Found footage movies are in the zeitgeist again, even though many thought it was a one trick idea with The Blair Witch Project. But the enormous cost to profit margins of the Paranormal Activity movies launched the trend again, and it crossed over to other genres as well, like the comedy Project X, and the superhero movie Chronicle.

Whether it’s a horror story or a comedy, the idea is simple. An event happens, it’s been documented on video, and once the footage is found and watched, it tells the story of the event. The idea of a found footage movies seems so simple, you’d think anyone could do it. In fact, that’s been the appeal for many filmmakers: it’s a simpler, and much cheaper, way to make a movie.

Some feel that Blair Witch had a punk, DIY sensibility that proved to young directors they didn’t need a lot of fancy, schmantzy equipment to make a movie. As Josh Leonard, who starred in the film, told the L.A. Times, “It was like when you and your buddies were 14 and you heard a Germs album and you’re like, ‘I could do that.’”

Paramount has a number of found footage projects in development, and as the President of the studio, Adam Goodman, told Deadline, “I believe it’s something that’s here to say. It’s a terrific medium for filmmakers. They don’t see the medium as a barrier to entry. They don’t care about shaky cameras. For whatever reason, it just makes for a much more visceral experience for the audience.”

At least one horror director complained to me that doing a found footage movie makes directors lazy, but in several found footage horror films it took a lot of work to make it look like no work went into it at all. Since the late sixties, documentary techniques and cinema verite became a big part of making horror films effective.

Night of the Living Dead may have been the first in this regard with its frantic camerawork, and fake newsreel footage that helped make the event seem more plausible. And as Dan O’Bannon, the late screenwriter of Alien, said of horror films that were shot on a budget, the lack of professional polish makes them feel far more removed from Hollywood. Like demented home movies, you have the feeling the people behind the camera aren’t bound by any restraints and could show you anything.

Blair Witch was shot on Hi-8, which is essentially a step above VHS, and it definitely gave it that demented home movie feel, but it was actually a European horror flick shot on 16mm that first started the found footage concept, namely 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust.

Although the late William Castle, the man who gave us such films as Macabre, The House on Haunted Hill, and The Tingler, had a reputation for making schlocky, low budget horror movies, he was recently called the first interactive filmmaker. And indeed, his gimmicks did make audiences an active part of the movie going experience, even if an inflatable skeleton floating over the audience, or seat buzzers zapping you with mild electrical current wasn’t as innovative as creating IMAX, Dolby Atmos sound, or even D-Box.

Castle was somewhat of a low budget Hitchcock, and much like the master of suspense he would appear in the coming attractions of his films, explaining what kind of low budget fun the audience had in store if they went to his movies. Like Hitchcock, Castle become a brand of his own, and a recognizable face to young horror fans growing up. (Castle would even appear at the local movie theaters, talking to fans, chomping a big cigar, asking them what they thought of the picture.)

It all started with his 1958 horror film Macabre. Castle knew he couldn’t make a movie as scary as Hitchcock, but he hatched a fun plan to bring audiences to the theaters. As Castle recalled in his autobiography, he heard that Lloyds of London would insure anything, and he got them to put up a million dollar policy for anyone who died of fright watching the movie.

“Nobody’s going to drop dead,” Castle assured them. “It’s just a publicity stunt.” The movie began with a ticking clock, and an announcer warning the audience: “Ladies and Gentlemen, when the clock reaches sixty seconds, you will be insured by Lloyds of London for one thousand dollars against death by fright during Macabre. Lloyds of London sincerely hopes none of you will collect.”

Audiences ate it up, and Macabre was a big hit. With the House on Haunted Hill, which starred Vincent Price, Castle came up with “Emergo,” where an inflatable skeleton floated above the audience on a wire. Once time the skeleton fell into the audience, who tossed it around like a beach ball, and at another screening, the kids in the audience threw trash at the inflatable for target practice.

Then came The Tingler, which also starred Price.

I like to build PCs. Not as much as our resident PC columnist, maybe, but I still get a real kick out of ordering a bunch of components and spending an afternoon putting a PC together. I think that earns me a little nerd cred. But you know what earns you a LOT of nerd cred? Building a fully functioning PC—in Minecraft.

My favorite thing about projects like these are that not only are they an incredible example of the maker spirit, they’re a great teaching tool for something a lot of people don’t understand—how, at a deep level, the computer they use every day actually works. Today, we're going to look at some of the crazy things people build in Minecraft and other video games, and how they explain some of the most fundamental lessons of computer science.

The Basics of Turing Machines

If you spend very long hanging out in the sorts of seedy places people where gather to discuss building virtual computers, you’re going to hear the term “Turing Machine” thrown around. For instance, you might have seen that somebody built a Turing Machine in Dwarf Fortress but I’ll be damned if you’re going to be able to figure out what that thing does just from looking at the diagram.

So let’s talk a bit about Turing Machines. It’s a complicated topic, but also a tenant of modern computer science—so if you can pick this up, consider your daily enrichment quota fulfilled.

Photo credit: Flickr user maria_keays via Creative Commons.

A Turing Machine is a conceptual machine composed of four parts:

Last time, we covered the basics of simple block-style moldmaking. While this technique is versatile and can produce very good results, it’s often not the best solution for molding complex or larger parts. The Halo Needler prop has many parts both complex and large, so we’ll need to look into other methods. But first, a little show off of the completed master sculpts all sitting pretty. Now I just need to make copies of everything!

I’m going to use the upper casing as the test mule here for showcasing a technique called “brush-on” moldmaking. The basic premise is gradually building up layers of silicone onto a part until the desired mold thickness is achieved. It’s a bit more complicated than just slathering some rubber on though, so let’s take a look at the individual steps.

First off, you need to determine if your master part will need to be molded in sections; and if so, where should the seam line be positioned. There is a significant amount of spatial organization to consider - most notably where will seam lines be the easiest to conceal and clean up later - but also things like how easily the parts will be to de-mold and how the mold will be disassembled and reassembled after use. For this upper casing, I chose to follow the lower seam line around the base of the part, then follow this hard edge line up the front. Any seam lines will be easy to sand off in these areas, and the resulting silicone mold parts will be easy to remove from the cast part. I also added a section of ¾” PVC conduit to act as a pour spout. This area will be covered up by another part after assembly, so we don’t have to worry about losing any detail here. Non-sulfur clay is used to create the parting seam, and small indentations (registration keys, as we learned last time!) are marked into the clay.

In the next few days, Bertrand Piccard will leave San Francisco on an airplane headed to New York. That's a long flight--five hours or so, on your typical 747--but he won't arrive until sometime in June or July. The plane Piccard is flying, dubbed Solar Impulse, only travels at about 50 miles per hour. It's also entirely solar powered, which will make the cross-country flight a historic milestone. Piccard and his partner André Borschberg have spent the better part of a decade designing Solar Impulse and preparing for solar-powered flights. And here's the most amazing part: This isn't even the most interesting thing about Bertrand Piccard.

Smithsonian Mag has a great story about Solar Impulse's impending flight, and it briefly touches on Piccard's history. In 1999, Piccard circumnavigated the globe in a gas-powered balloon. His father, Jacques Piccard, was one of the two men who first descended to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in 1960. They were the only men to reach the deepest point in the Ocean until James Cameron in 2012.

Photo Credit: SolarImpulse.com

Piccard's grandfather Auguste Piccard was also a balloon explorer and invented the bathyscape, used in undersea exploration. He designed the Trieste, which his son used to explore the Marianas Trench. And if the family wasn't acclaimed enough already, Auguste's twin brother Jean Felix Piccard invented high altitude unmanned balloons. Auguste served as the inspiration for Professor Cuthbert Calculus from Tintin, and he and Jean Felix had their family name adapted into Star Trek: The Next Generation character Jean-Luc Picard by George Roddenberry.

Bertrand Piccard clearly has a legacy to live up to, and his solar flight from California to New York is hopefully only a lead-up to a solar-powered circumnavigation of the globe. Solar Impulse won't be able to make that flight, however. Despite its 12,000 solar cells and 900 pounds of batteries, Solar Impulse couldn't sustain a pilot for the flight across the oceans, which will take 3-5 days to fly over at less than 50 miles per hour. Piccard plans to add a larger cockpit and weather-proof electronics to Impulse's successor. The new plane will also be bigger and lighter, with a more advanced carbon fiber frame and more efficient batteries. Solar Impulse already has a wingspan of 69 yards.

The plane should have what it takes to make it across the continental United States. In 2010, Borschberg piloted the plane for 26 hours straight, proving that the energy it stored during the day could keep it flying through the night. In a few years, Solar Impulse may prove something else: That planes can fly around the entire world without burning an ounce of fuel.

Check out Popular Science's feature on Bertrand Piccard and Solar Impulse for more photos and technical information on the aircraft, and the Solar Impulse website for some awesome photos and videos of the plane.

One of the best gags in Aaron Sorkin's West Wing played out when the White House staff dedicated a single day dealing with the small organizations that were ignored the other 364. One of those groups, the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality, petitioned the government to ditch Mercator maps in schools in favor of the Peters Projection map. Why? Because the Mercator map is distorted--we all know Greenland isn't that big--and the organization argues that size is associated with power. Africa and South America, which appear far smaller than they really are, don't get the respect they deserve.

The gag works because it actually has a good point behind it, something we don't think about very often. The Mercator map is really, really inaccurate. And the Peters Projection is inaccurate, too, just in a different way--it stretches all the continents vertically to approximate their actual landmasses. Maybe the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality should've been pushing Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map, which just turned 70. To celebrate, the Buckminster Fuller Institute is looking to give the map a rebirth.

The Dymaxion world map looks nothing like what we typically associate with a map, but its tesselated design, which folds up to form an icosahedron, does a better job of preserving the shapes and sizes of the continents than either the Mercator or Peters maps. The downside, of course, is that the array of unfolded triangles would make sea navigation impossible. But the map offers something unique as well: there's no "right" direction to look at it from, no real up or down. The Dymaxion is all about equality.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute's Dymax Redux contest " is calling on today’s graphic designers, visual artists, and citizen cartographers to create a new and inspiring interpretation of the Dymaxion Map. BFI will publish accepted entries within an online gallery, feature the selected finalists in a gallery exhibition in New York City and select one winning entry to be produced as a 36" x 24" poster." Anyone can enter a map design, and the deadline is on June 14.

Gizmodo's story on the contest includes some pretty cool versions of the Dymaxion map, as does the contest page itself. The map may never replace Mercator as the go-to representation of the Earth, but at least it's produced some pretty cool art.

Back before the late 1880s, no recordings of sound exist. We can only imagine the voices of world leaders and important historical figures. Sometimes biographies help, like in the case of Abraham Lincoln--Daniel Day-Lewis reproduced his supposedly high-pitched voice in last year's biopic, but it's impossible to know exactly what the 16th president sounded like. If there's any one man who deserves to have his voice preserved for the ages, though, it's Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Not only did Bell invent the most important audio device in history, his Volta Laboratory improved upon Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph by creating wax recordings.

Today we're in luck, because Bell did record his voice more than a century ago, in early experiments with different recording formats. It's just that, until now, no one has been able to play them.

Smithsonian has the great story of pursuing Bell's voice, which includes talking to his 99-year-old granddaughter in 2004 and piecing together the influences on his accent--Edinburgh Scotland, London, and multiple cities in Canada. Before his death in 1922, Bell regularly donated materials from his laboratory to the Smithsonian. Those donations included 400 early attempts at recording sound, which would never play on a turntable today:

"Inside the lab, Bell and his associates bent over their pioneering audio apparatus, testing the potential of a variety of materials, including metal, wax, glass, paper, plaster, foil and cardboard, for recording sound, and then listening to what they had embedded on discs or cylinders," writes Smithsonian. "However, the precise methods they employed in early efforts to play back their recordings are lost to history.

"As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained 'mute artifacts.' "

When the Smithsonian discovered that a physicist named Carl Haber had used modern technology to extract sound from a 150-year-old Parisian recording, however, they got in touch, and Haber worked the same magic on some of Bell's discs. And from one of them, these words emerged: "Hear my voice: Alexander Graham Bell!"

Hit The Smithsonian to listen to the recording. Even though it's only a few seconds long, it's pretty wild, and it's easy to imagine Bell enunciating as loudly and clearly as possible as he made the recording. The story also has a short video which shows off some of the equipment Haber and the Smithsonian used to recover voices that have been dead and gone for most of a century. Finally, if you want to here some more of Bell's voice, here he is counting up a storm:

It’s really too bad that today’s generation doesn’t understand what’s so fun about the low budget movies of yesteryear. We lost the drive-ins a long time ago, and gems like Plan 9 From Outer Space don’t even play on late night TV anymore. When the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez co-directed Grindhouse came out in 2007, audiences didn’t even understand the concept of a double-bill, and many left theaters without realizing there was a whole other feature after Planet Terror.

This is really a shame because when you worked for a producer like Roger Corman, you got real hands-on experience working on a feature, even if it wasn’t high art. (That many alumni who worked with Corman went on to the Hollywood A-list speaks for itself.) Yes, a lot of times the results were laughable, but with a lot of these films it’s remarkable to see what people could do with a few bucks and some ingenuity back in the day.

Rob Zombie, who is a huge B-movie fan, loved how directors of the drive-in era were able to work on miniscule budgets. He told Direct TV magazine, “Sometimes real genius came out of it. There is more passion and heart and iconic imagery in Plan 9 From Outer Space than there is in most of the crap that comes out now. Sure it’s a clunky movie, and of course it’s primitive, but it probably cost about five hundred bucks to make. Give anybody five hundred bucks today and they can’t even order a sandwich with it, let alone make a movie.”

These days so many fans love to make a game out of pointing out a movie’s “gaffes” or mistakes, and a lot of this began with Ed Wood’s movies, which had visible mistakes galore.

But Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, the screenwriters of the Ed Wood biopic, developed an appreciation for the hard work directors like Ed put into their work from working on low budget movies themselves.

Alexander recalled worked long, long hours for $105 a week, “But we were doin’ it because we were having fun,” he says. “At that point, I could sort of look back at Ed Wood’s films and say that maybe the people who made fun of him were wrong. Maybe they’re just kickin’ this guy around and saying, ‘Oh isn’t he incompetent, isn’t that funny?’ Ed directed half a dozen features. That’s pretty good for someone who came out to Hollywood to break into the movies. Most people who come out here to be directors don’t direct anything.”

And once Ed’s life story hit the big screen, there was the hilarious irony that Tim Burton made a $20 million dollar movie that copied bargain basement effects in immaculate detail.