Fantastic. This is the guy/team also responsible for the Google TV hoax currently doing the rounds. Yes I was almost fooled by the Google TV one, but after a little digging around it became clear it was a hoax.

I’m glad I did the digging around, because otherwise I might never have found this gem.

While the Google TV hoax is impressive in terms of the hoo-ha it’s kicked up on the interweb, I personally prefer to think of the odd gullible person who is currently wrapping their phone in ethernet cable and putting it in a tinfoil covered salad bowl.

More ‘Infinite Solutions’ videos on YouTube.

Below, I will embed a twenty minute short into this post. The short is by Stu Maschwitz, author of ‘The DV Rebel’s Guide‘.

The DV Rebel’s Guide is a comprehensive guidebook to planning, shooting, and finishing your own digital movie.

Stu works in the visual effects industry in Hollywood and has a fairly impressive list of credits to his name, including Star Wars, Sin City and Superman Returns - his involvement in the latter two being through his company ‘The Orphanage‘.

He says himself his day job is directing commercials, and you can watch his showreel on the Orphanage website, which includes one I recognised where a woman driving a toy VW Polo is chased by a cat… remember that one?

Oh, and he’s also responsible for developing ‘Magic Bullet‘ - a colour correction system which makes Digital Video look more like film.

He also has a fairly active and interesting blog worth checking out.

But the really impressive thing about Stu and his book is the fact that the proof is in the pudding. The film embedded below ‘The Last Birthday Card’ is a showcase for Stu’s skills, which his book will attempt to impart to you. The film is about two hitmen and features shoot outs, helicopter attacks and car crashes.

Is it a good film? Hell no. It’s terrible.

But he made it for $5,000. That’s pretty impressive and shows he obviously knows his stuff - whether his book can teach you his tricks I can’t say, not having read it, but Robert Rodriguez seems impressed, he says:

I’d been wanting to write a book for the new breed of digital filmmakers, but now I don’t have to. My pal and fellow movie maker Stu Maschwitz has compressed years of experience into this thorough guide. Don’t make a movie without reading this book!

Any filmmakers out there read this book? Find it good? Please comment!

Jason Sho Green is an artist/illustrator who, according to his website, makes his living as an illustrator and sho-repairer.

His ‘allmenlikebirdsmustdie.com’ site divides his work into two sections - art/illustration and old drawings.

While some of the art/illustration work is undoubtably good stuff, it’s in the old drawing section that I think he shines.

However, Jason doesn’t seem to like to keep things simple. If you visit allmenlikebirdsmustdie.com you will notice that the page title is youyesyou.net which turns out to be a daily cartoon site by Jason, which ion turn also leads you to yet another site of his, jasonshogreen.com which showcases more of his artwork.

Enjoy browsing the internet maze that is Jason Sho Green.

The Irish film Once has won the World Cinema Audience Award in the dramatic category at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. From director John Carney, who brought us Bachelor’s Walk, Once is a modern day musical about a busker, played by Glen Hansard, who falls in love with a Czech singer/songwriter, played by Marketa Irglova.

John Carney was once a member of The Frames - for whom Glen Hansard is the lead singer - but left to pursue a film-making career after shooting some music videos for the band. Glen and Marketa worked together previously on The Swell Season and some of the songs from that album feature in this film.

Following on from The Wind That Shakes The Barley taking the Palme D’Or at the last Cannes Film Festival, it is another encouraging sign for the Irish Film Industry.

Once was made for €100,000 over a period of two weeks and shot on Digital Video. It now looks set to be picked up by one of the major distributors in Hollywood.

For more information check out this review, this interview with John Carney, this live performance from Sundance and this report from Sundance.

In reality his influence created something similar to these examples below. This post is dedicated to Eoin. King of slapstick around here !