Showing posts with label interesting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interesting. Show all posts

Monday 3 August 2015

So much to learn, so little time

You know, when I was younger, I used to wonder how I was ever going to be able to read all the books that had ever been written.

We have access now to so much information and knowledge via the internet, never mind 'fear of missing out', I think sometimes I have 'fear of not having enough time to find out and learn about it all'.

Reading about a random topic on Wiki that leads to a marathon onward link trail; finding that one picture or article or video on Facebook or Youtube or Pinterest that leads to discovering a new hobby, travel bucket list destination, singer, artist or just really interesting fact...anything! I love that.

I'd watched the odd video link posted by National Geographic before, but only recently realised that they were from a whole Short Film Showcase of videos from around the web. I'm working my way slowly through them - it's a great Sunday morning contemplation exercise. And I want to share the ones I love the most on the blog. One at a time, short little nuggets of thoughts and ideas. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

How about this beautifully mesmerising clip of the process of traditional hand egg painting in Bukovina, Romania, to kick things off? 


The Art of Egg Painting: Ciocanesti, Romania from Jungles in Paris on Vimeo

Ornamental eggs are a signature craft of Eastern Europe. The jeweled Fabergé versions once coveted by the Russian nobility are really just a high-end take on a humbler, older, and perhaps even more remarkable Easter tradition. See the full story.

Credits: Directed + Shot + Edited by: TITUS ARMAND NAPIRLICA

Wednesday 7 January 2015

Assassin's Creed

All right, a little fan-girl geeking out coming up. You have been warned.

I'd always known of the Assassin's Creed games, but had never played them or really known about them in depth.

And then a couple of years ago I came across this really cool video of parkour/free-running inspired by the Assassin's Creed game style.



I loved it! But still I didn't attempt to get the game itself at the time. There was no particular reason; I guess I've just never been a massive action game player.

And then last year I played the most recent Devil May Cry, DMC, and really liked it. My little sister and I started working our way backwards through that franchise over the summer and it got me playing games again (we played quite a bit of video games growing up - Pacman, Super Mario, Bomberman, Sonic, my favourite Ecco the Dolphin ^_^...)

Anyway, so Assassin's Creed Unity was launched just at the end of last year and the guys who did the original parkour video did another one with 4 people, to tie in with the new game's multi-player co-op capability.


Talking about how cool it was with my other sister's boyfriend over Christmas, he said he had Assassin's Creed Black Flag on his Xbox and let me have a go on it. I have to say I didn't get into it so much on first play because I found the gaming style quite complicated, the controls confused me somewhat. But I was on board now, and after finding Assassin's Creed II on special offer on Steam over New Year's (=D) I gave it another shot. And I'm really glad I did as I was very impressed with the whole world and back story that they've built up for it - warring factions, Templars and conspiracy theories, sci-fi crossed with historical drama! The intrigue! The sense of adventure! I'm a really clumsy assassin though; I keep walking into walls and falling off rooftops (unintentionally)... and my brain's inability to realise that it's not really me climbing up those high places is a bit of a problem (I'm scared of heights) but it's definitely a great game. I really like how detailed the locations and historical information are, it's almost like going on a virtual tour of the time periods the games are set in - currently I'm still rampaging through Renaissance Italy.

I also can't stop re-playing the cinematic trailer for Assassin's Creed Unity because I love the song - Lorde's smokey cover of 'Everybody wants to rule the world' - and the action is so brilliantly choreographed to every beat. Very neat.


Word is that the next one is to be set in Victorian England. That'll be interesting. But the one I really hope they develop is the short side game China Chronicles that they've already released. Not only would the backgrounds and graphics plus the martial arts influences that'd be in there be so awesome, the main selling point for me is that the assassin in that story is a woman!

Saturday 19 July 2014

The Drowned Man

Way, way back in January, one of my friends treated me to an evening out to see immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and the National Theatre's most recent offering, The Drowned Man. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Seriously. It was mind-blowingly awesome. I loved it so much I couldn't stop recommending it and took my sister and her boyfriend, and my youngest sister all to see it to make sure they didn't miss it. My youngest sister liked it so much we went back to see it again, just a few weeks before it finished its run. If it hadn't wrapped, I suspect we might have gone again. Yes it really was that good, and no, that is by far not the most times people have been.



The Drowned Man is set in a 1960s Hollywood film studio, Temple Pictures. Inside the studio where stars and starlets chase their dreams, two lovers struggle to make ends meet. Tragedy strikes when infidelity, scheming and betrayal drive them apart, leading one of them into ever increasing delusion and paranoia until eventually it ends in a horrific death. Strangely, a similar story unfolds in parallel outside the gates of the studio among the people of the town. Even more mysteriously, something happened to Temple Studios itself, which we are told was shut down overnight for an unknown reason...

Do you know Punchdrunk? They made their name through pioneering large scale immersive theatre where audience members are free to roam and interact with the sets, the story and the characters.

I'd been to an open air promenade play before (based on Lords and Ladies, the Discworld book by Sir Terry Pratchett) which was staged in a park and where the audience followed the actors around the various scenes as the story unfolded. But we were still only watching in the background. Punchdrunk's productions are truly immersive. They convert huge disused buildings into unbelievably detailed sets and you are allowed to go wherever you want as the actors enact the story around you. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, you choose what you want to do and see. Though, 'seeing' doesn't describe the complete sensation, it's more 'experiencing'. You don't just watch as a passive audience, you have to work for it by choosing what to do. Very often you have to chase after the characters (up and down stairs, through narrow corridors, across forests and deserts...) as they go about their business. You can stand right next to the actors in a fight, sit at their desks, eavesdrop on intimate conversations, read a note they've read, look through cabinets, walk into their homes, riffle through their belongings... the amazing sets, the sounds, the smells, the music, the lighting, and the actors, all catapult you into the world that the story creates. It is as if you are watching from inside the story, beside the characters. It's like a live-action computer game. There are some rules though - all audience members have to wear a mask, talking is not allowed, and you are encouraged to explore on your own. A lot of it is practically in the dark, with only strategic lighting to guide you through the huge maze of rooms and sets. The more you search, the more secrets you uncover. And if you are very brave (and very lucky), you might find yourself rewarded with a special interaction.

For The Drowned Man, four floors of an old postal sorting warehouse was converted into Temple Studios and its town. The scale and detail of the sets were just incredible. To give you an idea of the sheer size, it played host to around 40 cast and 600 audience members at full capacity, with lots of space still left over. There was a working cinema inside. Yes really! You could have gotten lost in there. Each show ran for three hours but that was still not enough to see everything. You could easily have spent it just exploring the sets and rummaging through the details. And if you decided to follow the characters, there were multiple story lines happening simultaneously all over the four floors and it was impossible to follow everything. My friend and I missed a whole floor on the first visit and even after seeing it three times I hadn't followed every character.

The story itself is inspired by Woyzeck, a fractured, unfinished play by George Buchner, about a soldier who is driven crazy by his lover's affair and ends up killing her. It also draws on ideas from other works including short story The Sandman, and novels The Day of the Locust and Something Wicked This Way Comes. To quote Punchdrunk's own description, Temple Studios is a place where '...celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world' as we '..[follow] its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.'

For me, it very much gave a sense of the dark underbelly of the Hollywood dream - voyeurism, exploitation, obsession and corruption. I loved the air of menace that ran through the whole story, the allusions to the malevolent and the supernatural that played with the mind and made everyone very jumpy. I loved how, as the audience, we wandered around this world in eerie white masks as if we were ghosts - we could see the characters but they couldn't see us (or could they...?). The freedom to roam everywhere and be so close to everything completely blurred the fourth wall and, in a crazily beautiful way, brought full circle the very idea of fantasy/reality that was being played out.

I also loved that each person's experience was completely unique to them - only I saw everything the way that I saw it, even though we were all watching the same thing. And because of the story-within-a-story, multiple layered nature of the game that we were playing, we could all be seeing a different layer of the story depending on how deeply we were looking for hidden clues and trying to unravel the secrets. Oh how things clicked into place when reading spoilers afterwards.

I can't wait to see more of Punchdrunk's work. I'd first become aware of them a few years ago when they turned railway arches at Waterloo station into the setting of an immersive play for the launch of a sci-fi horror game for one of the big consoles (found out too late, didn't see it T_T). Their Sleep No More, which has located the story of Macbeth inside a 1930s hotel, is currently running in New York. Will they bring that back over to the UK? Or will their next production be something completely new? I wait with bated breath! Here is Punchdrunk's founder, the genius that is Felix Barrett, to tell you a bit more:


PS. All the scenes you see in the trailers are from the actual sets that were on location.

Sunday 20 May 2012

Globe to Globe

As part of the World Shakespeare Festival this year, the Globe theatre has been playing host to theatre companies from all over the world for their special Globe to Globe season. All 37 of Shakespeare's plays are being performed over 6 weeks, each in a different language.




I've been to see 3 of them: A Midsummer Night's Dream in Korean - it was so, so good! Really funny, with a great twist on the original plot and incorporating Korean music, costume, make-up and theatre style; Titus Andronicus in Cantonese - I didn't know this grim tale before...let's just say I don't think I'll see pies in the same way ever again; and yesterday I caught Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Portuguese - I loved it! The folk carnival-esque costumes and decor, the circus theme, the music and the singing!

I would have loved to have actually been to see the Haka that was in the Maori Troilus and Cressida O_O




Globe to Globe goes on until 9 June, catch it if you can!

Thursday 17 May 2012

Planet Earth Live

Anybody else also loving the animal stories and cute babies in Planet Earth Live?





I loved the Planet Earth series and was a huge fan of the Big Cat Diaries when they were running so I'm following this one with lots of interest.

There's updates, snippets and behind the scenes on the Facebook and Twitter links too.

Friday 27 April 2012

Finished Reading - Snuff by Terry Pratchett


39th book into his Discworld series and Sir Terry is still going strong.

His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Anhk-Morpork City Watch has been dragged on a holiday to the country estate of his wife Lady Sybil and he's really missing the city. He doesn't like the countryside, can't get on with its folk and they all seem to know something that they don't want him to know about. Soon enough he finds himself investigating a brutal murder and unearths some very, very bad things that have been going on...

I love all the Vimes and City Watch stories, my favourite being Night Watch, but I like the whole series. If you're not acquainted with Disworld, it is a flat planet carried on the backs of four elephants who are on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. It's a place strangely similar to our own but there the humans rub shoulders with all the denizens of the fantasy/science fiction realm.

I started reading the Discworld stories in my mid-teens after going to an open air production of Lords and Ladies for a friend's birthday party. I love the mad-cap whirlwind story telling and the often laugh out loud humour: the quickfire dialogue, clever wordplay, in-jokes and astute observations, satire and parodies.

It does seem that Sir Terry has become more serious in his recent books: the raw, mad energy of the earliest stories reigned in, the visual gags toned down, but the sharp humour is still there. And there has always been a moral thread in his tales; he's talked about Death, social injustice and ethics many times before.

Snuff isn't one of the strongest stories, there are some loose threads in the subplots, but it's a good romp none the less. It's always fun to revisit this world that is so well imagined now after nearly 30 years, to see old characters and meet new ones. I'm looking forward to the next adventure!

Friday 6 January 2012

Flashed face distortion effect

I am fascinated by optical illusions, things that can trick your brain into seeing strange phenomenon because of the way it interprets information that it receives. Makes me wonder if what I'm seeing and not seeing are really there (or not)...

This is a very interesting example, a quite recent discovery called the 'flashed face distortion effect' where ordinary, unaltered faces turn rather ugly and scary in front of your eyes. Follow the on-screen instructions to see the effect.


Monday 21 November 2011

In picture... old religions

Parsee Fire Temple, Mumbai.

Zoroastrinism is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions, founded about 3500 years ago in ancient Iran (Persia). Did you know that the Parsi of  India are descended from Persian Zoroastrians who fled to Gujarat in the 10th century to escape persecution after the Muslim conquests? Today, the Parsi are the largest surviving group of practising Zoroastrians.

Monday 12 September 2011

Happy Mid Autumn!

It's the 15th day of the 8th month in the Chinese lunar calender today, the Mid Autumn Festival! Also known as the Moon festival, it is the day in the year when the moon is at its fullest and roundest and was originally associated with moon worship. Traditionally it was also a celebration of the harvest.

Chang' E the moon maiden who stole the elixir of immortality, with the Jade Rabbit

Today, it's a day when families gather (the round moon symbolising reunion) and moon watch, celebrating by moonlight, eating lots and lots.

A many coursed dinner would be followed by lots of fresh fruit - pears, starfruits, pomelos, and of course, moon cakes. These are round pastries with sweet fillings. There are so many varieties of moon cakes now, but my favourite is still the traditional ones with the sweet lotus paste and crumbly yellow egg yolks.

Can you see why they're called Moon cakes? =D
Photo by china roamer

My absolute favourite part of the festival is the lanterns. When I was younger in Hong Kong, our living room had French windows looking out into the garden and there'd be brightly coloured paper lanterns hanging from the top ledge, the candles flickering inside. I liked the special shaped ones the most, rabbits, tigers, goldfish, star fruits...

A shop selling beautiful paper lanterns
Photo by Dead Cat

Of course, being allowed to stay up late and wonder around with a pretty lantern was incredibly fun. Public carnival-like celebrations would also take place, with huge lantern displays, performances and stalls.

Look out for the big, round moon tonight!  You might just see the Jade Rabbit. According to Chinese folklore, he lives there with Chang'E, the maiden who flew up to the moon after stealing and taking the elixir of immortality.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Horrible Histories

Have you ever read the Horrible Histories books by Terry Deary? They use a mix of comic illustrations, fun facts and jokes to bring to life historical events and figures. I'd always liked history at school for its stories more than anything.

Well, the BBC have been doing a live-action version of the books on their children's channel which has been winning all sorts of awards. They have top comedy writers working on limitless material with a brilliant cast of actors who have a whale of a time making complete idiots of themselves as people from different eras and places (ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, the Vikings, the Tudors, the Middle Ages etc etc).

Cutting edge Roman technology - aBook launch





The best part is they parody a lot of current TV shows, and the resulting sketches are just hilarious - think Aztec Come Dine With Me, Historical Masterchef...

Historical Wife Swap (the French Revolution)





I love the musical numbers the most, especially the ones that parody current bands and singers.

The 4 King Georges - as a boy band (!)





It's great fun to watch and you learn interesting things along the way. I'm a shameless fan.

Wednesday 25 May 2011

Moving Photographs - Jamie Beck

I was immediately fascinated when I came across these amazing 'cinemagraphs' made as animated GIFs by fashion photographer Jamie Beck and visual designer Kevin Burg.


They are so cool! An arty photograph suddenly comes to life with a blink or a passing car, or a waft of wind blowing on a few strands of hair, whilst the rest of the picture stays perfectly still.


As they are arty photographs at their base, they are definitely not just pixelated movies on endless loop.


I find the movement slightly hypnotic. They make me think of Harry Potter's moving photos.


For more, visit Jamie's cinemagraphs blog.

Links updated 10th Jan '15

Monday 17 January 2011

Embroidery of Heavenly Beauty

Went to see the Imperial Chinese Robes exhibition at the V&A at the weekend. Dresses and robes worn by some of the emperors and empresses of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) are on loan from Beijing's Palace Museum. It's the first time they have been shown in Europe, though many visitors to the Forbidden City have not seen them either as most of the collection is kept in storage.

Emperor's yellow dragon robe, 1736-1795.

Wow. What can I say? Photographs don't do them justice, let alone words. The embroidery work is astounding. Only the most skilled masters would have been commissioned, using the best material to make the most exquisite garments for the emperor and the royal household, so you can just imagine the quality. Each piece is covered in needlework so fine, the fact that they are all done by hand makes them that much more fascinating. The most amazing thing is how well they've been preserved - the colours are still vibrant after hundreds of years. Some of the unused rolls of fabric seem as if they've been woven yesterday.


Empress' festive headdress 1875-1908


Woman's shoes, 1875-1908

The exhibition isn't very big but the robes and accessories on display require close appreciation so it is well worth seeing. On until 27 February 2011. Makes me want to visit Beijing even more!


Length of green satin, 1796-1820

Images via V&A.

Friday 22 October 2010

Pillars of the Earth

How is it that I missed all these great stories when I was growing up?

Michael Morpurgo's Warhorse - which, incidentally, is being made into a film by none other than Steven Spielberg because he fell in love with the story after seeing the amazing play, and now Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. The TV mini-series is being shown on Channel 4 after its run on Starz in America and I am hooked after the first 2 episodes. Ridley Scott is executive producer (!) and the amazing cast plus the complex story set in 12th century England with its court politics played out alongside the human stories makes for riveting TV. It could only have worked as a TV series, film would not have done it justice.

Thursday 23 September 2010

Warhorse

Went to see Warhorse at the New London Theatre yesterday. It is absolutely stunning. It's based on the book by Michael Morpurgo about the First World War as seen through the story of a horse called Joey who is sold to the cavalry and shipped to fight in France, and Albert, the farm boy who raised Joey and enlists in the army to look for him and bring him home.

The horses are represented on stage by incredible life size puppets that feel very real and the story of friendship and the horrors of the Great War are truly moving. The charges across the battlefields gave me goosebumps.

Saturday 21 August 2010

Men of the North Winds


The BBC's been doing a season of documentaries on the Normans on BBC4. They're fascinating! I knew about 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, we all learnt that at school, but I had no idea that the Normans conquered a lot of southern Europe and fought their way into the Middle East as well. Did you know that Sicily was once ruled by the Normans?