Punya Mishra’s Web whatnmnmn

A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled “Editing is Cool.” The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee Willis as saying, “… you can see every single stage of the song and video coming together, along with work logs and lyrics and lots more.”
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Check out Story of Stuff or watch the movie…
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In my summer classes I have the participants complete a video assignment on understanding. This year as always my students worked in groups over a week-and-a-half to select their topics, develop interview protocols, video tape people as they answered their questions, and then edit the footage into a tight 4-5 minute documentary. Here are the projects they created (I am still waiting on one): Read the rest of this entry »

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL tournament. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post I talked about Pangea Day and the Imagine anthem series, where people from one country sing the national anthem of another. Here’s another one, France sings for the USA. Enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

NYTimes technology columnist, David Pogue, has a recent blog entry about Pangea Day, a global film festival coming up in a few days. As he says in his note: Read the rest of this entry »

Musings on local newspaper headlines, 2001 A Space Odyssey, media and creativity, and ending with some thoughts on the meaning of life… a lot to fit into one blog post but again I had the weekend to work on this. Read the rest of this entry »

I discovered PES a couple of years ago when searching for examples of stop motion animation on the web. One glimpse of his work and I was smitten. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished watching Clint Eastwood’s two Iwo Jima movies: Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood is an individual who I have come to respect a great deal. His evolution from the somewhat rabid “Make my day” vigilante to the nuanced and thoughtful filmmaker gives me hope (both for myself and for humanity). Ever since his directorial debut “Unforgiven,” Eastwood has developed into a tremendous director, willing to subvert genre cliches and deconstruct traditional tropes and narratives. These two movies are no exception. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oscars got one thing right tonight: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song, Falling Slowly from the movie Once. I saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, during my trip to New Orleans, and loved every moment of it. I heard that they had been nominated for best song (or whatever the technical term was for the category) and I was rooting for them… and checking the CNN website a few minutes ago discovered that they had won! Read the rest of this entry »

Taare Zameen Par (loosely translated as “Stars on the earth”) is a new movie produced and directed by Aamir Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. He also acts in it. What is unique about this movie is that despite its Bollywood trappings, it is a somewhat serious take on education in India. Through its story of a creative but dyslexic boy struggling to survive in school, TZP makes a heartfelt argument for going beyond tests and typical academic knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »