Network television shows boast star actors, large budgets, and lots of special effects. Internet television, on the other hand, tends toward the amateurish. But it can be produced far from Hollywood sound stages, even in New Hampshire.

In recent years filmmakers on the Seacoast have been flexing their creative muscles making shows for the web, and building devoted audiences for their content. Now this loose-knit collective of producers is starting another series.

Our producer and director Avishay Artsy checked in on the auditions.

For generations, people have flocked to movie theaters for a larger-than-life version of reality. That experience has changed with mobile phones, and a younger demographic now accustomed to watching YouTube videos, TV shows and watching movies on teeny screens.

Today’s smartphones can also make videos. iPhone users can shoot and edit a video, add music, and upload it to the internet with no other devices required. Amazing. But a cinematic experience?

Bart Weiss is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who teaches film and video in the art department. Weiss has been teaching video for small-format screens like the web, i-Pod and other mobile devices. Now, Weiss is teaching a class on mobile movie-making, helping the next generation of filmmakers make movies you can hold in your hand.

Mobilized TV: Video For The iPhone 101: Studying Mobile Filmmaking

(Photo by nobihaya via Flickr/CreativeCommons)

We begin today much further north on the Arctic coast. A place that has long existed in the human imagination as vast, uninhabitable… A frozen wasteland very far away.

The Arctic was largely unxplored until the mid 19th century and uncharted until the early 20th. Today, rising global temperatures have glaciers retreating and ice packs melting. While some say this bodes global disaster, others see access to vast ocean resources and shipping routes opening up like cracks in the Arctic ice.

As analysts predict how many billion barrels of oil could be hidden under the ice, a handful of countries are positioning themselves for a land grab. That scramble and other consequences of an accessible North Pole could determine The Future History of the Arctic. That’s the title of a new book by Charles Emmerson, he’s a geopolitics expert who uses his fascination, reporting and reflection to put the current Arctic challenge into historical context.

Financial Times: The Future History of the Arctic

Winnipeg Free Press: Warming opens Arctic to political tension

The Independent: Love in a cold climate: A life-long obsession with the Arctic

(Photo by orvaratli via Flickr/CreativeCommons)

Forget the Empire State Building or the St. Louis Gateway Arch. Atlas Obscura is a website that collects strange, out-of-the-way oddities you rarely see in guidebooks. The weird and wonderful spots that only locals and insiders know about. Like the stone ruins of Gungywamp Hill in Groton, Conn. The National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, Md. Or the world’s largest treehouse, in Crossville, Tenn.

This Saturday the folks behind Atlas Obscura have organized Obscura Day. More than fifty events are on offer around the world, including private tours of sites normally closed to visitors. Dylan Thuras and Joshua Foer created Atlas Obscura eight months ago, and they joined us with a preview of what’s to come.

BLDGBLOG Expedition to the Geoglyphs of Nowhere, California City, CA
Coral Castle, Miami
Synchronized Ringing Rocks Concerts in Butte, MT and Bucks County, PA
Arborsmith Studios, Williams, OR
Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, MA
Newnes Glow Worm Tunnel Expedition, New South Wales
New Hampshire's Atlas Obscura sites

New York Times blog: A Day Dedicated to the Weird and Wondrous

BoingBoing: Obscura Day, March 20: Visits to Wondrous, Curious, and Esoteric Places

(Photo by maisonbisson via Flickr/CreativeCommons)