Pablo Garcia and Golan Levin, two celebrated art profs and dead media specialists, have launched a fantastically successful kickstarter to recreate the Camera Lucida, a gadget much favored by the Old Masters. It uses an optical trick to superimpose the scene in front of you on a sheet of paper that you can trace in order to produce highly realistic drawings. They're producing a limited one-time run of them (a $35 pledge gets you one) (assuming, as with all Kickstarters, that this actually gets made -- caveat emptor!), and then the designs will be released as open source hardware for anyone to make.

The NeoLucida is designed to fit in a purse or bag, and the creators want to create a gallery of art made with it -- each one comes with a postage-paid card for you to send in one of your drawings

NeoLucida - A Portable Camera Lucida for the 21st Century (via Beyond the Beyond)

Emmy winning writer/director/producer Ken Levine went after Zach Braff today in a blog post about the actor's recent foray into crowdfunding. The Scrubs alum has raised millions of dollars for his planned follow-up to Garden State from regular folks, when the Hollywood money machine proved to be unavailable and/or undesirable.

Levine's argument is compelling. He essentially says that Kickstarter was created for people who don't have access to Hollywood. Braff obviously does, therefore his use of Kickstarter to fund his movie is tantamount to breaking the crowdfunding Code of Hammurabi. Following a deft takedown of Sundance for having become a tool of Hollywood rather than an alternative to it, Levine writes:

Sundance is a lost cause. But Kickstarter isn’t. Not if we put a stop to this now. If you only have so much money to give to charity, give it to cancer research and not to help redecorate Beyonce’s plane. Support young hungry filmmakers. The next Kevin Smith is out there… somewhere. He (or she) just needs a break, which is what Kickstarter is supposed to provide. Zach Braff can find his money elsewhere. He did once before. He’ll make his movie. And if it’s half as good as GARDEN STATE I will praise it to the heavens in this blog and urge you to go spend your money to check it out.

This argument assumes, however, that Hollywood doesn't make mistakes... that when they hear a pitch for a good movie, they always fund it. That's certainly not true. Plenty of good ideas never get made and plenty of bad ones do. Maybe Braff barked up every tree he could, and still couldn't get it funded. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure, as he notes on his Kickstarter page, that he would be able to maintain creative control. All of that seems fair to me. Successful actors, even rich ones, should have an alternative to the company store.

So, I don't have a problem with Zach Braff going to the public and asking for money in exchange for things like private screenings and meet and greets. (For $200 he'll scrawl your name on a wall that will appear in the film. Yay!) Now, just to be clear, I think people that willingly give their money to a millionaire in exchange for stuff that costs him nothing are nuts. I wouldn't fund a movie in exchange for that. But it's a free country. Each of us can do as we please with our money.

But consider this: Zach's raised close to $2.5 million for his movie from almost 35,000 people. If he'd raised that money from private investors, he'd have to pay that money back and give away a big chunk of the profits. Raising the money through Kickstarter - for the follow-up to the enormously popular Garden State - means he doesn't have to pay anyone back and gets to keep all the profits.

He's a fucking genius.

Like I said, as well intentioned as Braff's investors are, I can't help but think of them as suckers on some level and like Levine, I won't participate. On the other hand, I'd almost certainly be willing to invest in a movie in which I believed in exchange for some of the back end. I know in most cases it'd be a gamble, but maybe my $250 could turn into $500 or $1000. If the movie tanked though, I'd be OK with it, because I'd helped produce something that meant something to me. That's a model that makes sense.

Maybe Braff and other independent filmmakers should be selling shares in their movies, not tickets to the after party. If they did that, those 35,000 investors would almost certainly act as guerilla marketers too. They'd have a real, tangible incentive to get the word out. In the end, the public would almost certainly get to see a lot more different types of movies... and a few of them might actually be pretty good.

Image Source: david_shankbone, via flickr

Eric sez,

Best selling author and native Yiddish speaker Michael Wex has launched an indiegogo campaign to translate what he is calling the most important work of world literature that you've probably never heard of. The book, written by Joseph Opatoshu in 1921 when he was a young Polish immigrant living in New York City is an historical novel about 19th century Jewish Eastern Europe:

A vast panorama of Jewish life in Poland during the 1850s, Opatoshu's novel concentrates on backwoods Jews who live among gentile peasants rather than in Jewish communities in cities or shtetlekh. Touching as it does on hasidism, heresy, pre-Christian Polish folk customs, wife-swapping, messianism, and Polish nationalism, this book will change the way you think about Jewish life in Poland.

When he completes the work in about a year the translated novel will be released under a Creative Commons license. Wex hopes that a new translation will bring Opatoshu's 1921 novel to a broader audience. "It'll change everybody's views of Jewish life in Poland,' Wex writes. 'If this campaign works, it'll also help other translators find a way to fund their own projects and establish a whole library of world literature that hasn't been translated into English before or has never been translated properly. Raising the money in advance means that the translators can work full time; since the finished product doesn't cost anything, they don't have to worry about a book's commercial potential. It's like a grassroots Guggenheim."

Wex wrote the wonderful book Born to Kvetch, which I reviewed in 2009.

New Authorized Translation of a Classic Yiddish Novel into English

An illustrator and games publisher have teamed up to kickstart "Adventure Maximus!", a streamlined, cards-and-dice RPG aimed at kids eight and up (though there's an endorsement from a six-year-old on the site). The gameplay looks pretty clever and I really like the art. It's a minimum $35 pledge to get a finished game, though you can get a PDF of it for a pledge of $15. They're looking to raise $12K for manufacturing, marketing, and administration.

Adventure MAXIMUS! is a card based, introductory Role Playing Game for players 8 years-of-age and up. Players can take on roles from eight different races. Working together as a famous "Adventure Company" based in the fantastic, post-apocalyptic world of Ex-Machina where they can become heroes of legend.

When there is trouble, or innocent people need protection from the fierce creatures that populate Ex-Machina, they call on Adventure Companies to save the day!

Adventure MAXIMUS! follows the classic role playing game format consisting of someone who runs the adventure (who we call a Maximus Master) and 2 or more players who interact with the adventure. Inexperienced Maximus Masters will find using our Adventure Creation System helpful when making their first adventure. Also, the role of Maximus Master can be taken over by a player in mid adventure so that everyone gets a chance to play!

Players will be asked to make heroic actions fueled by Action Points. Players receive a limited amount of Action Points each round, so they must be budgeted. The bigger the action, the greater the cost. Action Points replenish each round. Racial Abilities, Class Abilities, Action Powers, Spells and Items all have Action Point costs printed on their cards.

As with all Kickstarters, you should be aware that you may get nothing for your money, in the event that the creators of the project flake out or just totally underestimate the amount of money they'll need to meet their obligations.

Adventure Maximus!

The Princess Who Saved Herself [MP3]

The "Code Monkey Saves World" project is about to stretch itself into the world of kickass princesses. Troubadour Jonathan Coulton and filmmaker and comics writer Greg Pak teamed up a few weeks ago to launch a crowdfunding effort to raise $39,000 to create a series of comic books based on the villains and other characters from Coulton's songs. On their way to blow past $200,000 in pledges, the dynamic duo added more pages to the future comics, promised JoCo would record an album of newly recorded acoustic versions of the songs referenced in the comics, and provided other rewards, most of which existing backers get added without having to increase their pledge.

Pak and Coulton have at least one more rabbit to pull out of their jointly worn hat: a children's book created from "The Princess Who Saved Herself," the title of which explains the song.

Read the rest

DroneShield is an indieGOGO project from a DC aerospace engineer that aims to build a tiny, net-connected drone-detector/identifier. Based on a Raspberry Pi gumstick computer, it uses a mic to detect the audio signature of nearby drones, and then communicates about its findings over the Internet. The project promises free/open hardware and software specs on its main site. Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar spoke to Chris Kyriakakis, a USC electrical engineering prof, who suggests the project is feasible, but believes it will need an array of mics for accurate identification. But John Franklin, who's running the effort, says the device will produce useful -- if imperfect -- output even with one mic.

The fully assembled drone detector costs at least $69 as a pre-order (as with all crowdfunded project, it's important to remember that you may never get your device). The project goal is to get them down to $20. For my part, I wonder how this would perform against active countermeasures: it's one thing to detect drones that aren't making any effort to remain hidden or fool detectors about which drone they are, but what about a drone that uses some technology (from playing a recording of a different drone to full-on modifications of its engines and blades) to sound different?

In any event, I expect that this is an intermediate step on the way to this thing disappearing into our phones and becoming an app that would make use of its open database of drone acoustic signatures. I can easily imagine a Drone Foursquare made by volunteers who upload drone "sightings" to realtime maps as they move around the world.

Meet Drone Shield, an ambitious idea for a $70 drone detection system (via /.)

Zack sez, "Neil Gaiman's award-winning mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft 'A Study in Emerald' gets a Gaiman-approved board game expansion in this new creation from Martin Wallace. The game will only be available through this Kickstarter campaign, and the page for it includes extensive explanations of the rules, game pieces, artwork and the initial and stretch goals for the project."

A Study in Emerald (Thanks, Zack!)

Open Tech Forever: open source hardware co-op —

Yoonseo Kang sez, "Open Tech Forever is a new open source hardware cooperative: a worker-owned R&D and education company that teaches others how to make hardware and start their own businesses. The Open Tech Forever team has recently launched their Indie-gogo crowdfunding campaign to fund the construction and documentation of an open source R&D factory on their 40 acre site in Denver, Colorado, and runs thru May 13." — Cory •

Ben sez, "The first ever synthetic biology Kickstarter is about growing glowing plants. Using synthetic biology and Genome Compiler software, they are ready to input bio-luminescence genes into a mustard plant and have it be naturally glowing. Meant more as a hint of things to come and what can be achieved with synth bio."

It's ambitious, but the project's lead looks like he has the necessary experience. Still, as with all ambitious Kickstarters, you should be prepared to lose your dough.

We are using Synthetic Biology techniques and Genome Compiler’s software to insert bioluminescence genes into Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant and member of the mustard family, to make a plant that visibly glows in the dark (it is inedible).

Funds raised will be used to print the DNA sequences we have designed using Genome Compiler and to transform the plants by inserting these sequences into the plant and then growing the resultant plant in the lab.

Printing DNA costs a minimum of 25 cents per base pair and our sequences are about 10,000 base pairs long. We plan to print a number of sequences so that we can test the results of trying different promoters – this will allow us to optimize the result. We will be printing our DNA with Cambrian Genomics who have developed a revolutionary laser printing system that massively reduces the cost of DNA synthesis.

Transforming the plant will initially be done using the Agrobacterium method. Our printed DNA will be inserted into a special type of bacteria which can insert its DNA into the plant. Seeds of a flowering plant are then dipped into a solution containing the transformed bacteria. The bacteria then injects our DNA into the cell nucleus of the seeds which we can grow until they glow! You can see this process in action in our video.

Glowing Plants: Natural Lighting with no Electricity or CO2