If you like SF, watch Dust.tv

... also available on Youtube. Seriously, you need to watch this stuff.

I stumbled onto this about 9:40 last night, all hyped up after the "Crew Number Two" sploosh and having half-assed an unrelated blogpost. I spent rather too long over there, and had a slow-start morning as a result...

If you are looking for Blade Runner / Alien pastiche (to the point of fanfic) you cannot better "The Beacon", which frankly Ridley Scott himself is having trouble doing anymore. "The Shipment" more goes to Lucas stylistic homage, to Mos Eisley and Han Solo (and, of course, to plenty of Star Wars games, and to wider Disney these days). We might also talk "Hyperlight" for an exploration of how FTL messes up Causality; and "FTL" for Zefran Cochran as composed by Carl Sagan.

I also peeked at "The Edge", "Atropa", "The Big Nothing", and "Archetype" but didn't watch those (yet).

Downside: the editing. The soundtracks are often overblown, and there's lensflare which for the life of me I cannot understand this side of 1999. Good sound-control is a particular necessity when you are casting amateur / lowranked actors who do not always have the enunciation skillz of a Hollywood or stage professional. (For the most part their acting, and the scripts, do hit the mark.) Another arguable downside is that these shows tend to be, well, downers - although we might not say this for "FTL". A better arguable is that there is a lot more room in these stories for a larger movie with a more-satisfying conclusion.

And occasionally there is Physics Fail, as "FTL" when a character in Mars orbit is communicating with Earth... in realtime. 3-22 lightminutes away. No, man; have him communicate with some Mars base (which you probably can't do because budget) or else suck it up and assume the delay (costing you... nothing).

Screw it, I'll go there: I ding almost all of these stories for physics. Artificial Gravity is handwaved without considering either a directed-fusion "Epstein Drive" or else a spinning torus. "The Shipment", for one, can be easily EPSTEIN'd by having the protag dock at a spinning wheel and then do his business in a claustrophobic station. For "The Beacon" I'd take a post-Sheffield kernel-infused mass disc.