Fan Movies

Sci-Fi Lunch Break: Battlestar Sabotage

Mar 9th 2010 12:25PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

I'm sure it made everyone smile when a young James Tiberius Kirk was hauling down a dirt road at the beginning of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek hit the play button on the radio and the Beastie Boys' oh-so-familiar Sabotage came blasting on. But you know what? That cultural collision wasn't just quit geeky enough for someone on the Internet and thus the Battlestar Galactica / Sabotage match-up was born.

This is no ordinary mash-up though. Someone didn't cobble together a bunch of BSG clips and set them to the tune. No, they actually edited the footage to mirror the original Sabotage video as closely as possible. And if you don't remember the original video well enough to have your jaw slightly dropped, give this YouTube Doubler link a go and see if it doesn't do the trick. At the very least, it'll make you want to rewatch BSG something fierce.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: Cyperpunk Post-Apoc in 'Frame 137'

Feb 25th 2010 1:32PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Oh, man, Judd Tilyard knows exactly what kind of movies I like, which is strange because I don't know Judd Tilyard and he doesn't know me. But if you were to run down a check list of my favorite staples of science fiction, it might look an awful lot like this teaser trailer for Tilyard's short film Frame 137.

Based off of a concept from The Crow creator James O'Barr (who gave Tilyard approval for the short), Frame 137 is a hybrid of cyberpunk's "fight 'em all" mentality set, I presume, within the confines of a bar in a perhaps not-too-far-off post-apocalyptic future. Check it out below.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: Living in 'Augmented (Hyper)Reality'

Feb 16th 2010 12:05PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

We all spend nearly 24 hours a day within arms reach of the information superhighway, but imagine what life would be like if you had the Internet piped right into your brain and everything around you was designed to spring to virtual life at your command. Don't worry if you can't picture life on the precipice of the singularity, though, because someone has gone ahead and done it for you with this conceptual demo of an augmented reality future.

From Keiichi Matsuda's Vimeo page:" The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it. "

Enjoy. [Via @slashfilm]

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: 'Xenogensis', James Cameron's First Film

Feb 10th 2010 1:49PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

It's always fun to peek back into the developmental stages of a filmmakers career to see how they got their start. Take James Cameron, for example, and his first short film, Xenogenesis. Today he's known for large scale, sci-fi heavy action films involving robots and aliens and more special effects than you can shake a harddrive at. But what kind of films did he want to make when he barely knew how to turn a camera on?

Well, turns out he was still into sci-fi and robots and special effects and people controlling robots to fight. I guess some things never do change.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: An 'Alien 3'-Pepsi Commercial for the Ages

Feb 3rd 2010 12:54PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

There are a lot of life lessons to be learned from this commercial for Pepsi/Alien 3 that aired during the 1992 MTV Movie Awards:

- If you thought something was cool when you were 12, it won't be cool again for at least another 15 years. Unless we're talking about grunge fashion, in which case, it will never be cool again.
- Don't try to hide from a xenomorph in a barrel, you stupid idiot.
- Pepsi machines cannot be destroyed. They instantly heal from inexplicable explosions and tail swipes from lethal extra-terrestrials.
- If Ripley was a better hostess, she would have offered the Nostromo's guest an ice cold Pepsi and saved a lot of lives in the process.
- Jeremy Davies (Faraday from LOST) doesn't think he's from around here.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: Take the 'Leap'

Feb 2nd 2010 2:02PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be occasionally supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

When I first talked to Sci-Fi Squad Editor-in Chief Erik Davis about launching a column to highlight short films back in the day, the very first thing he linked me to was Leap. The only reason it never ended up as part of the Lunch Break is because it was just a teaser for a short film. Well, now, the whole shebang is online. And by whole shabang, I mean 6 or so minutes of a guy who discovers he can leap through parallel worlds.

Enjoy.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: How to Fake UFO Evidence

Jan 25th 2010 1:35PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

I love a good UFO video as much as the next guy, but the cynic in me who assumes it's all just a hoax is far more interested in the fakery side of things. So if you thought the video of the Green Sphere UFO as glimpsed through the tree line was compelling evidence of visitors from the stars, you might not want to watch the below video that explains how you were (convincingly) fooled.

Oh, and if the Green Sphere never had you convinced in the first place, maybe the glowing orbs over the UK Midlands were a tad more effective. Well, they were faked by the same guy.

[Via ForgetoMori.]

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: The Nazi Retrofuturism of '1945A'

Jan 22nd 2010 12:15PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Oh, those crazy Nazis! When they're not busy building secret military bases on the dark side of the moon, they're apparently busy assembling "Spider Tanks". At least that's what Ryan Nagata's short film 1945A would have us retroactively believe.

From Nagata's YouTube page: "It's 1945, and the Allies are on the verge of winning World War II, when suddenly the Nazis unleash an arsenal of super weapons straight out of science fiction turning the tides in their favor. This presentation was done on a VERY small budget. All the tanks and vehicles (Willy's jeep, Stuart tank, Sherman tank, Nazi "Spider" tank) were done with 1:6 scale models, not CGI."

Enjoy and hop over to Nagata's site for some behind-the-scenes look at how the scale model work was done.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: James Cameron's 'Laser Cats'

Jan 18th 2010 4:02PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Avatar certainly has its share of detractors (they may even be considered a legion after the sci-fi record breaker won last night's Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Film), but no one can make fun of James Cameron's latest quite like James Cameron. With the help of Saturday Night Live and some Laser Cats, of course.

Sigourney Weaver hosted this past Saturday's episode and the best part of it was, of course, the SNL Digital Short. Then again, how do you get better than Cameron pitching a new movie to Lorne Michaels that features time-traveling soldiers who team up with Ellen Ripley to destroy the insidious Laser Cats by hurling Cameron cliches at them?

Brilliant.

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Sci-Fi Lunch Break: What is Going on With 'Alama'?

Jan 15th 2010 4:32PM By: Peter Hall

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[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Okay, so today's Lunch Break is not, strictly speaking, sci-fi given that there is, well, no actual science (or conjecture) involved. The fiction part, however, brings to mind some of the creepier vibes the Twilight Zone used to send off on a regular basis.

The short in question is called Alama and was made by Rodrigo Blaas, an animator for Pixar. Note, however, that this is not an official Pixar short (it's just a tad darker than the family-friendly studio puts out). It's only five minutes long, so there's no point in explaining it all upfront, but for those that require even a bare description before they click a link...it's about a little girl who finds a shop with a doll in the front window that looks eerily like her...

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