The Feed
52 Tuesdays was a tiny Adelaide film production that's gone on to win huge attention around the world. I sat down with the team behind 52 Tuesdays.
The movie opened strongly in the United States taking $A76.7 million on it's opening weekend and it's since taken more than $400 million worldwide with a large proportion of the audience being adults.
Animation director Chris McKay says Warner Bros gave the Animal Logic team a lot of latitude with the film because of the team’s passion for Lego.
"On the one hand they were expecting us to sort of push the envelope a little bit," says Mr McKay. "They understood what we were trying to do."
The film is filled with pop-culture references but many of them are in the background - a style which Mr McKay says pays homage to the style of movies like 'Who framed Roger Rabbit'.
To many people The Lego Movie might feel like a stop motion film but it’s all computer generated. Mr McKay says the animators paid particular attention to things like camera movement and lighting to apply real world limitations to their 3D animation.
"[We] put the camera in places that on a set only the camera could go... put the lights in a place that only the lights could go" says Mr McKay. "That gave it a very realistic feeling."
The Lego Movie was made locally at Animal Logic in Sydney - the studio known for its work on films like Happy Feet.
But despite film being made in Australia we're one of the last countries to see it in cinema.
Mr McKay says he wished The Lego Movie could have been shown here earlier.
"I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself," says Mr McKay. "Top to bottom this movie was made here in Australia."
"There's nothing I wanted more than to show this to the people that made it."
It began in Africa with horny dancing Ethiopian goats. Legend has it that the very first effects of caffeine were noticed by Ethiopian shepherds who saw their goats eating these plump red coffee berries. Suddenly the animals began to dance and copulate wildly.
These days Some 25 million people around the world now grow it, and roughly 27 million acres are given over to farm it.
Coffee is consumed by the richest countries in the world and made by the poorest. The average Guatemalan coffee picker makes less than $2 a day while there are some that will pay up to a $1000 for a special brew delivered straight from the anus of a wild Sumatran cat. It is the world’s most popular and socially sanctioned psychoactive drug.
But the story of coffee is also the story of modern civilisation, politics and culture.
Coffee owes its popularity directly to the rise of Islam.
Back in the 16th century, as the Ottoman spread throughout the globe so too did their drink of choice - coffee - especially, given alcohol was a no-no. In fact the word coffee is actually derived from an old Arabic word for wine.
By the end of the 17th century, Europe was also hooked. London alone had 2,000 coffeehouses. So much so that the King of England Charles the 2nd tried to ban them arguing that coffee houses were where people met to conspire against him.
An early feminist group also demanded the coffee houses be shut down, saying that the drink was causing their husbands to become snotty, “Frenchified” fellows who had lost all interest in sex. Clearly it didn’t work.
Coffee was too perfect a product for every wannabe colonial power looking to exert their economic might. It was non-perishable, addictive, and conveniently made in places filled with slaves.
The relationship between coffee and slavery are unmistakable. By 1791 half the entire world’s coffee was being made by African slaves working on an island in the Caribbean. The conditions for slaves were so brutal; they burnt the plantations down and declared independence. Today we call that country Haiti.
High-powered politics and coffee have always gone together. (And we are not just talking about how George Washington invented instant coffee. He did, but that's not US President George Washington it is actually a Belgian man who was living in Guatemala at the time.) We're actually talking about the cold war.
Coffee was at the centre of the cold war. The US would use their huge buying power to poor Latin American countries like Guatemala, El Salvador just to make sure they wouldn’t align with soviets.
But why? What is the hold that this humble drink has had over us?
Well the key is these two the adenosine and adenosine receptors in your brain. They want to be together, but when you have caffeine in your system it pushes them apart. Your pituitary gland assumes there’s some kind of crisis on and tells the body to produce adrenaline which in turn boosts your dopamine levels and hello caffeine high.
A high that has given rise to empires, nations, corporations and to helping you get out of bed every morning. Because that is the power of coffee.
Graphics by Dan Holohan, Gabriel Virata, and Miller Marshall.
Everyone is guilty of it but is using your mobile phone really an addiction? Some people say it is and are pushing for people to stop 'phubbing' and return to the real world.
We're all guilty of it. You're sitting around talking to friends and you pull out your phone to check your emails, or reply to texts only to realise that you don't know what happened in the conversation.
Phubbing is a mashup of the words phone and snubbing and many online are using it to describe people using their phones and ignoring others around them.
But there's a growing movement of people aiming to put their phones down and break the phubbing trend.
"We've all sort of been in that situation where you're in a cafe or bar, someone whips out their phone and they start ignoring you or they start snubbing you," says Alex Haigh the campaign leader of the stop phubbing movement.
There's now more than 37,000 people who have joined the stop phubbing movement and Mr Haigh says many people have contacted him online as they try to kick their mobile phone use.
"We've had some people get in contact and they might be phubbing at a funeral for example, or a bride phubbing a groom," says Mr Haigh. "I think the smartphones come in... in that they help you to fuel this digital identity."
"It all ties in to this online person that you've created and whether or not that matches up with you you are as an actual person, it varies from person to person."
And while many people might call phubbing an addiction the truth is it is currently not listed as an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM).
Dr Ben Williams, a senior lecturer in psychological science at Swinburne University of Technology, says phone addiction could potentially fall in the category of behavioural addictions like problem gambling.
"It comes down to whether or not the behaviour is causing you distress or to neglect other obligations that you have," says Dr Williams. "I think the difference between a problem with say smoking and a problem with say mobile phones is you don't have to smoke but most of us have to make phone calls."
The Oscars are terrible when your favourite movie doesn’t win or when Gwyneth Paltrow does. But there is a reason your favourite didn’t win today and it all comes down to the demographics.
There are nearly 6000 people who decide who wins and who looses at the film industries night of nights. Oscar voters are nearly 77% male and 94% Caucasian.
The academy is broken down into branches. Actors, producers, special effects etc. Caucasians currently make up 90% or more of almost every one of the 14 academy branches.
But age is the real issue here. The median age of an Oscar voter is 62. Only half of academy voting actors have even appeared on screen in the last two years, and hundreds haven't worked in decades.
Back in 2011, Sony Pictures executives argued that the reason 'The Social Network' lost to 'The Kings Speech' for best picture is simply because old white men don’t get Facebook.
But Oscars don’t come cheap. These days the average cost to win yourself an Oscar is about $5 million. Last year, the makers of Silver Linings Playbook even hired Obama’s deputy campaign manager to help their chances.
And then there’s the vote itself - which is a big part of why sometimes Oscar wins can be a bit bland.
The Academy is one of the few parts of America to use preferential voting.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers literally print out every ballot - even if you voted online - and they stack them up according to who people put at the top of the list. You need over 51% to win.
Let’s say it’s a close year - and this year’s almost definitely was - you suddenly have 2-3 contenders. But none of them have that golden 51%.
So you then head to the other end of the list and take the movie with the least votes and see what was their 2nd preference. Then you redistribute the votes and you keep on redistributing shifting down the 3rd, 4th preferences until someone hits the 51% mark.
But often only a fraction of the winning votes were from people thinking it was the best. Most people thought it was 2nd or 3rd best.
So, no matter what you wanted from this year’s Oscars - it's important to remember that who wins an Oscar is not quite as simple as who is the most popular but who most voters think is OK.
Have you ever seen a film that was so bad that you found yourself wondering "How did it get this way? How did this end up as such a mess?" Well imagine if you could sit down with a director and ask them where it went wrong. Well, we did. And the result was... surprising.
Have you ever imagined yourself looking like a film star or perhaps a president? Well a new piece of software aims to help you become your favourite celebrity by replacing your face with theirs - but does it work?
Imagine being able to broadcast yourself to the internet but with someone else’s face? Face Substitution is an application that claims to offer just that.
Want to be Nic Cage? Sure! Want to be a terrfying pseudo-Rihanna? Okay! Want to be Bieber for a day? No problem!
Face Substitution can track your favourit celebrities face on yours as you’re skyping away. But is it very convincing?
The app maps your facial features and lighting from your webcam and currently has has 17 different faces for you to “wear” in full Silence of the Lambs mode from The Queen to stranger, more abstract masks like “Picasso”.
It's an unusual idea but is Face Substitution something you would ever use?
Selfies. footstagrams. babygrams. drinkstargams. They are the lifeblood of the social web. But now you can exponentially enhance your narcissism with a third dimension.
Seene is an app that wants to bring the third dimenson to your phone. Quite simply it lets you take photos in 3d.
The technology itself has been around for a very long time but they’re using the motion senseors inside the phone to help you map a shape.
You select the subject and rotate around it. Then Seene maps it into a 3d shape. It doesn't always work and when it doesnt you just get the stuff of childhood nightmares.
But the cool part is that that you can use the images Seene creates on any platform - mobile or desktop.
Just last week Seene was even named the UK’s most innovative mobile company by the Smart UK project.
Of all of the things Minority Report promised at least one thing is finally coming true: the ability to interact with your computer with the flick of a wrist.
Well that is the promise of a small device called Leap Motion. If you’ve ever played with a Microsoft Kinnect, think of Leap Motion as small one of those but attached to your computer.
The Leap Motion controller tracks your hands in 3D space and converts your movements into actions and gestures on screen. The tiny LEDs and infrared cameras tracking your movement can generate around 300 frames a second of data - almost 12 times as much detail as what you see on TV.
Certain kinds of lights directly above your desk can tend to freak it out but clearly it’s struck a chord because computer manufacturers are now starting to build Leap Motion straight into laptops.
There's also a steadily growing app store - mostly of games where you can stroke radioactive trees or play serial killer. You can also use it to read The New York Times and potentially even completely do away with the mouse and computer handsfree.
Why re-invent the wheel when you can re-invent the ball. That seems to be the thinking behind Sphero.
At $170 Sphero is halfway between Wall-E and your favourite pet. You control Sphero with your phone and can let it roll in water, change colour, and even impersonate Evel Knievel.
It may seem stupid, it may indeed even be stupid, but credit where credit is due there is a lot of innovation that’s driving this ball of stupidity.
Inside the sealed white shell is a tiny robot that uses a gyroscope to balance on two wheels. The robot drives up the side of its own shell creating forward and upward movements. Think of it like a Segway stuck inside of a ball. The trick is that it runs on gravity.
wires, or battery compartments. Instead Sphero has its own built-in batteries that are charged by passing energy through the shell itself.
The charging station is basically a copper coil, which generates an alternating electromagnetic field and Spehro converts that invisible field into electricity.
Where it really gets fun, apart from torturing your cats and toddlers, are the augmented reality games. Sphero uses your phones camera to overlay a game environment, with say zombies, to give you a unique game play experience. It's fun but gameplay can be challenging. After all you are trying to control a ball that has a tendancy to run into objects.
Elegant, outspoken and fiercely intelligent, Oscar winner Juliette Binoche spoke to me in Paris about acting, filmmaking and more. She gives Marc the first taste of what to expect from the hugely anticipated “anti-blockbuster" reworking of Godzilla from director Gareth Edwards (Monsters). She explains why she turned down iconic roles in Jurassic Park and Schindlers List and how a sculpture she saw when she was 15 years old has changed the way she approaches art, acting and more.
