I’m fully prepared to complete every sentence I utter about John Hodgman in the future with the qualifier “is a delight.” Author, comedian, professional voice actor, celebrity spokesperson — Hodgman keeps the sort of schedule that would make even the most hardened globe-trotting blogger ball up into the fetal position. When we finally nailed him down for an interview on the Engadget Show last month, we asked him to meet us at the General Society for Mechanics and Tradesmen in midtown Manhattan. It’s a place not far from Times Square that our producer Ben discovered while shooting a segment about the annual meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Club, a group of menswear enthusiasts who meet each year on 11 / 11 — the date most closely resembling corduroy.
It’s a strange and beautiful old space that dates back to the early 19th century, as a resource for apprentices of a society that can, in turn, be traced back to 1785. It seems to serve a different purpose now, a couple of older gentlemen shuffling in and out of the library during the three hours we spend there, each staying quiet, seated alone at a small table, reading novels and history books from off the shelves. For today, however, it’ll serve as John Hodgman’s own private library, the tongue-in-cheek backdrop for his long-awaited Engadget Show interview. Ben and I go back and forth a bit, prior to his arrival, debating whether or not he’ll embrace the silly premise. He agrees immediately after traveling in from Brooklyn, offering up a single, key caveat: it’s actually the annex to his own private library.
The cameras roll and without missing a beat, he slips into his deranged millionaire persona, a character that has popped up a bit over the past few years, as Hodgman has wrapped up his trilogy of “complete world knowledge,” the last entry of which, “That is All,” was released in paperback and audiobook forms this week. “This,” the mustachioed author explains, “is the end of world knowledge.” It’s a journey that began in 2005, with the publication of “The Areas of My Expertise,” an almanac of sorts compiling the comedian’s knowledge of “matters historical, matters literary, matters cryptozoological and hobo matters,” to name but a small cross-section. Hodgman was a self-described former professional literary agent at the time, first making a splash amongst the literati some five years prior with the publication of the column “Ask a Former Professional Literary Agent” for uber-hip San Francisco publisher McSweeney’s.
This week we got to speak to the multi-talented Genndy Tartakovsky about his direction of the new-to-theaters animated feature Hotel Transylvania. This film is a big step in an already star-studded path for Tartakovsky whose creative career also crossed paths with or was straight up responsible for Dexter’s Laboratory, Power Puff Girls, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and soon Popeye – another animated feature coming soon. Have read here as we trade words with the director on his new vision for a monster-filled hotel filled with the likes of Adam Sandler, Steve Buscemi, and Andy Sandberg.
The story we’re seeing here with Hotel Transylvania is one with lots of monsters all having a fabulous time staying in a hotel run by Dracula. Of course Dracula has a daughter who wants to see the world, this all coming to a head when a human named Jonathan arrives at the hotel by chance – and there’s not supposed to be any humans at the hotel. Thus ensues a lovely comedy fest crowned with the top-notch visuals of Sony Pictures Animation and the music of Mark Mothersbaugh.
What we’re interested in is how Tartakovsky handled this movie with his past experience in more traditional animation in mind. How does Tartakovsky work with TV shows vs a star-studded feature for the big screen?
Genndy Tartakovsky: I think that one of the main differences is the pressure. With a TV show you work for multiple shows and when the show comes out, if one episode comes out and doesn’t perform as well as it could, the audience usually forgives you. Then the next episode is going to be better. There’s a pressure to perform, but it’s OK if you have an off episode once in a while.
With a movie, you have opening weekend and then that’s it. Everything is done for that opening weekend, and if you don’t get the characters right, and the humor and the entertainment and everything, then it fails and all that work is gone. It’ll be gone within 6-8 weeks and then that’s it.
So to think of it like you have one shot, it makes you think quite differently.
SG: You’ve had quite an expansive career when it comes to animation – how would you describe the difference between shows you’ve worked on like Dexter’s Lab or all the way back to Batman: The Animated Series back up to Star Wars: The Clone Wars and this new film Hotel Transylvania?
GT: In a way it’s hard to compare because one is CG and one is 2D. The two are very obviously different in the way we use the pencil. The one big difference for me, personally, is – when I worked on Dexter, especially – is I know how to do every different part of animation production. From the lighting to the camera work to the sound editing, mixing; I’ve done it all before.
Some things I can do better than others, obviously, but I know how to do it. So if there was something to troubleshoot, I could have an opinion about it. But then on CG, I don’t know how it works – to fix something, I have to trust my official tech supervisor Dan Kramer. All I could say is “yeah I don’t like the way that’s working,” but never say “let’s use this different lens to make it work.”
GT: I could just say “this isn’t working, let’s try a different way to try and fix it.” It was something that was very difficult for me because I’m so used to problem solving and having this push that’s a big part of being a director, in my experience. Especially on technical things – “why doesn’t this camera look right?” And then I’d figure it out. So in our production I couldn’t do any of it because I just didn’t know.
After a while I realized that I’m in good hands, and it became easier that way. In some ways it was a lot easier, in some ways it was a lot harder.
SG: You recently did a Reddit AMA post answering questions from the public – could you describe the changes in the way you’re able to communicate with viewers of your shows and now movies over this rather quickly evolving time period you’ve been working in?
GT: I remember when we started on Dexter, the internet was just sort of taking off – and we never went online to see the reactions. And now you can get thousands and thousands of reactions to a movie or TV show. I remember when we were doing [Samurai] Jack and it was taking off and after each episode we’d go and see what people thought, and on Sym-Bionic Titan it was even more intense and especially on Clone Wars. You could go to Star Wars [online] and totally see that all the fans were talking about if we messed it up or not.
What’s great for television is you get instant feedback. It’s a more specific audience that’s talking back, it’s not everybody, but you definitely get a clue, and see what people like, if your stuff is landing. It was really hard on Dexter – we would do an episode, we’d air it, I’d watch it at home, and I’d go “yeah I guess people liked it, I have no idea.”
GT: Then on Monday you’d get a rating, “oh I did a 2.2″, and that’s it. It wasn’t until I started doing comic book conventions and film conventions that I actually met some of the people who love the show and they would say how much they loved it. Then our numbers would slowly start going up, and you’d start to realize – “oh, it’s getting popular”.
It’s a really hard thing to capture, the popularity, especially when, in the beginning when Cartoon Network only had 12 million viewers. You know when Nickelodeon has a 120 or 160 or something, it’s different in such a mass. But what’s so much fun about a movie is that I can go to a theater to see if I’ve failed or succeeded instantly.
SG: What’s the difference between the built-in fanbase you had with Star Wars: Clone Wars and the audience you’ll have with Hotel Transylvania? Is there a big difference?
GT: For sure when you’re doing something that’s built-in like Star Wars, it’s all about getting it right – for yourself being a fan, and for the people who know the material and the last thing you want to do is be insincere about the material and change it so much that people hate it. Like saying “that was a huge disaster!” But here you’re presenting a new idea.
And you’re selling it for the first time, so you want to try to do something – you’re trying to sell your point of view. You want to do something that’s new and fresh and people have an experience watching. It’s a really big pet peeve of mine to – you know, I’m selling my point of view, it’s what I get hired for. And if my point of view is the same as 5 other directors, then I’m screwed. Replaceable.
But if my point of view is very unique, and strong, and people can sense it, then I’m much more successful that way. To me, that’s what the difference is.
Stay tuned for more entertainment coverage straight from the source here on SlashGear and be sure to check out Hotel Transylvania in theaters right this minute across the USA! This film has already set a new record for highest-grossing September opening weekend with a budget of $85 million and total earnings of $51.1 million – keep it growing!
Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan is charismatic, clearly very smart and passionate — not a bad combination considering he’s the face and voice of a major international hardware manufacturer. Razer’s latest, the second-generation Blade gaming laptop, launches this week for the whopping price of $2,500, and we spoke with Min-Liang about just that. “This,” he said, referencing the second-generation Blade’s slim power brick, “costs seven times this,” he added, pointing to a competitor’s power supply. “Do we have to do this? Probably not.” And that’s emblematic of Razer’s whole approach to the Razer Blade, as a line of gaming computers. Expensive? Yes, very. But significantly nicer and more detailed that its less expensive competition? Also yes. Also very.
As our own Sean Buckley put it in our review of their latest gaming laptop, “the Blade is a gorgeous machine.” It’s true — at just 0.88 inches tall and 6.6 pounds, the new Blade is remarkably thin and light for a 17-inch laptop with enough juice under the hood to sate even the most spec-obsessed of PC gamers. But are enough gamers out there willing to trade a lower price tag for a better-looking machine? Razer and its CEO certainly think so, and they’ve got numbers from the first, more expensive Blade to prove it. “The original Blade was at $2,799. Back then, it was pricey, but we’ve been surprised at the amount of demand for that. We thought we were gonna sell out in 30 days — we had 30 days’ stock. But we sold out in 30 minutes for the first batch,” he said. And, as far as pre-order numbers go for the second version, Min-Liang’s confident they mean good things for the future of the Blade.
“We’re getting hammered with the pre-orders for the new Razer Blade. Right now, we’ll be able to ship most of the orders by September 30, fingers crossed. But we’re trying to bring in as many units as possible,” he excitedly explained. Min-Liang isn’t too worried about offending first-gen buyers, either — the first Razer Blade launched in early 2012 for just shy of $2,800. Less than 10 months later, the second-gen Blade is launching for $300 less with a significantly upgraded graphics card. Sure, first-gen adopters get a $500 discount on the new Blade, but the sting of early adoption is especially rough in such an instance.
Financially, Nokia is in bad shape. It lost a billion dollars last quarter, which is only good news when you look at the quarter before that, which shows a $1.7 billion loss. Despite all this, Christof Hellmis, VP Location Platform at Nokia, doesn’t seem to be the least bit concerned. In fact, he’s rather chipper as he sits down with us at this year’s Mondial de l’Automobile in Paris.
Perhaps that’s because his division, Location & Commerce, is doing quite well indeed. Containing the remains of Navteq, L&C pulled down nearly €100 million profits in each of the past two quarters. It’s a healthy golden goose in Nokia’s rapidly shrinking barn. So why, then, is the company helping its competition improve their own offerings by providing more comprehensive navigation services baked right into Windows Phone 8? And, why is it that Apple’s own attempt at mapping has gone oh so poorly? Those are just a few of the questions we asked of Mr. Hellmis, all detailed for you after the break.
It’s almost time for the big drop of the new science fiction action time travel blockbuster LOOPER to hit theaters, so SlashGear took the opportunity to speak with none other than Dr. Edward Farhi of real-life time travel study fame. What we learn from Farhi, aka Director at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, is that time travel into the future is indeed very possible – theoretically – but that backwards movement – like LOOPER suggests – just isn’t in the cards.
Farhi and colleagues Sean M. Carroll and Alan H. Guth worked on a report by the name of “An obstacle to building a time machine” which lets it be known that the amount of mass that would have to be destroyed to make a time machine work would essentially break apart half the universe. That’s a time machine that travels along closed timelike curves – what we’re interested in is a machine that jams a single human back in a metal tube from 30 years in the future to our own present – or in the case of the LOOPER plotline, just a few decades into the future (and 30 years from then.)
Dr. Edward Farhi : There are two forms of relativity – one’s the Special Theory of Relativity [STR] and the other is the General Theory of Relativity. Relativity tells us that the rate at which clocks run depends on the speed of the system. And when we talk about clocks, we’re talking about the actual flow of time. It’s not something that just feels like it’s going at a different rate, it’s actually going at a different rate.
One thing we know is that if you could get into a rocket in space and go close to the speed of light and return to Earth, you could arrange it so that a short period of time elapsed according to you would be a much longer period of time elapsed on the Earth. For example I could put you, Chris, on a rocket, and you would say that 6 months have passed and you’d come back to Earth and 100 years have passed on the Earth – if you had kids, you would meet your great great grandchildren.
We call that “skipping into the future.”
Farhi : It’s actually allowed by the laws of physics. That rate at which you’re clock runs depends on the speed – another example is the GPS satellite. When you’re in your car you communicate with these satellites that triangulate your location. It’s very important that you understand that the rate at which the clocks run on those satellites is important – if you didn’t take into account the fact that the clocks are running at a little different rate because they were moving, you’d be driving in the ditch.
Moving clocks run at different rates, and that allows you to skip into the future.
The other thing is that if you’ve got a strong gravitational field it’ll also affect the way clocks run. So if I took you and I lowered you into a strong gravitational field, your clock would run slower. And if you were watching out, if you were watching me on the Earth, you would see me moving quickly and I would see you moving slowly and when we came back together again, you would have aged less than I. Those are real effects, there’s no doubt about these things.
Farhi : If you took that little trip and you went into the future and you wanted to come back, that would be a little more problematic. One of the reasons we can see it would be a little more problematic is that if you could go into the future and come back, then maybe you could today just go back – and if you could go back in time, you could prevent your parents from coming together and making you. That’s paradoxical. Most physicists, I would say, because of those paradoxes, going back in time doesn’t seem too possible.
Check out our LOOPER review tonight and see the full film out in theaters this weekend across the USA! This is a film that’s made for those who love loud blasts, massive kills, and massive amounts of mystery. It’s an investigative adventure from start to finish, one you’ll not want to miss on the big screen – and specifically there too, it’s a real experience.
In case you missed Thorsten Heins keynote yesterday, RIM’s betting on BB10 becoming the next big thing in mobile computing. Part of Thorsten’s plan to put BB10 on top involves deep integration of third party social apps like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare into the new OS. BlackBerry has always been a productivity platform first and foremost, but with RIM touting BB10’s abilities as a social platform, we wanted to know more about the plan to make it happen. So, we sat down with T.A. McCann, RIM’s VP of BBM and Social Communities, to find out how he’s going to reach his CEO’s goal of a flowing, social OS and the challenges of getting there.
Do you know what’s better than one interview with Stephen Elop? Two interviews in one month. We’d barely recovered from yesterday’s bout of nostalgia when we were given the opportunity to sit down with Nokia’s CEO in his office at the company’s HQ. Better yet, we were allowed to record the discussion with a hand-held Lumia 920 prototype. The resulting video is remarkably stable. Full disclosure: the audio was recorded with a shotgun mic mounted on a Sony NEX-C3 camera.
We talked about HTC’s colorful “signature” Windows Phone 8X and 8S and what that means for the Nokia-Microsoft partnership. Next we asked if Nokia is planning to work with carriers to offer incentives for existing Lumia owners to upgrade to the company’s 920 and 820 handsets. Finally, we discussed the evolution of PureView imaging technology from the 808 to the 920 and how Nokia plans to combine these building blocks in the future. Hit the break for our video interview.
Sony isn’t sharing exact numbers, but Sony Computer Entertainment America VP of marketing, handhelds and home consoles John Koller teased that “almost all” PlayStation Vita owners are also PlayStation 3 owners. We were discussing the potential crossover between Vita and PS3 — the obvious comparison to Nintendo’s latest offering, the Wii U, and its tablet controller. The Vita and the PS3 are capable of producing similar functionality, and, if anything, with higher fidelity, as the Vita is a standalone console.
Koller says Sony invites the comparison. “We tell our PlayStation fans all the time that what the Wii U is offering is something that Vita and PS3 can do quite easily,” he says. It’s not just about the functionality, however, it’s about whether implementing that functionality makes any sense. “It’s dependent on the content. So we need to make sure the content isn’t force fed. And, to us, making sure that the gamer receives the right type of experience is what’s most important. So we’re gonna pick our spots, but that technology does certainly exist here.”
It wouldn’t be hard to imagine Sony bundling the Vita and its new PS3 model together for holiday sales, pushing up against this holiday’s Wii U launch. Koller says not just yet, though. “As we look at the lineup, there are gonna be some opportunities to do that. Whether we want to bundle the hardware together remains to be seen,” he explains. It sounds like we’ll be hearing more on that front in the future, as “retails asks for it all the time,” Koller says. For now, however, he’s happy knowing that the vast majority of Vita owners are already prepared for cross-functionality between the two consoles. “In the meantime, you look at the Vita consumer and a very high percentage — almost all of them — own a PS3. So you see that crossover works.”
Call it the “SuperSlim,” the “Ultrasvelte,” or the “LipoStation 3” — just as long as “it stays positive,” says Sony Computer Entertainment America VP of marketing, handhelds and home consoles John Koller. The new, even thinner version of the PlayStation 3 doesn’t have a new name to distinguish itself from the myriad other PS3 models. Like Apple’s third iPad iteration, the third iteration of the PlayStation 3 is simply, “The PlayStation 3.” And like the second PS3 console, Koller says the new model is Sony’s new standard, with previous models going the way of the Puerto Rican shrew (poor little guy is totally extinct).
The new PS3 comes in two models for North America, 250GB and 500GB, which Koller says is a result of North American consumers being more “digitally inclined” than other territories. “We have to provide the hard drive size and the opportunity for them to be able to, out of the box, utilize that content,” he argues. But this philosophy may be flawed — one of Sony’s main competitor’s, Nintendo, is applying the same logic to its Wii U, albeit with starkly different results. Nintendo argues that it doesn’t want to pass the rapidly declining cost of memory on to the consumer, so you’ll be able to attach any form of external memory to its console. That functionality also exists in the PS3 — Flash memory via USB or a full-on internal HDD replacement — but Koller says consumers are more inclined to purchase additional consoles rather than replacing internal storage. “When you look at some of the earlier chassis, and the really early adopters — the 20GB, and the 60GB — that consumer had a choice. They could either go out and buy another hard drive — and it’s an easy install, so we make it easy for the consumer if they want to take a hard drive off the shelf and plug it in, they can do that. They had a choice of doing that, or purchasing another PlayStation 3. And what’s been happening is we’re seeing a lot of adoption of second consoles in-house,” Koller says.
That philosophy is why Europe’s the only territory getting a 12GB Flash-based PlayStation 3. Sure, consumers can expand the system’s memory with Flash — the new model allows for internal memory expansion as well — but that doesn’t line up with SCEA’s goals in its territory. “The smaller Flash drive isn’t coming to North America, and a lot of that reason is the digital consumer,” Koller says. “We really want to make sure, out of the box, that there is an option for them to be able to download that content. That is really critical for us, very very important.”
There’s a big frame in Polaroid’s Photokina booth — a giant, blown up version of the iconic white border that graced the company’s instant photos for so many decades, beckoning passersby to stand behind it and pose, like muscle man cutouts at a traveling carnival. Directly to its right, attendees stand around a row of product from the company aimed at recapturing some of the nostalgia inherent in the Polaroid name. It’s nothing compared to the gathering at a booth 20-or-so feet across the room, where international guests stand fascinated by the Instant Lab, an accordion-style gizmo that transforms iPhone images into instant photos, utilizing film produced at the last remaining Polaroid factory, since purchased by a company fittingly named “Impossible.”
The early 21st century is a strange time to be the head of a company like Polaroid, standing at a bit of a crossroads between new and old technologies, attempting to harness the cache (and nostalgia) that comes with 75 years of history, while keeping up with the latest trends in digital imaging and slates. We sat down with the company’s CEO Scott Hardy to discuss precisely what it means to be Polaroid in 2012, where the company goes from here and how much looking back is necessary to keep it moving ahead.
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