Category Archives: science in drama

Of Spies and Spacetime

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Stephanie DeMarco interviewed me a few weeks ago for an article she was writing about the science in the TV show Agent Carter (season two). As you know, I did a lot of work for them on the science, some of which I’ve mentioned here, and we spoke about some of that and a lot of interesting other things besides. Well, her article appeared in Signal to Noise magazine, a publication all about communicating science, and it’s really a nice piece. You can read it here. (The excellent title I used for this post is from her article.)

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It is a pity that the show has not been renewed for a third season (I’m trying not […] Click to continue reading this post →

Close Encounter?

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…of the physics kind.

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Ok, I’ll share a bit during my lunch break from spending too much time doing detail in a tiny panel few will linger on. (Perils of a detail-freak….) It’s a rough underdrawing I did this morning for a panel I’m now turning into final art (the black stuff is the start of final lines). That’s the character you saw a turnaround for earlier, busy at work in a cafe when… (To be continued…)

-cvj
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Competition Results!

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design_film_competition_logo_mediumThis year’s USC Science Film Competition saw another crop of films with a great variety of approaches, with live action and animation, comedy, drama and documentary, and all sorts of hydrids of those forms. Thanks to all who took part. As for the results, and seeing the films (do take a look!) I’ll repeat here the post I did over on the competition’s blog:

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We had a lot of fun at the screening and showcase last Thursday. The films looked great on the Imax screen. Many thanks to Matt Scott for working hard to make sure it all looked great, and also to him and the Large Format Cinema Club for co-hosting the event! Once again, thanks to the Burg Foundation for supporting the competition financially with prize money, grants for helping with the filmmaking, and funds for refreshments and logistics.

The results are as follows: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Weekend Reminder

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NHM_poster_April_1_2016_2While wandering with the family in the Natural History Museum this weekend, I spotted a reminder (click for larger view) for Friday’s event, which you might be interested in.

I’ll be on a panel about science (particularly space-related) and the movies, with fellow panelist Sean Carroll, and it is hosted by the awesome Patt Morrison! It’s part of the Natural History Museum’s First Fridays series, which you might recall me blogging about here before (actually, last time I was at one, I was a host so I imagine it’ll feel a bit different this time).

Here’s a website with all the details.

-cvj
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Visualizing Zero Matter

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zero-matter-in-actionWired has a video piece about the VFX work done on Agent Carter to bring the substance known as “zero matter” to your screens. They very kindly mentioned me, which is a pleasant surprise. There was a lot of conversation early on with the writers, show runners, and the head of VFX (Sheena Duggal), discussing what it might look like, and what kind of aesthetic drivers were in play for the look of the show overall (less ZAP! and more ooze and flow), and what you see on screen is the result of a lot of that conversation. It’s really great to see so much of what we brainstormed make it up on screen. The main physics input I wanted to use as a guide was the idea that this is some sort of special fluid from “elsewhere”, in a very special physical phase (inspired by various super fluids and perfect fluids in actual physics from our world, which I explained a bit about to them…Sheena was also very taken with ferrofluids, which was a very smart design input to use as reference). We also talked a lot about the idea that zero matter manifests itself in different ways depending upon the biology of the host. (See a post I did about other aspects of zero matter here, including the naming of it, and “elsewhere”.)

The amazing company Double Negative played a huge role overall, doing the rendering and bringing all sort of techniques to bear to make it all work. You’ll maybe recognize that name since they were the people who worked with physicist Kip Thorne […] Click to continue reading this post →

BPS Panel on Science and Entertainment

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BPS_panel_1Yes, I’ve been panelling again, down at the LA Convention Center. It was a fun conversation, moderated by Rick Loverd the Program Director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, entitled “The Science of Hollywood” as part of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society*. With me were Amy Berg, who is a Film/TV Writer and Executive Producer, Jessica Cail, Professor of Psychopharmacology, Pepperdine University, and Mike Ireland, Senior Vice President, Production, 20th Century Fox.

Despite the title, we were not trying to put observations of, experiments done on, or theories constructed about Hollywood on any firm scientific footing! We did engage in a lot of discussion about the connections we work on between science and Film and TV. We spoke about why we do it, how we try to do it, and […] Click to continue reading this post →

On Zero Matter

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zero-matter-containedOver at Marvel, I chatted with actor Reggie Austin (Dr. Jason Wilkes on Agent Carter) some more about the physics I helped embed in the show this season. It was fun. (See an earlier chat here.) This was about Zero Matter itself (which will also be a precursor to things seen in the movie Dr. Strange later this year)… It was one of the first things the writers asked me about when I first met them, and we brainstormed about things like what it should be called (the name “dark force” comes later in Marvel history), and how a scientist who encountered it would contain it. This got me thinking about things like perfect fluids, plasma physics, exotic phases of materials, magnetic fields, and the like (sadly the interview skips a lot of what I said about those)… and to the writers’ and show-runners’ enormous credit, lots of these concepts were allowed to appear in the show in various ways, including (versions of) two containment designs that I sketched out. Anyway, have a look in the embed below.

Oh! The name. We did not settle on a name after the first meeting, but one of […] Click to continue reading this post →

It Came from Elsewhere…

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Reggie_Austin_and_cvj_interviewThis just in. Marvel has posted a video of a chat I did with Agent Carter’s Reggie Austin (Dr. Jason Wilkes) about some of the science I dreamed up to underpin some of the things in the show. In particular, we talk about his intangibility and how it connects to other properties of the Zero Matter that we’d already established in earlier episodes. You can see it embedded below […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Big Reveal…

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Hayley-Atwell-and-Reggie-Austin-in-Agent-Carter-S2

Alert: Agent Carter season 2 is currently airing. I talk about last week’s episode three in this post. You’ve been warned.

While I’ve been very pleased with the volume of scientific tidbits the Agent Carter writers have allowed me to sprinkle into the show (perfect fluids, Compton wavelength, an accretion disc around a spacetime rift… and you can see two of my boards, including bits of the Thomas-Fermi model**) – and there are many more to come! – the really great science reveal came this last episode, #3, (spoilers!): […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Sundance Panel Report

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Over on NPR’s 13.7 blog, Barbara J. King reported on what she took away from the panel at Sundance entitled “The Art of Getting Science Right”. The discussants were Ting Wu, Mike Cahill, myself, and Kerry Bishé moderated everything masterfully. (We also were the Sloan Jury, along with Shane Carruth, who was indisposed.) As you know from my writing here, I’ve long been advocating a lot for more focus on portraying the scientific process and the engagement and joy of science over worrying about getting every science detail right. This came up a lot in our conversation, and we […] Click to continue reading this post →

Best Jury Duty Ever!

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embrace_of_the_serpent_ceremonyWell, I’m back from the Sundance Film Festival, where (as you’ll recall from previous posts) I was serving on a jury for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation prize for science in feature film. It involved a lot of sitting and watching movies in theaters all over Park City, discussion and deliberation with fellow jurors (and what a wonderful group to hang out with!), and then a public panel discussion about the importance of science in film (and how to do it “right”) and then announcements, questions, photos, more photos, even more photos, press, etc.

As you may know (it is all over the corner of the press that cares about this sort of thing) we awarded the prize to the film “Embrace of the Serpent” (director/writer: Ciro Guerra*), which happens to also be Colombia’s Oscar-nominated entry in the Foreign Language film category. Here was our citation, read out during a reception on Tuesday:

“for its original and provocative portrait of a scientist and a scientific journey into the unknown, and for its unconventional depiction of how different cultures seek to understand nature.”

I recommend seeing the film because there’s excellent […] Click to continue reading this post →

In Other Science meets Entertainment news…

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sundance_logoVariety and other such entertainment news sites are abuzz with the news that Sundance has now announced its list of who’s on the various Juries for prizes at the festival this year. As you may know, the Sloan Foundation gives a prize there for science in feature film, and I’ll be on the Jury this year. It should be fun – watching all those films will be a bonus, but I’m most looking forward to talking with Kerry Bishé and Shane Carruth about science/engineering and film. Kerry plays a computer engineer character on AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire”, and in my view really helps set a new high standard for the level of depth and nuance you can bring to such a character while staying well away from every tedious engineer/scientist character trope that actors usually are expected to bring to […] Click to continue reading this post →

WSJ Piece On Science and Entertainment

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wall_street_journal_snapIt’s nice to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning when my mum is visiting me. But where does one go to actually buy a newspaper?!

The nice piece, by Erich Schwartzel, is about the work the Science and Entertainment exchange, working with scientists like myself does in the entertainment industry. It opens by reporting on a conversation I was having at that Back to the Future […] Click to continue reading this post →

Conversation Starting Somewhere…

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Somewhere near you, some perfectly ordinary people are about to do something wonderful – start a conversation about science… turn their minds to how the world around them works. Isn’t that great? Here’s an iPad rough of an opening splash page of a story with one such conversation*. Listen! – It is about to begin. (Click for larger view.) Pick your city/street/people…

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-cvj

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