Table of Contents

• Why AI hardware needs to be open

• Summer at the Movies

• Making with Mussels

Why AI hardware needs to be open

A few weeks ago, Ayah Bdeir called out of the blue. I was glad to hear from Ayah, the founder of littleBits. She appeared on the cover of Make: Vol 65 in the fall of 2018.

One reason for Ayah’s call was the acquisition of Jony Ive’s company, IO, by OpenAI. It was really bothering Ayah, especially with all the fawning media attention. She wanted to write a response based on what the maker movement is about. She would call it “revenge of the makers.”

The article came out this week in MIT Technology Review. “Once again, the future of technology is being engineered in secret by a handful of people and delivered to the rest of us as a sealed, seamless, perfect device,” wrote Ayah, who had taken a break after selling LittleBits and had been consulting on strategy for Mozilla.

She was happy to see a lot of interest in hardware, once again, but she was worried about Silicon Valley’s role in that future. Her article is a call for developing open hardware as alternative to what Silicon Valley might create.

She wished that more people would realize what the maker movement has accomplished and what it could do to offer an “open alternative” to closed, proprietary hardware.

She proposed funding this open alternative.

Read Ayah’s insightful article for yourself.

Summer at the Movies

by Kevin Toyama

June 20 marks the official start of summer, but how are you spending it? If you’re a maker, you’re probably looking to challenge yourself and sharpen your skills. 

If you haven’t chosen a fun project yet, look no further than the Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival! There’s still plenty of time before the July 31 submission deadline to flex your creativity and put together your own 120 seconds of movie magic.

In case you’re on the fence, here are a few resources for inspiration:

Joey Shanks, Shanks FX

Joey Shanks first caught my eye with his primer on reverse-motion effects, where motion is recorded and then run backwards to appear incredibly precise or supernaturally controlled. It’s an editing trick, but he shares some great tips to help sell the effect. His YouTube channel is filled with demos of practical effects, including one showing Crazy Aaron’s Magnetic Storms putty “coming to life” when placed on a metal object—it would make for a great homage to The Blob!

Star Wars fans should definitely check out this vid on how to make a light saber like they did in the original film, with a light source and $12 Scotchlite reflective tape. While the original used a Graflex camera flash handle that now carries a “vintage” price tag of hundreds of dollars, other brands/sizes are on eBay for $20!

John Lykes, cameraman for Swagger

I consume an unhealthy amount of basketball content. Michael Jordan shattering a backboard in Italy? Check. Pete Maravich beating Bob McAdoo in a game of H-O-R-S-E? Yep. Soul Train host Don Cornelius playing one-on-one against Marvin Gaye? You betcha. 

So I was excited to find this crazy behind-the-scenes video in my feed, showing cameraman John Lykes shooting a basketball scene on rollerblades. It’s a genius way to smoothly record the fast-paced action, but then he dials it up to 11 by skating up a ramp to stay level with a dunk! 

It’s been years since I was on blades, so I wondered how would I shoot something like that? I’d probably start with an engineering approach and rig a rail system, mount my phone on a toy car, and then push the car/phone along the track to get a similar smooth tracking effect. That’s probably not fast enough to keep up with the ball, but it’s fun to start thinking about potential solutions.

(The best part of Lykes’s story is that he took his love of blading and applied it to making movies—what can you do with your skills?)

Dustin McLean, Dust Films

I have no idea where to start with Dustin McLean, because he’s generated so much great content! There’s Homemade Movies for CineFix, a series of shot-for-shot recreations of movie trailers. There’s DIY Prop Shop, where he showed how he built replica props. D.I.Y. Costume Squad for Mashable. And on and on.

So I’m going to link the side-by-side comparison of his Man of Steel trailer and the original, because it has a little of everything. What I love about this trailer and the others on his YouTube channel is that it’s proof that movies don’t need to be a polished blockbuster to be awesome!

Homemade backgrounds, props, and costumes have a lot of character! No one cares that we can see the strings on your airplane, or that you’re filming in the neighborhood park. Suspension of disbelief doesn’t happen through lifelike simulations—it happens because your enthusiasm is taking us on a fun ride!

It’s OK to make cardboard cityscapes, tape a paper beard to your face, or mod your Nerf gun into a futuristic blaster—like Fox Mulder, we want to believe!

Making with Mussels

One of the more interesting projects I saw at Maker Faire Lille was a group of Lille architects from studio.addit (on Instagram), Denitsa Hristova and Alexis Wanert. They have figured out a way to use mussel shells and oyster shells as materials for products. Denitsa explained that the composite material, “terrazzo”, combines the finely-ground shells with a binding agent. She said that biggest challenge in the process — which I took to mean most time-consuming step — was to thoroughly clean the shells, which they get for free from a seafood store. They grind the shells and then mix them with gypsum and resin in a mold.

They have made some vases in which the base is molded from their materials and the top is 3-D printed.

I love seeing these new materials used in making and Studio.Addit is making some beautiful things.

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I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].