Everyone’s favourite private dicks are back in the game, this time for Digital Comedy Lab‘s current competition which could see Jim Vultour and co. make it to the big screen by landing a feature film production.
If you can spare five minutes, find out what it’s all about by watching the video above and showing your support for the Vultures crew. Episode 2 of the current season won’t be long behind…
Hot from the edit suite this morning comes a first look at The Devious Theatre Company‘s Night Of The Living Dead, performing at the Watergate Theatre this July. Written by John Morton and Connie Walsh, I’m producing the show later this year – about 12 months on since we started pre-production. The result will be our most planned, calculated, produced, biggest and best production to date – or at least that’s the plan.
As it is a teaser, you can be assured that there is plenty more to come over the next few months. Watch the clip above or check it out on YouTube.
With festival application season upon us at Devious Theatre, and the fact that we’ve now got six years of video material between shows, teasers, trailers, interviews, behind the scenes footage and more – we’ve put together this mashup to mark the past five years of theatre. I say five as we’ve left out some footage from our debut show in Cleere’s in 2006, Heart Shaped Vinyl, largely due to the fact that I’ve been without a DVD copy of it for a few years now but I’m sure we’ll put together some of that for the reboot in 2015.
Or maybe not.
Either way, in 2 minutes and 14 seconds you’ll get a look at Cannibal! The Musical!!, Trainspotting, Smitten (2008 edition), Accidental Death of An Anarchist, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, Scratcher, Shifting, Smitten (2011) edition and some behind the scenes clips from the forthcoming Night Of The Living Dead.
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This was finished at 4am this morning but I reckon we do ourselves justice in it 
Rare has a truer word been spoken. Forget your auto-tune, your computers, your digital this and that, just go out there, pick up a microphone or guitar and hone your craft. I hope the new and next generations of musicians will heed those words.
In what transpired to be a camera error and not a software error as first thought, I wound up splashing out to pick up Final Cut Pro X last Thursday night to complete a video job. Some graphic card warnings from my MacBook Pro later and the realisation that my 2009 64bit iMac with it’s 4bg of RAM may not be up to the task, I’m having a few moments like the above this morning. That said, I’m jumping from a 2009 edition of Final Cut Express 4.01 to Final Cut Pro X (having only dipped my toes into Final Cut Studio on a borrowed machine briefly) so there’s bound to be a few bumps along the way.
There are some things in life that you just can’t throw out. One of those, is the large box of LEGO that sits in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom upstairs. I honestly think that there’s nothing you can’t make with LEGO, case in point, the video above. Very much worth the three minute viewing.
This project is a sortingplant that sorts 2×4 and 1×2 bricks in size and color. The bricks get sorted directly into pallets in a high bay storage system. When a new color is detected, an empty pallet in the high bay storage is assigned to the color. When a pallet is full, a robot retrieves it, and returns a new empty pallet. There are 7 NXT’s in the plant, and they all communicate with each other and a PC application over Bluetooth. The software written in leJOS, with is a java language for MINDSTORMS®. It’s build for a company called Dynaway (www.dynaway.com). They use this model to demonstrate their manufacturing execution system. The model is designed to fit inside one large flight case, for easy transport.
The total project took over 1,000 to put together between construction and programming time.
Via The Journal and BrickItDK
I’ve been getting to grips with the Traktor Kontrol S4 and Traktor Pro 2 after a few months of tinkering around with the LE version of the DJing software for Mac and PC. It looks like they’re going to be making a rather sizeable addition to the Traktor Kontrol family coming March this year if the above clip released earlier today is anything to go by.
Find out more about Traktor here.
There’s one gig I’m kicking myself that I didn’t get tickets for this year and it’s Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds at The O2, my own fault as I got into the album later than realising tickets were actually on sale. As a band, Oasis were always one I kept in high regard, identifiable by the sheer amount of Oasis albums, compliations and bootlegs in my iTunes library. I never did care too much for Liam Gallagher mind you and I wasn’t at all disappointed when he sat in the box for the duration of their classic MTV Unplugged gig.
One song that I’ve not been able to get out of my head, pretty much since the start of the year, is this one – Sad Song. This version was performed on Jools Holland with Noel Gallagher playing 12 string. The song itself is close on 20 years old, having appeared on vinyl versions and Japanese imports of Definitely Maybe – which reminds me that I should really give Paddy Dunne back his CD copy, I’m sure it’s still in the house.
Enjoy.
Ever since I picked up my Apple TV (or more like herself bought me an Apple TV) a year ago this week, I’ve been hoping to get a Netflix account. Then in October it was announced the Netflix were coming to Irish shores in 2012 with no definite launch date set. I figured March / April time might be good. It turned out to be today.
Opening its doors this morning, I’ve already got my Netflix account set on the iPad, Xbox and more importantly, the Apple TV, joining the new TV that arrived in the house for Christmas. If you’ve got a Wii in the house you can also put it to movie use after a fun day’s gaming.
My initial reaction, from a web design standpoint anyway, is that the main website is pants – but it works. There’s nothing fancy about logging into the Netflix website, no amazing bells, whistles, fancy flashing graphics, entertainment news or trailers. Instead, you’ve got a very simple layout for picking through and searching movies by name, actor or genre to stream on your PC or Mac. The interface is also similar for streaming via Xbox, iPad or other mobile devices. The winner on that front is Apple TV with the library functioning exactlty like Apple’s own when it comes to browsing and searching for something to watch and for me, it’s likely to be the biggest player in the house when it comes to consuming what Netflix has to offer.
Regarding content, you’re not going to find all of the latest releases to stream – in fact you might not find any of them. As Netflix continues to strike agreements with the likes of MGM, Sony and other big picture houses, more content will come on board for the Irish and UK markets. Outside of your American block buster shows like The Office, Weeds, Breaking Bad, 24, Prison Break (ok, might be rolling back the years there in terms of examples), there’s also a healthy helping of content from Channel 4 and ITV including older runs like Cracker and Prime Suspect.
Netflix suits my viewing habits, absolutely. I’m not a TV schedule person. Maybe when I was in college and I could tell you exactly what was going on in Emmerdale, Coronation Street and EastEnders (I lived with 4 girls who were soap junkies in my first year in Waterford) but nowadays the only thing I could tell you the time of is the Six One news as its in the title. As it is, most of my TV viewing in recent years has been from downloads from shared sites or streams from dodgy TV forums where you may or may not get the episode you’re looking for and the quality can be rather questionable. I also can’t do the series thing on a weekly basis. If there’s a good series running, I tend to let it run to the end and then seek out a box set to throw myself into for a few days. Spare time doesn’t come along too often but when it does, I like to indulge and cram as much in as I can, not wait a week or a fortnight for the next 42-minute installment.
Equally, Netflix suits my taste and style in movies, at least where the Irish listings are concerned on first review today. I’m not one for the recent releases. If there’s something screaming at me in the cinema to go see then yes, I’ll go see it, but for the most part I like to throw myself into older movies or movies I’ve seen time and time again. When it comes to buying DVDs, I’ll hit up HMV for five €3.99 DVDs of older releases before I’ll go for on €17.99 new release. Having access to older action movies, westerns, comedies, documentaries and the likes is much more appealing to me than having the latest and greatest releases.
And, to top it all off, the €6.99 a month price point has to be viewed as a bargain. In cutting TV costs, I cancelled my Sky subscription late last year, something that was running in the region of €30 a month. At €6.99 a month to access the same shows I was watching on Sky when the chance presented itself, and unlimited access to movies I would otherwise have to pay €5-odd for any time I wanted to view something, I’m on a winner, as I’m sure are a lot of other people who like to sit down at the weekend with a DVD and a bowl of popcorn and lose themselves for an hour or two at a time.
So, dear Netflix, welcome to Ireland. Hopefully there’s a strong enough subscriber base to see the service grow and the Irish & UK library expand but for the moment, and despite some begrudgers comments I’ve read online over the course of the day, I feel spoiled for choice and with one months subscription costing substantially less than a trip to the cinema, I’ll be holding onto my account for some time to come.
Also, if you nip over to Netflix.ie to sign up, you get a month’s trial that you can cancel at any time. All you can eat movies and TV for free for a month? Surely that’s worth a punt.
Something Happens were an ever present in party playlists over the past 12 months where Devious Theatre or All Time DJs were concerned but it’s taken me until now to go back search for this video. It’s got all the staple ingredients of a 90s classic – long hair, flashing colours, star jumps, windy beaches, sunglasses, beach balls in the studio and more besides. Video or audio, it’s a cracking tune.
I’m a web designer, actor & producer, theatre lover, home chef, presenter of The Arts Show on KCLR96FM. All views are my own.
© 2011 Ken McGuire · All Rights Reserved
