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Zooey Deschanel sat on a panel at PaleyFest on Monday night and set the record straight about how much she's really like her New Girl character. Meanwhile, Zooey's costars sang the actress's praises. Hear from the whole cast in today's PopSugar Rush.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen appear on dual Elle UK covers for the glossy's April issue. The sisters have managed to build a massive high-fashion empire helmed by their luxury line, The Row, since leaving their acting careers behind. Mary-Kate and Ashley, who show off their well-honed individual style in the pages of the publication, talk about their "shared" thought process and their somewhat controlling approach to their design work. The Olsens also reflect on their decision to mostly stay out of the public eye these days. The full feature appears in the April issue of Elle UK, on sale Wednesday, March 7. In the meantime, check out some highlights from the interview:
Photos courtesy of Alexei Hayand for ELLE UK
Greg Broadmore, Concept Designer for Weta Workshop
MAKE: You’re known for doing concept design for Weta Workshop, District 9, and the Dr. Grordbort line of rayguns. What brings you to GDC?
Greg Broadmore: Good question. Basically, I’ve been interested in games my whole life. And I’ve spent the last 10 years helping to make films. But I’m particularly interested in games and I’ve always wanted to come here as long as I’ve known about GDC. So I’m here just to see it for the first time, to learn and adsorb as much as I can. I just started working with Valve adding Dr. Grordbort weapons for Team Fortress, so I’m interested to explore more of it. I’m here on a learning mission.
MAKE: Had you ever done concept art for games before?
GB: I’ve done a little bit. I don’t really see it as being much different than designing for anything else. It’s just creative.
MAKE: We love your line of Dr. Grordbort’s rayguns at MAKE. What’s the process there of going from concept drawings to final product?
GB: It’s quite tricky. I believe the hardest designing in the world is making something that’s actually going to be built as a physical product. It’s certainly hard to build something, design something that’s going to be in a digital world, say a creature in a film — that’s hard, but there’s nothing harder than doing physical stuff.
MAKE: What makes it especially difficult?
GB: Well, with the rayguns, doing side-on schematics and drawings from various different angles. Half of the process is actually working with the guy who’s going to be physically building it. In the case of the rayguns, it’s usually David Tremont, a model maker who’s been working at Weta Workshop for god knows how long now. I work with him problem-solving all the way through. I suppose it wouldn’t be much different from any other creative process where you have to build something from something you’ve imagined, but you have to be very careful because everything has to function, everything has to feel right. For instance, with the rayguns, as ostentatious and over the top as they are, they still have to be ergonomic; your finger still has to reach the trigger. In a digital design, you don’t have to worry about such things as much — you can fudge them, but when it’s a real object, especially when a person is going to hold in their hands, it has to look right and feel right. I’m really nerdy about that kind of design, having it make as much sense as possible.
MAKE: So, have you been doing game concepts sketches yet? [for the Super Magnetic Game-o-Matic project]
GB: I’ve only just been wandering around at the moment. But I’m doing one hopefully later on in the week. I’m actually trying to find the guy who’s organizing it.
MAKE: Oh, yeah. I think it’s that guy… Thank you for your time.
[And with that, he was off.]
More:
See all of our alt.GDC coverage
Barbot last Saturday was a blast. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t love this event, which showcases the latest in maker-made cocktail-mixing robots. Barbot is produced by the same organization that puts on Robogames.
Most of the Barbots and their teams are returnees from previous years, but as with the DARPA Grand Challenges, the…ah… bar raises very quickly from one event to the next as the innovations pour forth. This year’s bots were all beautiful, with gracious interfaces. On the back end, they took different approaches to the problem of how to dispense precise quantities of source liquids consistently.
The hot young newcomer was the Santa Barbot, built by a team of recent engineering grads from UC Santa Barbara (Zachary Rubin, Andrew Ballinger, Paul Filitchkin, and Ethan Zakai). They decided to participate in the event just 11 days before it opened, embarking on a massive, sleepless design and coding binge to make it in time. The last pieces of code were written in the car ride up from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. The system has a host computer with webserver that enables drink selection via mobile devices. Once the user makes the selection, an Arduino controls a semicircular array of nozzle/pump assemblies lifted from Nerf Super Soaker battery-powered squirt guns, along with matching colorful LEDs. One by one, the liquids shoot through the air into a cup placed in the center of the semicircle as the LEDs highlight the source bottle, and when the drink is done, all the LEDs flash in sequence. Meantime, the bartender character Lloyd from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining looks on from a flat-screen TV. As Andrew explains, “He stares deep into your soul and then gets you drunk with robotic uncaring and precision.”
Santa-Barbot
The Santa-Barbot team
The Party Robotics team (Pierre Michael and Robert Kaye), whose work is veering dangerously close to commercial viability, showed off Bartendro. Above a gleaming metal panel, it uses peristaltic pumps to precisely dispense from inverted bottles up top. Vent tubes stick up above the liquid level inside the bottles to equalize the air pressure inside, running to small holes in the sided of the rubber plugs. Each bottle has its own controller board, with centralized control coming from a BeagleBoard and a touchscreen interface in front.
Bartendro - clamps from McMaster Carr hold bottles inverted
Bartendro - panels removed in back to show LED-lit interior
Bartendro - cluster of liquid tubes lead down to dispensing location
The fascinating and elegant Drink Making Unit 2.0 from Evil Mad Science Laboratories (aka Evil Mad Science, Lenore Edman and Windell Oskay) has a laboratory glassware aesthetic. Liquids are pushed from their flasks into flexible tubes by battery-powered backup aquarium air pumps — which enabled the DMU 2.0 to continue operating through a brief power outage at about 11pm. The liquids then dispense into angled graduated cylinders that swivel and tip sideways into the cocktail glass once they’re full and top-heavy. As they tip, reflective tape on the side interrupts an IR emitter and sensor pair, which triggers the flow to stop and tells the controller to fill the next cylinder. Users specify their desired drinks via a control panel, by assigning their six allotted mix units to each ingredient, and then hitting the Launch button.
Drink Making Unit 2.0
Drink Making Unit 2.0 - tip sensor
Anthony Fudd built and programmed his super cute TipsyBot entirely out of Lego and Lego Mindstorms components. The bot mixes Screwdrivers because, as Anthony explains, the screwdriver is an important tool for many creative pursuits. The TipsyBot’s small car carries your cocktail glass along a tabletop railway from the serving station to the mixing station, where two servomotor platforms tip and pour the vodka and OJ from bottles for precisely programmed amounts of time. When the mixing is done, the car delivers the cocktail back to you.
TipsyBot - cocktail glass car
With an ever-changing LED glow, fountain interior, and classic chemistry graphics, the ThinBot (by Kevin Roche and Andrew Trembley) serves the drinks and celebrates the elegance of the 1930′s Thin Man movies, during which all characters imbibe cocktails constantly. Thinbot’s electronics are housed on top, above the liquid line, where they can never get inadvertently dripped or poured on. Of course, ThinBot’s drinks are served with cocktail napkins– emblazoned with a blueprint for a proper martini.
ThinBot
The rocketship-shaped CosmoBot (by Samuel M Coniglio IV, Ken Mochel, Joe Phillips, and Katherine Becvar) quenches all of our thirst for space travel. Set the dial to your preferred drink, hit the Launch button, and watch the bot pressurize the cabin, spew dry-ice clouds, and dispense professional bartender calibrated proportions into your glass. Like the Drink Making Unit 2.0, the CosmoBot uses aquarium pumps to dispense the goods.
Other barbots at the event included the Elixerator (Bill, Becky, and Amanda Sherman), the pedal-powered Skinner Box (Matthew Dockrey), the neatly countertop-integrated DrinkSys (Ryan Nevell), and El Espanol Borracho, by Barbot and Robot Wars impresario David Calkins.
The Elixerator - interior
More: Photos From BarBot 2012—One More Night (Tonight) in San Francisco
