Beauty is in the eye of the Google Glass wearer.
At least that’s what the Internet search giant hopes a handful of young filmmakers will discover. Google is enlisting film students from five colleges to help it explore how its wearable computing device can be used to make movies.
The $1,500 Google Glass headset is already being used by 10,000 so-called explorers. The device resembles a pair of glasses and allows users to take pictures, shoot video, search the Internet, compose email and check schedules.
As part of its experiment, Google will lend each school three pairs of Google Glass.
The participating schools are American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California.
Google Inc. says it plans to share an update of how students are progressing sometime after school resumes in the fall.
The company says the schools will explore how to use Glass for documentary filmmaking, character development, location-based storytelling and “things we haven’t yet considered.”
Norman Hollyn, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, said students will be encouraged to use Glass to tell stories incorporating the first-person point of view.
He said one model that students might follow is one explored in the film, “Timecode,” by director Mike Figgis, which uses four cameras to capture four different people simultaneously. Students will also be encouraged to try to use Glass’s data overlays as a way of revealing elements of a story. At least two short films are expected to be done by the beginning of next year, he said.
“We’re kind of looking at it as, ‘How can we push this to tell stories rather than just sit on a cool Disneyland ride and broadcast that out to people?'” he said. “This excited us in a lot of ways.”
Glass users can shoot video in “720p” high-definition quality by issuing voice or touch commands.
Google has already shown off a few examples of how people are using the device, such as tennis pro Bethanie Mattek-Sands preparing for Wimbledon and physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel taking his class on a virtual field trip to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
“Captain America: Brave New World” Tops Weak Weekend At The Box Office
"Captain America: Brave New World" kept falling but still hovered above all others at a weak weekend box office.
The latest Disney-Marvel offering brought in another $15 million according to studio estimates Sunday, when most of Hollywood's attention was on the Oscars.
The Anthony Mackie-led "Captain America: Brave New World" opened strong at about $120 million on a three-day weekend last month, but plunged to $28.2 million last week in one of the most significant second-week drops for a Marvel movie. It's earned $163.7 since its release.
It was slammed by many critics and audiences, failing to bring the Marvel reset some had hoped for. That task now falls to May's "Thunderbolts" and July's "Fantastic Four: First Steps." But "Captain America" will face little competition through March, and could remain at No. 1 for a while.
The weekend's only significant new release, Focus Features' "Last Breath," earned just $7.8 million. The based-on-a-true-story adventure starring Woody Harrelson, Simi Liu and Chris Lemons is about a routine deep-sea diving mission that goes terribly wrong when a young diver is stranded some 300 feet below the surface.
It got strong reviews, with Lindsey Bahr of The Associated Press praising the "white-knuckle experience" and "pure suspense and anxiety" it brings.
At No. 3 was Oz Perkins' "The Monkey," which brought in $6.4 million for a two-week total of $24.6 million. It's among the strongest openings for indie distributor Neon, whose film "Anora," and its director Sean Baker could make a major mark at the Oscars later Sunday.
"The Monkey" marks another successful low-budget collaboration between Perkins and Neon, whose "Longlegs" brought in $126.9 million globally last year.
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