IndianaJones.com has posted video of the first day of shooting on the upcoming fourth Indiana Jones movie.

Production began on June 18 in New Mexico. Director Steven Spielberg appears in the brief video, which also shows executive producer George Lucas. The action from the first day involves a vintage Army vehicle and a ’50s-style hot rod.

Old Harrison Ford doesn’t look too bad as an Old Indy even though he’s older than Connery was when he starred in The Holy Grail and hopefully he won’t break anything too important while on set.

Indy 4 is planned for worldwide release on May 22, 2008.

Check out the video here: http://www.indianajones.com

Scifiwire is reporting that the next Marvel Comic book hero to get the big screen treatment will be Captain America, the Patriotic super soldier best known for his shield.

Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel Studios and producer of the upcoming Iron Man movie, revealed that the company’s next independently financed project will be a version of Captain America, which would mix a period story with a modern-day one.

“We’ll have to play with Captain America as being a patriotic propaganda machine on one hand but also being a very human Steve Rogers, … [an] interesting, fascinating hero in his own right,” Feige told reporters on the set of Iron Man, which is in production in Playa Vista, Calif.

Is the script they’re developing a period piece? “Right now what we’re developing would be about half and half,” Feige said.

Feige said that Captain America will aim for a PG-13 rating, like Iron Man. The comic studio has brought on writer David Self (Road to Perdition) to draft a screenplay. A director will be announced soon, Feige said. Production is expected to begin in a year.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

Sean Connery will not star in Indy 4. The actor is apparently enjoying retirement too much to do the film. In a statement posted on the official Indiana Jones Web site, Connery said that he will not be reprising his role as Henry Jones, Father of Indiana Jones.

“I get asked the question so often, I thought it best to make an announcement,” the 76-year-old actor said. “I thought long and hard about it, and if anything could have pulled me out of retirement, it would have been an Indiana Jones film. I love working with [director] Steven [Spielberg] and [producer] George [Lucas], and it goes without saying that it is an honor to have Harrison [Ford] as my son. But in the end, retirement is just too damned much fun.”

Indiana Jones 4 is currently in preproduction and will co-star Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

Fan power can be very powerful indeed and nothing showed what disgruntled fans and tons of peanuts can do more than when CBS cancelled Jericho.

The show set in a town that survived a series of nuclear detonations across the US has cancelled due to disappointing viewing figures even though the show opened to positive reviews and high viewing figures. It is thought that some of the lost viewers went to American Idol.

Fans of the show bombarded CBS with emails and the tons of peanuts that fans have sent to the network to protest its earlier cancellation, a campaign that CBS credited for its change of heart.

Jericho has now been renewed for another seven episodes, to air sometime mid-season. Nina Tassler, president, CBS Entertainment, made the announcement on the official Jericho message board on June 6.

CBS offered no date or timeslot for the show’s return. But it said that it would rebroadcast Jericho reruns over the summer, stream them online and release the first season on DVD on Sept. 25. The network also plans on “continuing the story of Jericho in the digital world until the new episodes return,” Tassler wrote. “We will let you know specifics when we have them so you can pass them on.”

Tassler added: “Please stop sending us nuts ”

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

The renowned comic book character creator, Stan Lee has signed a deal to work with Disney on yet more superhero characters.

Best known for his work in creating the Spider-Man franchise as well as The Fantastic Four, Lee will create more superheroes for Disney such as Doubleman, El Lobo and Nightbird, with another 20 heroes in early development stages and another 40 waiting in the concept stage.

It could be a good deal for Disney as Superheroe movies have been doing incredibly well in recent years with the X-Men and Fantastic Four films have taken over £1.8bn since release, and films of Iron Man, Thor and Nick Fury are reportedly all in production.

Reference for posting: http://www.bit-tech.net

So its at last been confirmed, Battlestar Galactica is coming to an end. What had been leaked by Edward James Olmos was confirmed by the show’s producers Ronald Moore and David Eick.

Executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said that it was a creative decision to end the acclaimed series with the upcoming 22-episode season which will star in January 08.

So what can we expect from the fourth season of Battlestar? Well a few questions should be wrapped up, a few relationships and hopefully the fleet will finally reach earth.

At last month’s Saturn Awards, Edward James Olmos said that the upcoming season would be the show’s last, prompting Eick to say at the time that no decision had been made. “I promise you that when Ron and I make a decision about Galactica’s future, we’ll let you know,” he said then.

In November, a special two-hour Battlestar episode, “Razor,” will air. The episode revolves around the Pegasus Battlestar before its destruction at the hands of the cylons.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

Dania Ramirez who played Callisto in X-Men: The Last Stand is to join the cast of NBC’s hit SF drama Heroes when the show returns for a second season in the fall, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

So far all that is known about Ramirez’ character is her name; Maya. Hey powers are currently being kept under wraps.

Maya is one of four to five new characters expected to be added to Heroes next season, but her character might be the only regular one, the trade paper reported.

The other roles, most of which are said to have international flavor, include a boyfriend for the indestructible Claire, a 28-year-old black mother, a surrogate for Niki’s (Ali Larter) son and an Irish mobster.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire

It looks like Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company specializing in facial recognition software, is finally starting to pay off. Google Blogoscoped, a blog dedicated to everything related to Google, got a tip from a Google engineer that Google had secretly added some facial recognition abilities to its image search this week.

The feature remains unofficial and unannounced, but you can add a small query string to the end of your Google Image search URL to see the facial recognition software in action.

For example, do a normal Google image search for “Starbuck Battlestar” and your image results should produce images from the American SciFi TV show Battlestar Galactica. Then try adding “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL. Your new search results will only contain photos of people and tight shots of their faces. Cool right?

Last August, Google Picasa product manager Adrian Graham had this to say about Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision in the official Google blog:

“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.”

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No longer are our magnificent Monday night ‘Heroes’ going to be confined to merely mortal NBC TV (and SciFi Channel reruns). Our favorite Heroes and villains are coming to DVD this August with tons of bonus features.

The 7-disc set, available on DVD and HD DVD on August 28, 2007, will include the never-before-aired 73-minute premiere episode and over 50 deleted scenes.

The Heroes Season 1 DVD set is priced at $59.98 and is available for preorder on Amazon.com for $38.99 until July 24, 2007.

Here are some of the Heroes Season 1 DVD extras:

• Unaired Pilot: The Tim Kring cut with audio commentary — A full 73 uninterrupted minutes of the original, unaired, extended pilot episode, as Heroes’ creator Tim Kring first envisioned it, with a character never seen.

• The Making of “Heroes”: From concept to pop culture phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look at the hottest new series on television.
• Special Effects: The secrets behind the eye-popping visuals that give the Heroes their amazing powers.
• The Stunts: A backstage look at the show’s hair-raising stunts.
• Mind Reader: Matt Parkman’s mind reading abilities reveal your inner Hero with a series of simple tests.
• Profile of Artist Tim Sale: A look at the Eisner Award-winning comic book artist (Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil) behind much of the Manga-influenced artwork used in the show.
• The Score: Go behind the scenes with Wendy Melvin and Lisa Coleman (of Prince’s The Revolution) as they create their ASCAP Award-winning musical score.
• Extra Scenes: 50 deleted and extended scenes.

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Think He-Man and you will think Mattel action figures, “By the Power of GreySkull” and that campy 1987 movie that starred Dolph Lundgren. Now producer Joel Silver is hoping that he can develop a new film version of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe for Warner Brothers but it must be approved by toymaker Mattel who owns the toy-based franchise.

The script is set to be written by Justin Marks if the film gets the go ahead but Mattel are reported to be wary of going Hollywood again and had already said no to an attempt by Fox 2000 and director John Woo.

The franchise has been reimagined by Silver and the writers and pitched to Mattel as a classic good-vs.-evil battle, using the kind of visual effects strategy employed in 300.

Reference for posting: http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire