More amazing music that I consider some of the best out of 2015, including Ore Ska Band doing Hands Up Girl back in September (did you know they played Live at Otakon this year?). Next is Wake Up!, an amazing collaboration between Asian Kung-Fu Generation and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, two of my favorite bands out of Japan, which is why I kept it in even though it happened in 2014. Sense Clown did A-Han this past June, and Singapore’s Indi Fusion group In Each Hand A Cutlass released Satori 101 back in April.
Merry Xmas Eve, ya’ll; hope you and yours are together and enjoying the holidays this year. For the final image of this set I am using the Impressionist tool, which gives you a very Vincent Van Gogh kind of virtual painting. I will no doubt be posting more about this type of software soon, or at least the variations of it I have been playing with, once I figure out a bit more about how it all works together.
As I said, when we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and this time the same two pictures are being modified using two different tools from Painter Essentials. While the results of these two processes look similar when you look at the images they created, the parts of the original pictures which were enhanced were quite different. I suspect it is going to take me a while to learn what kind of image requires which tool to bring it to its best advantage, especially considering what its best advantage is will change depending on what I want to use it for. Computer wallpaper, animation background, and 3D model textures each have different ways of presenting the results, for example, with the first a static screen image, the second being shadowed and moved by the characters in the foreground, and the third changing continuously with both the camera viewpoint and the orientation of the scene lighting.
When we were at Steampunk unLimited earlier this year we took a lot of photos, and I am sure everyone will be shocked and surprised to learn many of them were taken on, in, or around steam powered locomotives. I took a few of those images and processed them through an art program, Corel Painter Essentials 5, which is the stripped down successor of their earlier package Paint It!. I wanted to share a few of those results, this time using the Colored Pencil Tool.
There isn’t any genre films on the big screen this weekend as near as I can determine; but that’s OK, because we will have the Doctor Who Christmas Special on Friday instead. This will be the first episode where Alex’s Professor River Song shares the screen with Peter’s incarnation of the Doctor. When you add in that Steven Moffat wrote the script himself, and the director this time has also been directing Sherlock episodes, it is bound to be something special indeed.
In Movies, Dragon Blade is an epic historical fantasy about the battle between the Roman Empire and the ethnically diverse people of 36 countries, some of which would combine with still more nations to become China century’s later, for control of the Silk Road. It stars Jackie Chan, John Cusack and Adrien Brody, and was massively successful in its native China earlier this year. A lot of the critics were not kind to it, but it is worth seeing for the huge battle sequences alone. Also this week, Pan is a retelling of the origins of the classic literary hero who refused to grow up, and it also was not kindly received by many of the critics.
TV has Defiance: Season 3, which is the first major network TV show to be an online game, with the events of each environment impacting the story line of the other. Lots of different Aliens scattered all over the Earth add to the drama and action. Also this week, Dominion: Season 2, one of the few stories where Humanity is under direct threat by the Angels. Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be any Anime this week.