Our picks this week encompass everything from a comic about kids fighting the power with mythical pets and a way to save cinema history to a Game of Thrones fan film that takes us to the past of Westeros.
Pick #1 – Dunk and Egg: A Game of Thrones Fan Webseries
Brace yourselves… the fan films are coming. Game of Thrones has been an absolute blast to watch, but for some fans of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, ten episodes a year isn’t nearly enough. Enter Chase Boyajian. The writer and Martin fan has scribed a pilot set 100 years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones. Â Dunk and Egg will focus on the events in Martin’s short, “The Hedge Knight,” a tale that follows Sir Duncan the Tall and Aegon Targaryan as they build their reputations in Westeros. The film is being produced by a large team of Game of Thrones fans that just happen to include folks like Holly Conrad and Jessica Merizan on costumes. Please don’t send us to the wall before we get a chance to see this fan film.
Pick #2 – Anthrocine: Archival Film Digitizing System
The state of our American culture is in jeopardy. No, I’m not talking about the upcoming election (though that is important). I’m referring to the archives of film that are now beginning to be lost to the ravages of time and chemical breakdown of their components. Modern film digitization is expensive, and most companies that do it are working on films in active production, driving the costs on digitizing archives extremely high. Athrocine hopes to develop a scanner that will be more cost-effective for archivists to begin transferring their films to digital. Film production today is almost universally moving to digital; now is the time to transfer our film history to hard drives as well.
Pick #3 – Creature Academy: The Legacy, A Steampunk Graphic Novel
Magical creatures of mythology have been partnered with students at a school of magic to train to fight evil. It may sound like Harry Potter meets Digimon, but Creature Academy hopes to bring more to the table than a “this meets that” premise. The group of students must use their magic abilities and rapport with their animals to save their kidnapped parents from evil spirits. If you liked the Arsenic and Old Lace rapport in Marvel’s The Runaways, give this one a shot.
Everyone should check out Conclave – A tabletop-inspired RPG you can play w/friends w/any browser and easily switch between synchronous and asynchronous play. It looks AWESOME.
It looks like a fun way to replicate some classic tabletop gaming when you dont have the time to get together for hours at a time. They are very short of their goal and only have 9 days left. Check it out here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10x10room/conclave
You had me at Runaways 🙂
@Dimitri Thanks for the heads up! TA (and the open source TA:Spring) was one of my favorite games of all time, and Planetary Annihilation was an easy Kickstarter for me to buy into — my first, as it happens.
By all means, this film digitizing project sounds great and it would be great to have a more economic way to digitize film. But make no mistake: a lot of film is doing just fine, and it is a more stable medium than any digital format, for the time being. The “archive” he’s touring is an old commercial storage facility that probably has rudimentary-at-best temperature and humidity control. If kept well, film lasts for hundreds of years, and who knows how long those digital files will stay intact before they become unreadable because of technological changes, bit rot, etc. Yes, save film that’s in danger; but no, digitizing everything and forgetting about the film is not the answer.
Sorry if I’m missing it, but it would be great to have a link accompanying these Pickstarter articles to the previous article in case we missed it. Or add a link to the left under the “Browse Carefully” section. Regardless, these are great posts. Thanks!
For those of you who are RTS fans might I suggest checking this out? It is an amazing project.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts
I also talked bout it on my blog here.
http://www.withmadnessinmind.com/2012/08/24/the-annihilation-of-the-gaming-underground/