Someone did an amazing job of editing this Sesame Street footage to have the Cookie Monster sing the Tom Waits song God’s Away on Business. It’s already found all over the web, I got the heads up from Kellytastic.
The Radioactive Orchestra has an assortment of over 3,000 radioactive isotopes which you can use to create music. Strange as that sounds, it is a first class way to get an instinctive understanding of radiation decay behaviors and patterns, allowing you to directly perceive the activity. And, with a little mixing of isotopes and adjusting your BPM rate and root frequency you can actually end up with an interesting music bed from which to build your own compositions. They also have some wave filter functions; it defaults to a sine wave, but try a square wave or sawtooth for some interesting acoustic variations. Thanks to the folks at New Scientist for the heads up on this one.
From the team that did Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromet series of films comes The Pirates! Band Of Misfits. As always with the output from this group expect a wonderful animation leaning heavily on the comedy side, but there will be a bit of a wait for it; this one comes out in March of 2012.
Emil Goodman created a very interesting Steampunk video as an initial concept piece for a project known as Henry Waltz. If he gets to build out the entire project, I will definitely be in the audience when it rolls out on the big screen.
HENRY WALTZ – VISUAL TEASER from Emil Goodman on Vimeo.
Nothing exciting coming out new this weekend, and I certainly can’t recommend Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of an old made-for-TV horror flick. This might be a good weekend to catch up on recent releases you haven’t seen yet, or watch a few of the DVDs you still need to unwrap. But there is a new trailer for the Ghost Rider sequel, coming out in February.
From Norway we have Troll Hunter, a fantasy adventure done in the venerable Blair Witches style of pseudo-reality film style (think no budget, shoddy film gear, and total lack of skill sets). Three collage students take a cheap film camera and follow a hunter into the wilderness, eventually figuring out that he was hunting creatures the government claimed were bears, but which turned out to be much less of this world. Also out this week, Assassin’s Creed: Lineage is a compilation of three short films that together make up a prequel to Assassin’s Creed II, bridging the gap between movie and game.
For TV, the primary selection this week is The Event: The Complete Series. I haven’t actually seen any of this shows episodes, because the premise and trailers struck me as somebody trying too hard to jump on the Lost bandwagon, which was kind of silly considering Lost was terminally past tense long before then. Much more interesting is the Live From Tokyo documentary about the city in Japan that has 1,000 bands playing each and every night.
Live From Tokyo Trailer from Lewis Rapkin on Vimeo.
In western animation, I have to vote for the New Adventures of Captain Amazing-Lad, pretty much a parody of any other superhero cartoon going. In eastern animation this weeks winner has to be Samurai Girls, which takes place in an alternate timeline where twenty first century Japan is still ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate. The entire series may only be 12 episodes long, but they cover a lot of cultural and social upheavals in that time. Also out this week, the new Eden of the East: Paradise Lost brings us the next feature film in the exciting series. It would have gotten my top spot vote if it had been a season instead of a movie.