The Lovable Geeks Behind Turbo Kid, a ‘Mad Max on a BMX’

Meet the Roadkill Superstars. Their new film Turbo Kid has been called “Mad Max on a BMX” and is a campy 1980s throwback packed with vintage tech and blood and guts. Stylistically they’re not too different from Robert Rodriguez, except they have much smaller budgets and a taste for science fiction. Not exactly what you’d expect from three sweet writer/directors from Canada, but that mix of heart and hellfire is what makes them—and their movie—so unique.

The Roadkill Superstars (aka François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell) are also just a bunch of nerds committed to doing what they love. “Being a geek is very liberating,” says Simard, “because it just means you are very passionate about something and you did it as much as you want. We are huge geeks and I am proud of my geekness.”

After a strong debut at the Sundance Film Festival (we named them three of our heroes the fest), the gang is taking Turbo Kid to South by Southwest this week, where undoubtedly the genre-film-loving crowd will eat up the movie’s dytopia-flavored action.

Here are a few things you should know about the Roadkill Superstars.

The Roadkill Superstars: Anouk Whissell, François Simard, and Yoann-Karl Whissell. Franois Simard (left), Anouk Whissell (center), Franois Simard (right)

Team RKSS Is a Modern Family

Anouk and Yoann-Karl are brother and sister, and François and Anouk have been a couple for 15 years. The trio has been making short films together for more than a decade. “Over the years we’ve made some sort of hive mind where we share a brain,” says Simard. “We love the same things. We grew up with the same things … the fact that we are three, we are like a band. We have each other through good and tough times.”

And while many people have a hard time surviving long holiday weekends with their families, Team RKSS says their unique bond is a boon to the creative process, even when disagreements inevitably surface. “When we write we all come with our ideas. We stand up and act out scenes together to see if everything works,” says Simard. “We do get into yelling spats from time to time for five minutes and then someone goes ‘OK, I’ve got what you mean!'”

This constant workshopping also gives the team an advantage when it’s time to move the idea beyond the hive. Yoann-Karl explains that by defending your creative process in advance, it’s easier to bring cogent arguments to a room of outsiders later on. “When we come to present that idea we really know it from top to bottom,” he says, “and are able to explain it.”

Turbo Kid Is Not Actually for Kids

Don’t let the name and the whimsical production stills fool you. Turbo Kid falls into solid R-rating territory with plenty of flailing disemboweled corpses, fountains of blood pumping from sliced arteries, and wanton profanity.

RKSS likes things gory and absolutely not subtle, and staying faithful to their hive mind’s DNA with Turbo Kid was crucial. “Be true to yourself. Be genuine,” says Yoann-Karl. “Do what makes you happy and make it as often as you can.” And when your true self makes short films like Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension, you’ve got a pretty uncompromising aesthetic to uphold.

However, RKSS Isn’t Just About Campy Blood and Guts

Despite the predilection for on-screen savagery, the only thing actually bleeding from the trio is enthusiasm and gratitude. “We love to give hugs. Like, really,” says Simard. “We aim to please and we want people to go out of Turbo Kid with a big smile on their face and be happy for the rest of the day.”

If that sounds like the opposite reaction you’d have to a movie packed with savagery and death, you’re not alone there. But the Roadkill Superstars snuck a light-touch love story into Turbo Kid, an unlikely coupling between the titular Kid (Munro Chambers) and his android companion, Apple (Laurence Leboeuf). The trio knew that their full-length movie couldn’t sustain itself on cartoon violence alone, and so they gave it a soul in the form of young love (or at least young bashful affection).

“You have to make hard choices to be able to tell the whole story,” says Simard, discussing the differences between short-form and long-form storytelling. “For the feature film we knew that we needed to have a heart for a story, and we had a cute little love story. It was the first time we wrote love.”

The Roadkill Superstars Found One of Their Superstars By Chance

On top of all the blood and guts and young love, there’s one other sweet surprise in Turbo Kid: The mega-villain crime boss, Zeus, is played by genre hero Michael Ironside. It’s a near-perfect role for the actor, and it’s a casting that came by very fortuitous means for the Roadkill Superstars.

“We went to the Toronto International Film Festival and Michael just walked in,” says Simard. “He comes in and we’re all just looking at each other going ‘Zeus just walked in!’ So we went to our producer and said we wrote the character for him and we want him for the film.”

Turbo Kid Is a Lot Like Whiplash

Well… Not really. But similar to the critical and awards darling from director Damian Chazelle, Turbo Kid premiered at Sundance, was based on a short film, and had directors pulling double duty as screenplay writers. How’s that for the can-do spirit of independent cinema?

Turbo Kid was born as T is for Turbo, a short film entered into Drafthouse Films’ ABC’s of Death competition in 2012, and it almost didn’t happen at all. The trio had already participated in various short film competitions and didn’t want to keep trudging down the same road, but fortunately for us all, they changed their minds. T is for Turbo took third place in its bracket of the competition, and even though it wasn’t included in the feature-length ABCs of Death horror anthology (that honor went to category winner T is for Toilet), the entry from Roadkill Superstars fared pretty well. It is still the most popular entry from the T category, and, oh yeah, launched its creators into the Sundance and SXSW film festivals.

All the attention on their films has kept Simard and the Whissells extremely busy in 2015, but they don’t mind at all.

“It’s still a lot of work every day, but it’s a dream. We fought for it,” says Yoann-Karl. “All the years making shorts and we wanted to do at least one wonderful feature, and now that we’ve done Sundance we have a lot of opportunities. We don’t mind going around the world. We love being busy.”

If You Want to Find Aliens, Look for a Colorful Planet

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The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. Jim Peaco/National Park Service

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Eight of the 137 microorganism samples used to measure biosignatures for the catalog. In each panel, the top is a regular photograph of the sample and the bottom is a micrograph, a 400x zoomed-in version of the top image. The scientists were aiming to achieve diversity in color and pigmentation. Top left to bottom right: Unknown species of genus bacillus (Sonoran desert, AZ, USA); unkown species of genus Arthrobacter (Atacama desert, Chile); Chlorella protothecoides (sap of a wounded white poplar); unknown species of genus Ectothiorhodospira (Big Soda Lake, NV, USA); unknown species of genus Anabaena (with green fluorescent protein; stagnant freshwater); unknown species of genus Phormidium (Kamori Channel, Palau); Porphyridium purpureum (old woodwork at salt spring, Boone's Lick State Park, MO, USA); Dermocarpa violacea (aquarium outflow, La Jolla, CA, USA). Hegde et al./MPIA

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. Jim Peaco/National Park Service

When Lisa Kaltenegger first saw the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, its azure valentine-shaped pool surrounded by lurid, fiery yellow-orange tendrils, stunned her. As an astronomer who studies other worlds, Kaltenegger understood better than most people here on Earth that the kinds of bacteria that thrive in hot springs like the ones at Yellowstone tend to have striking coloration. “I knew it before, logically,” Kaltenegger says. “But seeing it was different.”

So like any good scientist, Kaltenegger did a little reading. It turned out that different colored bacteria preferred different temperatures. And that gave her an idea. If an entire planet were covered in microbes…whatever conditions they lived under would affect their color. If life exists on other planets, it’s probably not as toothy xenomorphs or doe-eyed wanderers. It’s probably germs—bacteria like those that dominated Earth for the majority of its history. With new space and ground-based telescopes set to begin exploring alien worlds in the next few years, scientists are poised—for the first time ever—to identify signs of alien life. Kaltenegger realized that they could do it by looking for pretty colors.

Eight of the 137 colorful microbes that Hegde and Kaltenegger analyzed. In each panel, the bottom image shows the bacteria magnified 400 times. The bugs are found around the world, from the Sonoran desert in Arizona to the Kamori Channel in Palau. Hegde et al./MPIA

When astronomers characterize stars, they often use a system called a color-color diagram. Basically it’s a chart that maps the brightness of the star as seen in two different wavelengths, through a telescope. Measured this way, stars tend to cluster into groups based on things like how old they are. Kaltenegger, director of the Institute for Pale Blue dots at Cornell University, teamed up with her student at the time, an astronomer named Siddarth Hegde who’s now also at Cornell, to try the same thing with bacteria. They took five species, each of them tough enough or weird enough to potentially exist on another planet (hypothetically) and looked at them with visible and near-infrared light. Then they plotted a color-color dagram.

It turned out that the measurements formed a diagonal line—suggesting that other bacteria might fall on the same graph. Now, in a study published today, they expand those results to 137 microbial species, a catalog of colors that, if you see them glinting off a planet outside our solar system, might suggest bacteria on the surface. “So far we haven’t found anything that falls outside the line,” Kaltnegger says. And since actually looking directly at an exoplanet isn’t easy right now, these kind of signatures might be the first sign anyone sees of ET.

The pattern is far from a definitive signature of life, but it’s a way to prioritize which planets to focus on. “It’s not that this planet has life,” Kaltenegger explains. “It’s that this planet is more interesting than that other one.” That kind of prioritization is going to be crucial, because astronomers expect that they’re about to discover lots more planets. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, set for launch in 2017, aims to find dozens—maybe hundreds—of Earth-sized planets, all orbiting stars at a distance that would allow for liquid water. That “habitable zone” makes it at least plausible that life could exist on their surfaces.

Meanwhile, the next generation of planet-bound telescopes will actually be able to see the kinds of colors that Kaltenegger and Hegde’s catalog covers. The Giant Magellan Telescope will start observing in 2021. The Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii will also be finished in a few years. And if one of these telescopes finds a planet promising for life, then astronomers can zoom in with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2018. JWST will be able to detect gases in the atmosphere—including the byproducts of processes unique to living things.

Obviously, you’d want to find those molecules as relatively sure signs of life. But some Earthly organisms don’t produce any detectable gases at all. One type of such microbes, called anoxygenic phototrophs, flourished on Earth for a billion years. They could be similar to what astronomers might see on other planets. “You start with looking for what you know,” says Niki Parenteau, a researcher at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. “Because these are very simple phototrophs that can inhabit a variety of niches, it seems reasonable to search for them as a starting point.” Conveniently, one of the phototrophs is purple.

In fact, Esther Sanromá, an astronomer at the Astrophysical Institute of the Canary Islands, used a computer model to see if they were purple enough. She built a computer model to calculate whether an Earth-like planet covered in the bugs would look purple to a telescope. Parenteau is also measuring the colors of other anoxygenic phototrophs, which span a spectrum of greens, yellows, and reds. “Instead of a purple exoplanet,” she says, “you have a rainbow sherbet exoplanet.”

Of course, whether or not astronomers can see such colors will depend on how much land or water covers the planet, and how thick its clouds are. Sanromá found that if purple microbes only lived in oceans, a telescope wouldn’t be able to detect them. But the galaxy is filled with all kinds of planets with different landscapes and seascapes. “I think there’s a big diversity of worlds out there,” Kaltenegger says. And each could be home to a rainbow of lifeforms.

The Week in Trailers: Mr. Clooney Takes Us to Tomorrowland

This week’s trailers offered a twist on the standard fare. We got new teasers for major upcoming releases that are finally doling out more in the way of plot and character details. And as far as being on the new, this edition of the roundup belongs to documentaries. The Sundance crop continues to bloom with Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, and fellow pop legends Iris Apfel and Back to the Future also get time in the sun. Finish it out with Steve Coogan and Nick Kroll bringing it in the funny department and you’ve got yourself a pleasant slate of on-screen entertainment to look forward to. Rev up your imagination engines, because we’ve got your Tomorrowland of trailers right here.

The One Everyone Is Talking About: Tomorrowland (Above)

Tomorrowland has been billed as a “mystery adventure” by Disney, and up until now the teasers have made good on that promise. We’ve seen brief glimpses of a futuristic utopia and heard voice-overs in the dulcet tones of George Clooney, but otherwise it’s all been very vague. This is the first trailer that really lets us sink our teeth into the movie, and it does have a story, after all! What we know so far is that Tomorrowland the place looks a lot more pristine and technologically advanced than the world as we know it today. And from what we see in this trailer, the world as we will eventually know it is beset with catastrophic weather, riots, looting, and devastation. Clooney’s character Frank knows this, and tells our young hero Casey (Britt Robertson) that he’s been waiting for someone like her, perhaps to build a bridge between Tomorrowland and the real world to stave off something like human extinction. Interestingly, we also see that Casey’s movements in the this world affect her movements in Tomorrowland, suggesting the two places aren’t so much dimensions apart as they are parallel realities—maybe. Everything looks beautiful, like a combination of art deco and steampunk and the Wizard of Oz and Disney World (surprise!), and it’s very exciting to see such an ambitious, live action original story coming from a major studio. The already stacked May release schedule just got even more enticing.

Pause at: 1:16. Possible Magic Mountain sighting in the background. Regular tub time (and space) machine at 1:36. A glimpse of apocalyptic things to come at 1:57.

Essential Quote: “What you saw was a place where the best and the brightest people in the world came together to actually change it.”—Frank (Clooney)

The Animated One: Inside Out

Apparently Disney decided this was the week its time-release trailer campaigns were set to go off, because in addition to Tomorrowland, we’ve now gotten our first in-depth look at the plot of its next Pixar feature, Inside Out—the animation house’s first original story since Brave in 2012. We’ve known that Riley is an 11-year-old girl adjusting to her new life in San Francisco after a being uprooted from her Midwest upbringing. And we’ve also known that Riley’s emotions are actual characters living inside her mental Headquarters, trying to keep the delicate balance of sanity in tact. But with this trailer we get to see more of the misadventures those emotions actually get up to. Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) get sucked out of HQ into a different sector of Riley’s consciousness, and must navigate their way back through her various mental compartments (e.g. Long Term Memory, Imagination Land, Dream Productions) to set things right with her Core Memories. Considering how effective the Emotional Manipulation team (aka the writing team) is at Pixar, we’re probably going to be two sad memories away from crying this entire movie.

Pause at: 0:36 for a charming San Francisco backdrop. Loving the maze of long term memories at 1:15. Too bad it’s not just normal for things to explode into glitter when they’re hit with wrecking balls, like at 1:45. LOL! Brainfreeze at 2:11.

Song: Boston, “More Than A Feeling”

Essential Quote: “Congratulations, San Francisco! You’ve ruined pizza!”—Anger (Lewis Black), disapproving of broccoli as a topping

The Small Screen Standout: Happyish

The notion of a man-of-a-certain-age out of touch with today’s fast-paced digital culture—who’s also suffering from erectile dysfunction—feels more tired than its protagonist. But the cast of Happyish is so good we’re ready to follow them blindly into Showtime’s new bittersweet comedy series. The role of Thom Payne (who actually says “fuck Thomas Jefferson!” in this trailer) is played by Steve Coogan, but was originally written for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman was certainly adept at working comedy, but the idea of switching from one of the great dramatic actors of our time to one of our greatest comedic actors must have necessitated a big tone shift in writing the main character. But from his pursuits as Alan Patridge to Hamlet 2 to Philomena and everything in between, we know that Coogan is a formidable talent across the dramedic spectrum, and with Ellen Barkin, Kathryn Hahn, and Carrie Preston starring alongside him, we’re feeling really positive about Happyish.

Pause at: 1:32 for a … weird cardboard cutout?

Essential Quote: “You hit your joy ceiling and you’re done. That’s why Jesus wept! Low joy ceiling. Richard Simmons? High joy ceiling.”—Dani Kirschenbloom (Barkin)

The Documentary: Back In Time

This October will obviously be October 2015—the same month Marty McFly landed in 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, and—appropriately—the month this documentary about the whole trilogy is scheduled for release. Perhaps director Jason Aron knows how to find time-hopping Marty and how to get him to the premiere! If you’re a fan of BTTF, this movie has a lot to offer. The roster of contributors is a Future fans dream, including Robert Zemeckis, Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, Bob Gale, Dean Cundey, Kevin Pike, Alan Silvestri, and famous mega-fans like Community’s Dan Harmon and creator of The Goldbergs Adam Goldberg. It talks about how the movies got made, but also examines their impact and enduring significance for so many even 30 years down the road. Fox says at one point “it’s great to have a bunch of lunatics on your side.” Well, if loving Back to the Future is crazy, then we don’t want to be sane.

Pause at: 0:07. Heads up for the hoverboard! Still amazing after all these years at 0:29. This guy’s BTTF game is better than your BTTF game at 1:01.

Essential Quote: “We maxed out that card on a DeLorean, and made it into a time machine.

The Alterna-Screen One: Daredevil

Continuing the week of big reveals in known properties, Netflix is following Disney’s lead by giving us a juiced-up new Daredevil trailer that showcases the hero/villain relationship between Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and the Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio). Kingpin gives a brief explanation of his Hell’s Kitchen origins and tries to tell the Daredevil he’s the yin to his yang—you know, standard villainy mind games stuff. We also get to see the first actual connection between Murdock and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), the lawyer’s long running love interest in the Daredevil comic series, and his best friend and partner in legal practice, Foggy Nelson (who also happens to be into Karen). So, it looks like we’ve got our antagonist, our love triangle, and our conflicted vigilante hero. Bring on that binge watch, Netflix!

Pause at: 0:41 for sweet Foggy Nelson. A hard night’s work for the Daredevil at 1:33.

Essential Quote: “Sometimes you have to do things outside the law.”—Matt Murdock (Cox)

The Sleeper Documentary: Iris

Even if you don’t care about fashion icon Iris Apfel (and really who are you to think she isn’t worth your time?) you should at least respect entirely self-made legendary status. “The Rare Bird,” they call her, a singular entity in the fashion industry who thinks rules and conventions are BS. One might even dare to call her … disruptive! The 93-year-old Apfel is captured here by the great documentarian Albert Maysles, who passed away on March 5 at 88. Maysles directed such renowned projects as Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter and it’s fitting that his final project would focus on someone who is nearly a century old, but still as vibrant and sharp as ever, proving that true genius and star power has no expiration date, a quality shared by Apfel and Maysles till his last days.

Pause at: 0:11, 0:27, 0:56, 1:53, 1:56, and 2:17 for a bird in the wild.

Essential Quote: “I didn’t give a damn about going to the party or being at the party. It was getting dressed for the party. And there’s truth and poetry in that.”—Iris Apfel

The Music Documentary: Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

If you’re a music fan, Montage of Heck might feel a bit like porn. Brett Morgan, the director of this Sundance favorite, got unbelievable access to the real life of Kurt Cobain for this documentary, talking to the artist’s family members and close friends and getting access to personal art works, video footage from his childhood, and old journals. Much has been written and discussed about Cobain, but Morgan really gets in there with first-hand accounts about the embattled rock icon from the people who actually knew him and shaped his life—even Courtney Love!

Pause at: 0:15 for baby Kurt! Assuming this is a clip of Cobain’s artwork at 0:52. The little Bean Cobain at 1:35. Dorothy, we’re not in Aberdeen, Washington anymore at 2:07.

Essential Quote: “He was searching for whatever made him feel like he wasn’t alone.”

The Funny One: Adult Beginners

The Kroll Show may be going the way of the Dodo, but maybe that just means Nick Kroll will have more time for projects like this. If you’re going to make another “Help me! I’m an adult!” coming-of-middle-age style movie (Kroll isn’t quite at the middle-age threshold, but the spirit remains the same), you might as well stack it with an outstanding comedic cast. We know the comedian can do absurd and outlandish (see “The Douche” from Parks and Recreation or any number of his Kroll Show alter egos), but the toned down, earnest approach to funny is something we haven’t seen yet. Additionally, Bobby Moynihan, Jane Krakowski, Joel McHale, and Jason Mantzoukas appear in bitsy roles, at the very least, with Rose Byrne and Bobby Canavale as his co-stars. (Rose Byrne and Bobby Canavale!) So even if Beginners veers into annoyingly whiny self-discovery territory, all the principals should at least be very fun to watch. Oh yeah, and Kroll plays Jake, an entrepreneur type who failed miserably and lost a lot of people’s money in the process, which forces him to move out of Manhattan and into the Burbs with his sister and brother-in-law. So, that’s the actual story here.

Pause at: 1:09. Who doesn’t want this face babysitting their kids? Excellent nanny work at 1:11. A FaceTime-with-parents’-worst-nightmare scenario at 1:52. Yes at 1:54.

Song: Dominant Legs, “Hoop Of Love” and Winterbourne, “Sunrise”

Essential Quote: “You can basically take the last three years of my life and light them on fire.”—Jake (Kroll)

The iPhone’s Slo-Mo Video Has Become a Dancer’s Best Friend

I’ve used my iPhone 6’s slow motion superpowers to capture waves crashing on the beach, bicycle wheels spinning by in a race, and to turn a dog’s adorable yaps into a ferocious 240 fps growl. But plenty of people have started using slow motion to more practical ends. Including dancers.

Before the advent of high-quality smartphone shooters, slow-motion was largely left to movie montages, pro-sports instant replays, or pricey camera rigs. The idea that dancers, particularly freelancers and students, would have access to that sort of technology was unthinkable. When you’re making under $30k a year, that money is going towards food and rent, not a high-end DSLR. But now that a smartphone has become practically standard issue, previously high-end camera technology is accessible to almost everyone. And slow motion, while initially more of a gimmick, has slowly matured into a mainstay for some people.

For dancers, it’s become an incredibly useful tool for honing their craft. The newfound affordability of slow motion has enabled them to improve their technique, spruce up their audition reel, and isolate aspects of their performance that were once intangible.

“If my students can’t understand the momentum of a certain movement, slo-mo makes it a really simple thing to break it down,” freelance dancer and dance instructor Ashley Marinelli told WIRED. She uses slo-mo as a teaching tool in dance classes in the Tri-State area, showing, for example, how to properly fall into and rise from the ground smoothly and cleanly, without injury, during contemporary classes. She’s been using video as a teaching aide for about two years, capturing rehearsals with either her iPhone 5 or iPad mini. When the situation calls for slow motion, she uses the Slow-Pro app on her iPhone 5, or uses a borrowed iPhone 6 (“The technology on the iPhone 6 is far superior, so I mooch off of my generous friends whenever I can,” Marinelli explained).

Video has been an important part of documenting dance rehearsals, performances, and audition materials for years, but only recently has it begun creeping into dance classes. Say you’re demonstrating a complicated jump for students. Once you leave the ground, you’re falling back down at 9.8 meters per second squared, whether you like it or not. There’s only so much you can demonstrate step-by-step, unless you awkwardly suspend yourself in mid-air propped against the barre at the back of the room. With a smartphone, you can capture that movement and replay it to explain exactly what happens moment to moment. It saves precious class time, and eliminates ambiguity.

Lindsey Miller, a dancer with Alison Cook Beatty Dance company, owns an iPhone 5c, but has worked with director and photographer Tristan Pope to record herself with an iPhone 6. This allows her to see how her muscles move, and improve skills on her own, helpful when there’s no instructor around to offer critiques. Being able to see the breakdown of motion that happens in a split second provides insight on the physics of what exactly occurs when she dances, she says.

Pope, meanwhile, is an avid user of slo-mo. He exclusively used the iPhone 6’s 240 fps slo-mo in a short film called Dancers of New York , which has been selected as a contestant in the International Mobil Film Festival. In the video, you see daring leaps, high kicks, and acrobatics slowed down such that you can watch legs stretch and muscles contract with impressive detail. It’s mesmerizing. Pope embarked on the project mere hours after buying the latest iPhone last fall, shooting the first dancer for Dancers of New York, Anna Pinault. The results were instantly impressive.

“When I hit record and she did her dance move, I remember thinking ‘Well, that was cool,'” Pope said. The two huddled over the phone to check out the results. Not only could they see a stunning move from prep to finish, they could discern where it needed to be improved upon and repositioned to ensure the next shot was perfect, both in terms of technical execution, and camera angles and lighting. On average it took only ten minutes to get the right shot from each dancer, after a 15 to 30 minute set up.

Pope said the only issue he ran into with slo-mo for his particular project shooting in low light conditions. When you increase the frame rate per second, you need a higher digital ISO to counteract the lower exposure time each frame is getting. The iPhone can’t compensate for that quite yet. While the footage Pope took at night was still viewable, it was too grainy to include in his piece. “240 fps just eats your light,” Pope wrote in a blog post about the project. He just recently finished another short piece that features a dancer in the snow.

There’s also more to a dance performance than just body movements. And as Marinelli discovered, slow motion footage can also reveal the almost imperceptible changes in expression that can make the difference between landing a gig and falling flat.

“I was doing one movement, over and over, and I realized you can see where enjoyment starts in your face,” Marinelli recalled, explaining how her smartphone picked up even the smallest shifts in expression. “You can see the mental processing of ‘Oh my god I hope this works out, oh my god it’s going to work, oh it’s fun I’m flying, oh I hope I land okay. Facial expressions that take a millisecond in real time.”

Capturing these seemingly tiny nuances can set a dancer apart from his or her competition when auditioning for a role, highlighting details of artistry and technique that otherwise might be glanced over. Dancers have been augmenting their resumes with video footage for years (many companies require video as part of the audition process, particularly if they can’t be there in person). The addition of slo-mo to a video reel also adds an “extra bit of movie magic finesse,” according to Pope, who finds himself behind the casting table in addition to behind the camera. It certainly doesn’t hurt for your video to look more pro.

Of course, not all dancers can, or will, take advantage of slo-mo. Some companies, like San Francisco Ballet, do not permit any sort of smartphone recording during class or rehearsal due to union rules. But for freelancers like Miller, Marinelli, and others, it’s become a unique creative tool to add to their portfolio, and a way to shine light onto technical faux pas that even the most eagle-eyed instructors might otherwise miss.

Premiere: A Pop Album All About Facebook and the NSA

As his stage name, Big Data, might suggest, producer Alan Wilkis’s sound is heavily influenced by our tech-laden world. And on his extremely catchy debut album, he goes all-in with songs inspired by Edward Snowden, the Internet of Things, and even Facebook’s mood experiments.

“With each song on 2.0, I set out to explore a specific issue or moment in technology,” Wilkis says. “And lyrically they are often voiced from the perspective of the ‘bad guy’ in the narrative.”

How so? Well for the Snowden-themed song, “Snowed In,” the thoughts and statements of the NSA are “in the tone of a spurned or betrayed ex-lover,” Wilkis says. And the Internet of Things track frames our relationship with gadgets as being romantic but “verging on extreme codependence.”

To give all those narratives a voice, Wilkis assembled a roster of collaborators that includes Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and WIRED favorite Twin Shadow. “I had the immense privilege of collaborating with a host of incredible vocalists on 2.0,” he says, “and at the end of the day I just hope these songs make you smile, dance, and think a bit.”

Check out 2.0 below. The album drops March 24.

An App That Lets You Stalk Yourself at Home

What goes on in your house when you’re not around?

A startup called Camio offers a free service that turns any old Android or iOS smartphone or tablet into a web-connected surveillance camera. Just install the app, sign up for an account and you’re ready to go.

Camio co-founder Carter Maslan, a former Google Maps project manager, says people use it for everything from home security to finding out what their pets do all day while no one is home. But the company ran into a problem soon after launching last year. Even though it only captures video that includes motion — so that you’re not storing hours and hours of video where nothing happens — it was still more than most people actually needed. “For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter,” Maslan says.

Camio saves 30 days worth of video in the cloud, which you can watch from anywhere. You only have to pay if you want to connect more than one camera to your account.

So last week, the company launched a new feature called Camio Daily, an email digest of the stills that the company’s algorithms predict you’ll find most interesting, based on which clips you’ve watched before. Click a still, and you can watch the the video clip it came from.

It’s certainly a different take on the Internet of Things. Instead attaching sensors and Wi-Fi card to everything we want to know about or keep track of, the company repurposes something many of us just having lying around — old phones — and turns them into a way to learn more about what’s happening in a particular place. You can search your video archives using natural language — for example, “people approaching my walkway” — or set up alerts when certain things happen, such as when it captures an image of someone inside your house.

From Street View to Home View

The idea stemmed from Maslan’s time working on Google Maps Street View. “During literally every usability study at least one person would ask ‘Why isn’t my car there? I parked it there this morning,'” he explains. That led to the realization that there was a demand for live monitoring. There were plenty of other video streaming products out there—such as Dropcam, which was acquired by Google’s smart home company Nest last year—but they tended to capture far too much video to be useful. Plus, since they tended to stream everything they captured, they’d use a lot of banddwidth, which could slow down other video streaming services like YouTube or Netflix.

Camio’s innovation is that the camera app is selective about what it uploads. Maslan says that it’s algorithms are smart enough to tell the difference between, say, lighting changes or a blowing tree branch, and someone walking up to your porch. By reducing the total amount of data uploaded and stored, Camio can use much less bandwidth than a traditional webcam, and the company can afford to offer a free version of the service.

For most users, only about 51 seconds per day matter. Carter Maslan

Once the footage is moved to the cloud, Camio’s computers analyze the videos to try to automatically detect things such as which ones have people and what colors are present, so that users can search the archives.

It’s hard not to worry about uploading video footage from your house to the cloud, but Maslan says that all the video is encrypted so that not even Camio’s engineers can access it (though it’s not possible to verify this without auditing Camio’s servers). For people uploading video that’s not particularly sensitive –such as publicly viewable areas such as their front yards — this might not be a big deal. Everyone else will need to take a leap of faith.

It’s not hard to imagine Camio being used for corporate security or other applications, but Maslan says that the company is completely focused on the home market, at least for now. But Camio did just announce a new API that will allow select partners to build new integrations, and it’s possible that project could lead to some corporate or government uses.

“I came from Google Maps where we decided to focus on making a super simple product for consumers, but then open it up so that people could tie it into,” he says.

Or just spend all day watching yourself.

Dear Kenneth Branagh, You Can Do Better Than Cinderella

Branagh at the red carpet of Cinderella at the Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 13, 2015. Berlin Film Festival

Dear Sir Branagh,

Congratulations! Not only have the last two movies you directed been most financially successful of your career—Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recriut—but after a $70 million opening weekend, your live-action Cinderella already handily surpassed one of them. (The one that isn’t Thor.) But while you’ve managed to forge a path as a reliable director of big-budget films, you’ve forgotten what made you a significant creative force in the first place: wildly ambitious and distinctive adaptations.

You’ve been compared to Sir Laurence Olivier for decades, and considering you earned your most recent Oscar nomination for playing Olivier in My Week With Marilyn, it’s not as though you’re shrinking from that comparison. You directed Henry V and then a four-hour unabridged film adaptation of Hamlet—that’s the exact order Olivier went in back in the 1940s. Though “Greatest Shakespearean Actor Of His Generation” is a term about as meaningful these days as “Heavyweight Champion Of The World” or “Fastest Man Alive,” it’s as more of a distraction than an accolade, because it ignores how impressive your offstage work really is.

Your best directing work has one thing in common: you explore how our most cherished stories—archetypal myths, plays, novels—endure over centuries. You took the title Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein quite literally (as opposed to, say, Coppola’s loose adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula), and while that adaptation didn’t necessarily sell tickets, it was still a striking effort. Same went for your verbatim Hamlet, a nearly unprecedented undertaking among movie versions. It might have floundered (four hours? Really?), but you knew it was better to fail nobly with high ambition than to aim low.

Perhaps it was that affinity for classic material that justified taking on Thor; Asgard’s son is the Marvel character not just rooted in comics, but actual Scandinavian mythology as well. But in practice, the movie proved why directorial choices matter so little to Marvel Studios—it contains none of the passionate ambition or attention to literary detail that drives your best work. Trying to suss out what makes Thor a “Kenneth Branagh film” is fruitless; it’s just another coal car hitched to the churning engine of the MCU. Then there was Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a rote spy thriller that didn’t know if it wanted to be a Bond or Bourne. Sure, it still gave you the chance to twirl your mustache as a Bond-style villain, Russian accent and all—but if “timeless source material” is what you’re after, Tom Clancy ain’t it.

And that’s why Cinderella is the most disheartening of the three big films you’ve directed. The original French folk tale is tailor-made for you: no glass slipper, no pumpkin, no fairy godmother, just boundless potential to tell a tale of subjugation and redemption. But the nicest thing to say about the latest Disney live-action remake is that it’s a perfectly adequate love story. It’s just…wholly unnecessary. (Though it’s also an insurance policy for a lifetime of Blu-ray royalties.)

But we’re guessing you knew that, because at every possible opportunity, you diverge from the story Walt Disney told 65 years ago and do something silly. Helena Bonham Carter feels freer and funnier as the Fairy Godmother than she has in years. Robb Stark from Game Of Thrones pushes Lady Rose from Downton Abbey on a giant swing in a secret garden in what might be the most thinly veiled sexual metaphor of 2015. Somebody actually defends the idea of marrying for love by arguing it’s more patriotic than marrying a foreigner for strategic advantage! You also added a handful of flourishes that remind us of the stories you used to treat with meticulous authenticity: Royalty hiding their true identity (Measure For Measure); tragic parental deaths (The Winter’s Tale); issues of succession (Henry IV). There are even visual similarities to Hamlet (a fencing scene and the excessively gaudy palace) and Henry V (Cinderella’s attic recalls the empty theatre Derek Jacobi walks through as the narrator).

Look, big studios trust you for their adaptations; that’s great, but it’s also constraining. Your ceiling is just too low. Some might argue that’s a good thing, given what happens when you get full creative control. But no one keeping Shakespeare alive on film these days—Julie Taymor’s The Tempest, Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline, Julian Fellowes’ Romeo & Juliet—can touch you.

You triumphantly returned to the stage in 2013 for a production of Macbeth, but you haven’t yet taken the same comeback risk in film. So here’s a thought: go back to the Bard. Laurence Olivier’s directorial trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations concluded with Richard III, a production often credited with re-popularizing Shakespeare in America. The time is ripe for another production—that weird 1930s fascist adaptation starring Ian McKellen was 20 years ago! But whatever the choice, one thing is clear: enough with the serviceable base hits. It’s time for to swing for the fences again.