shane Howard’s lovely duet version of his song Flesh and Blood. It was replayed on Rockwiz (SBS) last night.