Hasta La Gadget!

Writing a decent story is hard enough, but taking that story and turning it into a watchable film is even more complicated. But new software called Plotagon aims to turn anyone into a one-man movie-making machine. It uses a simple menu-based interface that helps you build a script, which turns into a computer-animated video as you’re writing it. Is it perfect? Nope. Far from it. It looks really fun though.

As you can see in the image above, Plotagon is divided into two parts: on the left is where you’ll write your manuscript, and on the right is a video player that shows you what your movie looks like. You don’t need to know the proper format for a manuscript or even have a deep vocabulary, because Plotagon cheats.

Since it would take an insanely complex program to read your mind or even parse your paragraph and figure out what you’re describing, Plotagon instead has a bank of scenes, characters, actions and more. As you pick out each element, it appears on your manuscript and is visualized in the video player almost instantaneously. It’s a bit like playing The Sims.

The only thing you can’t pick from Plotagon’s stock is the dialogue, which your digital actors will speak in silly synthesized voices. I don’t know if it supports other languages besides English though.

Plotagon is currently in beta, and is available for both Windows and OS X. You can download a free trial version on its official website, where you can also see a few short films made with the program. Plotagon will make money from its store, which will sell more characters, settings, etc. Imagine a Marvel character pack or a Star Wars location bundle. In fact, Stan Lee is going to make four new superheroes just for Plotagon. Imagine sharing co-creating duties with Stan the Man himself!

[via Mashable]

Hot Wheels’ toy cars let kids pretend they’re hotshot racers. The company’s new Car Maker model kit on the other hand, lets them be factory workers. The kit has a machine that turns a stick of wax into a car body by pressing it into a heated mold. The resulting car body can then be customized with a chassis and stickers.

The molding machine has voice prompts that walk you through the steps for making a car. The machine has a compartment that heats the molds and a chute on top for the wax sticks. It takes about 8 minutes to turn a stick into a car body. There’s a demo video of the kit on Hot Wheels’ website, but in the meantime you can check out the ad below:

The Hot Wheels Car Maker is available on Amazon for $40 (USD). Each kit comes with 10 wax sticks, two molds, three chassis and three sheets of stickers. You can also buy more wax sticks and other kinds of car molds. And if you have a kid, you will buy more wax sticks and car molds.

[via Uncrate]

If you’re going to the New York Comic Con with a kid, stay away from Booth 208. Otherwise you’ll have to explain why there’s a small batch of gold-domed R2-D2 action figures each rocking a purple hat, a cape and a cane. Because this isn’t a Count Dracula costume.

This robotic uh, solicitor is the work of Jason Chalker aka Manly Art. He also made a poster featuring his scandalous creation:

You can get the poster from Jason’s online shop (his other artworks are NSFW) for $20 (USD). As I said the action figure will only be sold at the New York Comic Con and will go for $50 each.

[via Geekologie]

Who doesn’t love kittens? I’m no professional web designer, but I’ve tried designing a site or two, and let me just say it involved a lot of hard work. One of the tiring aspects of web design is having to insert placeholders for designs, images, or code that aren’t ready yet.

So to make that aspect of design less of a pain and a bit more fun, Placekitten was born.

It’s essentially an image gallery of sorts that was created with web designers in mind. Using the site, developers, designers, and cat lovers can generate various sizes of cat and kitten images that can be used as placeholders in their designs. Just use the URL below to get started.

http://placekitten.com/width/height

For example, if you want an image that’s 300×200, just type “http://placekitten.com/300/200” into your URL to get your correctly-sized kitty.

Here’s a couple of examples generated by the service:

Awwwwww. Placekitten exists thanks to Mark James.

[via Red Ferret]

When you think of Disney, most typically think of animated movies and theme parks, but Disney also has a research arm that looks into all sorts of future technology. Researchers at Disney have created an interesting and very cheap power generator that uses pieces of paper. This won’t create enough power to run your computer, but it does generate enough electricity to make LEDs glow, make sounds, or turn on an e-book display.

The generator uses sheets of conductive Teflon to create an electrical charge as users rub, touch or tap its surfaces together. Circuits are then able to take advantage of that electric charge and harness it to create power for small electronic devices.

The researchers say the generators are extremely cheap and convenient to produce. Such generators could to add interactivity to just about anything you can think of. Disney sees the potential for such generators to be used to power interactivity in books, papers, magazines, posters, and a number of other places.

Researcher Ivan Poupyrev said, “This simplicity leads to countless applications enabling interactivity everywhere and anytime. My overall goal is to make the whole world interactive, and creating ubiquitous power supplies is a key step in that direction.”

[via French Tribune]