“Creative Evolution” starts production!
What are those fossil gaps trying to tell us? Could they be signatures of another arrow of time in evolution, not just in gradual adaptation.. but instead in a punctuated tempo representative of quantum leaps in evolution? Hmmm…..
So starts the questions on the new film in production with Dr. Amit Goswami called “Creative Evolution“ – A Physicist’s Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design
We started production in the green grass on Summer Solstice at the University of Oregon in Amit’s old stomping grounds. We had some lively conversation about the nature of reality and our part within it, and a received a powerful download. It was a great shoot, and a good start to this new documentary.
Next month we will be filming at the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park Colorado. Mike Triebold there at the Center will be letting us do some filming in their paleontology lab, as well as the exhibits for the film. Thanks Mike!
Sand Mandala Timelapse
When the Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour visited our hometown in 2008, we had the opportunity to mount an HD 1080p camera to the wall above the mandala table. We then ran the camera directly to a Macpro via firewire so it could create daily quicktimes.
The creation of a sand mandala is a sacred event that creates a vortex of intention and prayer into a tangible blessing that can be felt by anyone. The intricacy and attention to detail is unmatched, and the symbolism unparalleled.
We then compiled over 24 hours of footage and sped it up about 10,000 percent so you could enjoy it in 3 minutes instead of 3 days.
http://www.gadenshartsetour.org
Deactivate Visual Editor – Wordpress
I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.
The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/
Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour
The Bluedot team has been having a lot of fun working on some promotional films for the Gaden Shartse Monastic Tour; a fund raising and outreach program from the tibetan buddhist monastery located in the refugee area of southern India. The footage in this 7:00 introduction was collected from old archival pieces from the monastery, and when we toured with the monks to Aspen Colorado in 2008.
Enjoy!
Writing: Foreign Mistakes
We can learn a lot about the importance of proper word choice from the mistakes of foreigners.
I was in a Chinese restaurant in Spain and as if their troubled translation of the menu into Spanish wasn’t bad enough, they had also translated it into English. Next to some of the menu items there were asterisks. I looked to the bottom of the menu were the asterisks were explained and expecting to see the word spicy or vegetarian I read this: “These dishes are no longer in existence”.
Ok I’ll admit there’s nothing really wrong with the grammar here. It’s just so outlandish. What is most compelling to me (nothing to do with writing) is that these people reprinted their menu and rather than take the items off, they chose to memorialize them. If the phrase had read, “these dishes are no longer served” it would have been very pedestrian, very normal. But “existence” balls us over; it elevates the phrase to the level of poetry.
As writers we should employ strategy in the use of our words. There are times to be very clear even predictable and other times when it is nice to surprise or shock. The element at work in the phrase on the menu is surprise and the effect is humor. What makes the word “existence” so powerful is the context. If it had been in a speech about lost lives the word would have been merely factual. But existence for a menu item – it’s hilarious.