My quick trip to South by Southwest was fruitful, and fun. I was in three events. This* was the group for the panel that was hosted by Rick Loverd, who directs the Science and Entertainment Exchange. We had lots of great discussion about Science in Film, TV, and other entertainment media: – Why it is important to make films more engaging with richer storytelling, to help build broader familiarity with science and scientists, and so on. There were insights from both sides of the “aisle”: I spoke about what the kind of work I do in this area, coming from the science side of things and Samantha Corbin-Miller and Stephany Folsom discussed things form their points of view of writers of TV and Film. (I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I’d recently (last Summer) looked at Stephany’s work in detail: She wrote the upcoming movie Thor: Ragnarok, and I had studied and written notes on the screenplay and met with the production team and director to give them some help with science underpinnings of that part of the Marvel Universe. I’m curious to see how the movie turns out.)
(On the flight there, and in my hotel room, I also got to do more of a series of physics computations that I’ve been working on that are rather exciting. The results are helping build a really nice story that I hope to write up in a paper very soon.)
Rick and I were to be on two other panels that day. More on that later. I need to rest.
-cvj
*Picture courtesy of Ann Merchant. Thanks!
