Robot Film Festival Botsker Cocktail Recipes

The Robot Film Festival was a smashing success and all of us here at Magic Futurebox had a wonderful time meeting all of you filmmakers, robotmakers, maker-makers, and, of course, robots! 

By popular demand, we've posted the Botsker Awards Ceremony cocktail menu (with recipes!) so you can recreate them at home.

Cool off during the heat wave with a Marilyn Monrobot or a beatbots. 

Impress your friends with the unusual blend of sage and tequila in a Science House.

Changeup your normal Manhattan routine with our own Magic Futurebox. 

As we started to run out of certain ingredients, like any good hackers, we took what we had and made some Frankensteinian cocktails of what was left. Our favorite of the hybrid cocktails was a mashup of the Magic Futurebox and the beatbots which we like to call: 

The Magic Futurebeatbot

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Ingredients: 

• 2 oz Jim Beam
• 2 dashes The Bitter Truth Chocolate Bitters
• Reed's Extra Ginger Brew
• Ice
• 1 black cherry, pitted and sliced in 2
• 2 slices fresh cucumber

Equipment: 

• Rocks glass
• Ingenuity under pressure

Instructions: 

1. Fill rocks glass with ice. 
2. Pour Jim Beam and bitters over ice. 
3. Fill with Reed's Extra Ginger Brew. 
4. Top with 2 slices of cherry and 2 slices of cucumber. 

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Thanks again to Marilyn Monrobot, beatbots, Science House, and 3LD, as well as everyone else who came out to the event and made it such a wonderful weekend for all! 

Workshops, Workshops, Workshops!

In line with our upcoming Story Theater play, Demon Dreams, director (and MFb co-exec) Kevin Laibson will be teaching two story theater workshops open to the public, with members of the Demon Dreams cast. 

Story Theater involves a small group of actors collaborating without sets, costumes, or props, to tell stories as written, each actor playing several roles and narrating.  It was developed by Paul Sills, adapted from his mother, Viola Spolin’s, theater game techniques.  Actors play several roles, ranging from people to animals to elements, and use their bodies to create entire environments, through transformation and mime.  The development of a Story Theater piece is highly collaborative and improvisational and relies absolutely on ego-less collaboration and playfulness among the actors.

Come join us for one of two 5-hour Story Theater workshops on the set of Demon Dreams at the Gene Frankel theater.  In each workshop, a (very!) short story will be selected and turned in to a short Story Theater piece, which will be filmed and offered exclusively to participants in the workshops.  The workshop costs $100, and 12 slots are available for each session exclusively through the IndieGoGo fundraising campaign for Demon Dreams.  The workshops will be held July 8th and 15th at 11am.  Participation comes with two tickets to Demon Dreams and some other cool stuff.

Kevin Laibson studied with Paul Sills for two years at the New Actors Workshop, where he worked with Sills on two Story Theater productions, Evening Clouds, and The Stories of Red Hanrahan (in which he played the title role).  Immediately after Hanrahan, Laibson directed a Story Theater revival of Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, and worked on several more Story Theater plays with Jason Hale and the Theater Project Ensemble, featuring members of Sills’ Broadway Story Theater production.  

DJ Spooky Donates Beats to Demon Dreams

About a month ago, I had the pleasure of running into Paul D. Miller AKA DJ Spooky at The Tank for Jose Bold's hilarious satire musical, SPIDERMANN. We got to talking, and he invited us to his wonderful performance at the opening night of the Korean American Film Festival New York, where we were treated to his live re-scoring for iPad and strings of the Korean film classic, Madame Freedom.  

In September of last year, we were hammering out the details of our first playwright spotlight with Tommy Smith, and the second play we decided to do was Demon Dreams, a story theatre update of traditional Japanese Noh stories. The play was inspired by one of the stories in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams*, "The Weeping Demon," itself a retelling of a traditional Buddhist fable. In the dream, a man meets a demon on a hillside after the human race has all died out or been transformed into demons by nuclear fallout. Where Kurosawa's tale ends as a nightmare, Tommy took a step further and gave the story a sense of hope. 

When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan a few weeks ago, the context in which we were producing this play suddenly became very different. As reports of nuclear meltdown came across the Pacific, what had seemed an innocuous enough setup for a fanciful play suddenly had a very real gravitas. Rather than scrap the show, we decided to take the opportunity to use the show as a platform to raise money for rebuilding efforts in Japan. 

We were looking for some good original hip-hop instrumentals for the show, so I reached out to Spooky and asked if he could recommend any up and coming artists who might donate some music to the show. He stepped up in a way that was totally unexpected and incredible and has personally donated his sound design and beat production services to the show. We could not be more excited to have his incredible talent as a part of this production, and more thankful to him for being so generous in sharing it with us. 

For more on Spooky and to keep up with his many fantastic projects, you can visit his website or follow his delightful tweets, and if you're inclined to that sort of thing, we definitely recommend his DJ app for the iPhone and iPad. If you happen to be in Paris this weekend, he'll be lecturing and performing at Gaîté Lyrique, or if you're in NYC you can catch him on the panel discussion Designing Activism: Graphic Arts, Propaganda, and the Green Movement at Gallapagos on the 26th. 

*If you've never seen Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, go to Netflix RIGHT NOW and watch it on instant. It defines the phrase "visually stunning."