One of the great perks of being a filmmaker is that I can hang out with people doing really interesting things, and its considered work!

Last week, a screenwriter friend and I spent the afternoon with Ken Perlin, a professor in the Computer Science department at NYU who originated some of the algorithms that ended up creating the special effects in Tron! and his research has ended up in movie effects too many to enumerate, not to mention video games.

Ken showed us his latest research, which was the creation of virtual actors who performed ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as the 30 second version was narrated!

Another one of his experiments Rudolph, has its own poem:

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep†

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep
Had to stand on just three feet
This made his A.I. program
Always run NP-complete

All of the other rein-sheep
Used to call him names and laugh
They always said poor Rudolph
Had an asymmetric graph!

Asymmetric graph, wow, thats funny! Check out Ken’s page, its got all sorts of fun stuff to play with.

I had friend visiting me the other day. It was one of those balmy days when you can sit around all day chatting about this and that, and one of those aimless conversations involved the places we’d like to visit someday, which included Sikkim. None of us remembered anything about the time Sikkim became part of India in 1975, except things like how my mother had a beautiful dragon ring gifted to her by her brother who was an IAS officer posted there in 1975. As such we learnt very little about the land and its people in school. Then my friend told me there was a documentary on Sikkim, made by Satyjit Ray in 1971. I had never heard of this film, and its had a rather tragic history (Thanks, Diditi):

—(the film) has never shown in India, courtesy the ban imposed on it by the Union Government. The world lost track of Sikkim , the Ray documentary made at the request of the Chogyal, when the king’s American wife Hope Cook left the Himalayan kingdom to go back to New York, never to return.

There are only three prints of the film in existence, and two of them are beyond redemption. Hopefully, the $100,00 needed to digitally restore the print will materialize and we’ll get to see it.

The knighthood of Salman Rushdie and the idiotic protest in Pakistan and Iran (see Amardeep) are two sides of the same coin, somewhat, read Priya Gopal on the subject:

To see the knighthood as “belated” endorsement by the British establishment is to miss the point entirely. Until, and even after, the vicious death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie could not possibly have been endorsed by an establishment he had committed himself to undermining in merciless prose and brilliant satire.

Our film is screening at the 10th Royal Anthropological Institute Ethnographic Film Festival on Friday, June 29th. The festival is running from June 27th to July 2nd and is exhibiting many interesting films and installations from all over the world.