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Quest for a great one-liner
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Quest for a great one-liner Your winning words will inspire SCI-FI-LONDON’s 48 Hour Film Challenge
Godzilla’s director Gareth Edwards won the first 48 Hour Challenge
Gareth Edwards, went on to direct Monsters (2010) and Godzilla (2014), and is currently working on a spin-off of the Star Wars franchise. This year’s 48 Hour Film Challenge takes place from 11 to 13 April, and will be judged by a jury that includes the writer Neil Gaiman, Adam Rutherford from
Theatre’s dark arts Flatland, Dilston Grove, London Simon Parkin
THERE is a disproportionate focus on the visual in public art exhibits. This, anyway, is the view of Maria Oshodi, artistic director at Extant, a professional theatre company of visually impaired artists. And this is why, for a chilly week in March, a cavernous hall in south-east London’s Dilston Grove hosted Flatland – a drama delivered in total darkness.
BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science and film composer and musician Simon Boswell. Participants have to create a sci-fi short in only 48 hours, based on a set title and prop list, and all submissions must include a specific line of dialogue. This is where you come in. Write a line of dialogue that
creates an interesting premise for a science-fiction film, and submit it via the form at bit.ly/ NSmovieline. Make it something intriguing to do with science, and remember that the film-makers are constrained by time and resources. Entries should be no longer than 20 words. We’ll pick the snappiest, most originally expressed ideas we receive. The judges from New Scientist and SCI-FI-LONDON will then select one winner who will receive a pair of tickets and party invites to the 2015 SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival, plus an ev ATC hard disc by G-Technology. This rugged disc is built to store up to 1 terabyte of data and to cope with the rigours of location filming. Nine runners-up will also be selected, each winning a pair of festival tickets. The closing date for entries is 2359 GMT on Friday, 3 April 2015. Full terms and conditions are at bit.ly/NSmovieline. You can find out more about the festival at sci-fi-london.com. n
Flatland is experienced only through sound, movement and touch. Robbed of sight, the only way to navigate the environment is by placing your trust in a handheld cube created by Ad Spiers, a postdoctoral associate at GRAB Lab, Yale University’s centre for studies in robot manipulation and biomechanics. Its top half jutting and swivelling, the cube leads you through a tightening spiral corridor, or past a
jutting clutch of pipes and tubes, and into an immersive, often eerie story. GRAB Lab’s unobtrusive cube suggests how a new generation of haptic devices might guide both visually impaired and sighted people around museums and heritage sites, leaving their senses open to their surroundings. But the play’s the thing, and genuinely new forms of theatre don’t appear often. Even at this experimental stage, Flatland announces the arrival of a compelling (if slightly oxymoronic-sounding) new art: sightless theatre. n
warner brothers/capital pictures
CULTURELAB has teamed up with SCI-FI-LONDON to offer readers the chance to win tickets to the 2015 SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival. The festival runs from 28 May to 6 June at venues across the UK capital, and showcases some of the best and most original films in science fiction, including a selection of UK and world premieres. It will include features, documentaries, short films, animation and film-making events, plus a host of industry workshops and networking sessions, but the festival is probably best known for its 48 Hour Film Challenge. Over the last five years, this contest has seen more than 1000 films completed, some of which have been screened at other film festivals, broadcast on TV or, on a couple of occasions, even led to feature film deals. The competition’s first winner,
Flatland is still in its proof-ofconcept phase – the final production won’t launch till 2018. It gets its inspiration from an 1884 satirical novella written by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott. Abbott tells the story of a two-dimensional world populated by two-dimensional characters. In Extant’s version, an exile from “Robbed of sight, the only Flatland briefs the audience way you can navigate is before sending them as spies to by placing your trust in his lightless homeland: a twoa hand-held cube” dimensional world of sorts.
21 March 2015 | NewScientist | 47
Quest for a great one-liner Your winning words will inspire SCI-FI-LONDON’s 48 Hour Film Challenge
Godzilla’s director Gareth Edwards won the first 48 Hour Challenge
Gareth Edwards, went on to direct Monsters (2010) and Godzilla (2014), and is currently working on a spin-off of the Star Wars franchise. This year’s 48 Hour Film Challenge takes place from 11 to 13 April, and will be judged by a jury that includes the writer Neil Gaiman, Adam Rutherford from
Theatre’s dark arts Flatland, Dilston Grove, London Simon Parkin
THERE is a disproportionate focus on the visual in public art exhibits. This, anyway, is the view of Maria Oshodi, artistic director at Extant, a professional theatre company of visually impaired artists. And this is why, for a chilly week in March, a cavernous hall in south-east London’s Dilston Grove hosted Flatland – a drama delivered in total darkness.
BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science and film composer and musician Simon Boswell. Participants have to create a sci-fi short in only 48 hours, based on a set title and prop list, and all submissions must include a specific line of dialogue. This is where you come in. Write a line of dialogue that
creates an interesting premise for a science-fiction film, and submit it via the form at bit.ly/ NSmovieline. Make it something intriguing to do with science, and remember that the film-makers are constrained by time and resources. Entries should be no longer than 20 words. We’ll pick the snappiest, most originally expressed ideas we receive. The judges from New Scientist and SCI-FI-LONDON will then select one winner who will receive a pair of tickets and party invites to the 2015 SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival, plus an ev ATC hard disc by G-Technology. This rugged disc is built to store up to 1 terabyte of data and to cope with the rigours of location filming. Nine runners-up will also be selected, each winning a pair of festival tickets. The closing date for entries is 2359 GMT on Friday, 3 April 2015. Full terms and conditions are at bit.ly/NSmovieline. You can find out more about the festival at sci-fi-london.com. n
Flatland is experienced only through sound, movement and touch. Robbed of sight, the only way to navigate the environment is by placing your trust in a handheld cube created by Ad Spiers, a postdoctoral associate at GRAB Lab, Yale University’s centre for studies in robot manipulation and biomechanics. Its top half jutting and swivelling, the cube leads you through a tightening spiral corridor, or past a
jutting clutch of pipes and tubes, and into an immersive, often eerie story. GRAB Lab’s unobtrusive cube suggests how a new generation of haptic devices might guide both visually impaired and sighted people around museums and heritage sites, leaving their senses open to their surroundings. But the play’s the thing, and genuinely new forms of theatre don’t appear often. Even at this experimental stage, Flatland announces the arrival of a compelling (if slightly oxymoronic-sounding) new art: sightless theatre. n
warner brothers/capital pictures
CULTURELAB has teamed up with SCI-FI-LONDON to offer readers the chance to win tickets to the 2015 SCI-FI-LONDON Film Festival. The festival runs from 28 May to 6 June at venues across the UK capital, and showcases some of the best and most original films in science fiction, including a selection of UK and world premieres. It will include features, documentaries, short films, animation and film-making events, plus a host of industry workshops and networking sessions, but the festival is probably best known for its 48 Hour Film Challenge. Over the last five years, this contest has seen more than 1000 films completed, some of which have been screened at other film festivals, broadcast on TV or, on a couple of occasions, even led to feature film deals. The competition’s first winner,
Flatland is still in its proof-ofconcept phase – the final production won’t launch till 2018. It gets its inspiration from an 1884 satirical novella written by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott. Abbott tells the story of a two-dimensional world populated by two-dimensional characters. In Extant’s version, an exile from “Robbed of sight, the only Flatland briefs the audience way you can navigate is before sending them as spies to by placing your trust in his lightless homeland: a twoa hand-held cube” dimensional world of sorts.
21 March 2015 | NewScientist | 47