Bunny Blog

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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It’s not a good sign when the best thing you can say about a movie is that it features that guy who played Eldin on Murphy Brown, and gives you some fond memories of that show, and how towards the end he was Murphy’s nanny. This, however, is the sad truth of Michael, part of John Travolta’s (Phenomenon, White Man’s Burden) successful project to squander his indie credibility from Pulp Fiction even faster than Uma Thurman (The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Batman & Robin).

An important plot point is that Michael, much like Spawn, only has a finite amount of mystical powers and can run them down, making himself sicker, as he does good deeds.  If you do not immediately see where this is going, you have never seen a movie ever in your whole life. (more…)

I am so very very glad she's painting in the Patron Saints series again

Long ago when I was kind of a jerk, I knew a very talented young woman named Sarah Atlee, with whom I once dropped a box of superballs down a the 14-story stairwell of the local Marriott to see how high they’d bounce back up. Sarah is a professional artist and a very good one at that and as part of an ongoing penance for that whole being a jerk thing, I like to make people aware of her work whenever I can.

I caught a blog post of hers last week that I quite enjoyed, about useful things to try when you are feeling stumped. I love, love, love that in addition to being a working artist who is genuinely doing interesting things that showcase her own unique voice and perception of the world, Sarah takes the time to be much better at having a blog than we fools here at the Bunny. Sarah’s tips for re-starting the creative juices can be read here. And while you’re at it, you should read her treatise and suggestions on How and Why to Title Your Work.

CSI NY and Director Eriq La Salle shut down 4th street between Spring and Main to film some St Patrick’s Day Parade footage.  Despite the photo evidence, Doug was not there.

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