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The videos of KYARY PAMYU PAMYU’s music have always been some of the most surreal footage coming out of Japan, but her latest seems to be somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a cast of munchkins played by Easter eggs. The track is, appropriately, called Easta, which is Japanese for Good, and I can’t help but feel there is a bit of a second language pun going on there. The new single (which has 5 tracks on it, but tow of them are just instrumental versions of two of the others) is her 14th, and was released this past week on the 5th. At the same time, she also released her KPP 5 Years Monster World Tour 2016 DVD, filmed at the final performance of the tour at Budokan. Here’s the bit I find really interesting; folks picking up the limited edition version of the disc get a VR headset included with it, so they can get the full 360 degree immersive effect of the concert. That’s right, they filmed a VR version of the show, and put it on disc.

I love their music, but OK Go consistently make the most amazing music videos I have ever seen. They have done it yet again with The One Moment, watch this one and see if you don’t agree. Then watch the next few videos, which will give you insight into their creation process.

Or if you prefer Every Harry Potter Spell in a single video edit, and in alphabetical order no less. I didn’t realize how many times they used some of these until I saw them back to back. Davide Rapp was the editor with Giorgio Zangrandi as the assistant editor, and just finding all of these probably meant they had to re-watch the series from the beginning; I’m sure they were heartbroken about that! *grins* They did an excellent job on this project, thanks to Games Radar for the heads up on this one.

This is from back in 2014, but I only found it this week, courtesy of Laughing Squid. The amount of video available these days is staggering, and the surprise is not that we miss things, but that we manage to keep up with it at all. Even though it’s old, it struck a chord with me, so I had to share it.

Pixar in a Box is a free online animation training curriculum developed as a joint venture by Pixar and the Khan Academy. The classes include effects, character modeling, rigging, sets and staging, and rendering, as well as a number of important topics that may not have occurred to you are part of the process. I am signing up with Khan Academy (mostly so I can save my progress and don’t have to wonder where I am on a given course) and checking out the wide range of free math, science, and computer programming online classes they have to offer, starting with the animation training. That isn’t all they have of course; history, art, economics, and many more topics are also available. But I only have so many hours a day that aren’t spent at work, so I have to choose which classes I take carefully. To give you an idea of what they have on offer, here is the Pixar class overview that they start the training with.