Bunny Blog

Got six minutes?  Then I’ve got just the espionage thriller for you!  “Dead Drop” is a concise story of intrigue and betrayal, and I’d say more about it but it would just be cutting into your six minutes!

You can also download a higher-resolution Quicktime at http://www.dvxfest.com/mirror/betrayal2010/entries/Dead_Drop-dougspice.mov

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Who doesn’t want to learn about science from the King of the Vampires and/or Davey Jones and/or whoever he played in Love, Actually?  Nobody, that’s who.  This hit series is ON THE WAY.

Year One isn’t terrible, it just isn’t very good.  It has a few legitimately funny jokes, most of which (gasp) aren’t in the trailer.  What little narrative the movie has is based largely around bible stories, which I guess are all taking place concurrently, because hey, it’s Year One!  As a general rule for this film, Caveman Jokes are pretty funny, Bible Jokes are almost never funny.  It’s a shame, because from the poster you’d think this would primarily be a Caveman Joke movie.

YEAR ONE

BAD-BAD <——————–X———–> NOT-THAT-BAD

Actually really funny jokes: 3

Actually really funny Michael Cera jokes: 0

Actually really funny Caveman Jokes: 3

Scenes that just end with no resolution: 6

Years that Harold Ramis has been coasting on the success of Groundhog Day: 17

Oh, Chopping Mall.  How 8-year-old-me yearned to peek inside your VHS box of wonders and see what mayhem awaited.  Check out that sweet razor gauntlet!  And the back of the box says something about killer robots!  Sold!

This movie was originally titled Killbots, which is a more accurate, and frankly, more rad, title.  There isn’t really a serial killer per se, and in fact these robots don’t even have hands, or good production design.  What they do have are blades and lasers and electroshock devices suitable for murdering the group of crazy kids who might as well be spending the night in the Camp Crystal Lake Gift Emporium for all the difference it makes.  They wander into the woods, err, mall, hoping to spend the night, drink booze, get a little action, and accidentally awaken Jason, err, the robot security guards.  Ruh roh!  Somebody should have brought their razor gauntlets!

FUN FACT: Bad Movie All-Star John Terlesky, star of the trashy masterwork Deathstalker 2, has a smaller role in this film, and now directs episodes of Castle.  Way to go, John Terlesky!

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If you’re a living human, chances are you’ve tried to send an important document via email to your attorney, John Arai Mitchell  – only to later realize that you completely forgot the little detail of actually including the attachment!  Idiot!  No wonder he never writes you back!  He’s got better things to be doing than helping you and your slowbrain recall how the little paperclip button works!  He’s a professional law person.

Well, if you use Apple Mail, fret no more.  Attachment Scanner is a little plugin that scans your email for words that indicate that you think you’ve included an attachment… and then stops you dead in your tracks when you try to hit send!

Now, it doesn’t do the hard work of helping you add an attachment automatically or anything cool like that, but come on, how lazy are you?  This is a nice, free little tool that will give you added peace of mind and a long, healthy, equitable relationship with John Arai Mitchell… nothing more.  Enjoy!

The front page of Yahoo always has some great news headline that makes me click. Their headlines work the opposite way, I think, of how newspapers work, in that they usually don’t tell a lot of information. Scanning through newspaper headlines, or even CNN headlines, you can tell get a good sense of what is going on really fast.

With Yahoo, and a lot of other websites, the headline is not actually meant to inform. It is there to lure you in to reading the whole article. And for me, it always works. I find myself clicking on them all the time. Usually I’m slightly disappointed, but that doesn’t make me less curious the next time.

This Yahoo front page, taken from a few weeks ago, makes me very click-happy. What is the outcry? I want to know! How is the actress’ ad raising questions? Tell me all right now! They usually tell you everything except for one crucial detail, the detail that makes it a “story.” And that’s what you really have to click for. The McDonald’s meal in question was a new burger called the “McItaly,” made with all-Italian beef. If the headline was “McItaly burger sparks outcry in Italy,” which still doesn’t say a lot, I would have surmised that Italy was angry that McDonald’s had named a sandwhich named McItaly for some reason. Probably because of the name. And I would have moved on. But with the headline not including that crucial information, I immediately wondered if McDonald had a new happy meal with chidren’s meat inside. So I had to click.

I suppose fictional stories work the same way. You have to leave some things to the imagination. You’ve got to get readers to bite.

So, in the information age, how do you decide which crucial information should be left out?

New Rose Hotel was recommended to me by a friend as “the worst movie I’ve ever seen.”  Now I know he was not kidding.  A movie featuring Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken and Asia Argento based on a William Gibson story should not be this unwatchable.  Christopher Walken spends a lot of time dancing around, presumably because the director was too passed out from drug abuse to stop him.  Asia Argento sings a lot, which is the audio equivalent of saying that John Goodman has a lot of nude scenes.  All of this happens and yet nobody in the room could tell much of what was going on or why, and not even in the delightful drug haze way that Babylon AD achieves.  In fact, it was so bad that a group of people committed to watching a bad movie had to turn it off and switch to Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead. (more…)

Hey friends!  Seen these badass new Transcend HUD goggles?

That’s right, they’re ski/snowboard/whatever goggles that have a live heads-up display feeding you moment-by-moment data on your speed, direction, temperature, whatever you like.  Basically, it turns you into a living human F-16.  Pretty badass, right?  At $350, even I am tempted to buy a pair, and I’ve never been snowboarding in my entire life.  That’s how cool they are… in theory.

So how the hell do you make a promo video for something so badass that fails to actually show you an immersive simulation of what it’s like to actually wear them??

As someone who’s spent a lot of time creating exactly this kind of video, I’m really disappointed in this obvious oversight which makes me wonder… did they somehow manage to make this product not cool?

Psychic Bunny does a ton of work with the Institute for Creative Technologies and the US Army, everything from Interactive Design to Film Production.  A project we did with them last year has been getting a ton of traction, and was recently featured in The Atlantic.   We did world-building and scenario writing for the interactive experience, as well as a large educational motion graphics component.

Read all about it!

It’s priceless to get in some good creative exercise now and then, so for the past week or so I’ve been spending a lot of my time shooting a short film that I wrote, “Dead Drop.” The film is the story of Mark Granger, a man who is being coerced into betraying his country by a shadowy figure who has kidnapped Mark’s wife.

More stills and stories from the shoot inside!  Click the link!  Do it!

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