This is a movie I want to see, from a game I should be playing; it is amazing. Blur Studios, the folks who put this together are heavy into both worlds, with movie special effects credits including Thor: The Dark World and the upcoming Deadpool. In this case, League of Legends happens to be a game, but after watching this video I am ready to plunk my money down on the counter to see the finished production on the big screen. Mind, I was gasping for sympathetic breath 30 seconds into the trailer; I suspect that same 30 seconds might end up being my best time staying alive were I to actually attempt to play.
This short CG film Ascension has won multiple awards and certainly made me smile when I watched it. As so many of these are, this is a graduation movie, meaning it was built to prove they deserved the degree or certification offered by their school, the same way you do it to get a degree for film school. The school in this case was the Supinfocom Arles in France (if you don’t speak French they have an English version of the site), and the students who created this are Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry and Florian Vecchione doing the animation, with Seth Stewart composing the music.
I usually leave music for Saturday’s entry, but this one is about 3D modeling and motion capturing to create an amazing video. When The Chemical Brothers and Beck got together to record Wide Open they decided they needed the dancer in the video to be wide open as well. So they made a 3D model of Sonoya Mizuno and used it to transform her gradually into a 3D printed matrix of herself. The result is as enjoyable on the eyes as the music is on the ears. Thanks to Digital Trends for the heads up on this one.
For decades Virtual Reality has been expensive and flaky, but no more; this is the year it goes mainstream and affordable. Part of that is because of projects like Google Cardboard, allowing you to assemble your own VR headset for as little as $150 (cell phone, head set, and trigger button). Until recently there has been a lack of content for VR, but that has changed as well, with everyone from the Discovery Channel to the Dali Museum putting together presentations for it. In the case of the museum, they converted one of Dali’s paintings into a Virtual Reality exhibit entitled Dreams of Dali. Once at the museum they have Oculus Rift headsets for you to wear while exploring the VR environment they created of it.
This week Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will be in the theaters, giving a whole new twist to the classic story. It is the kind of thing you might have gotten if Jane Austen was writing episodes of Buffy for Joss, and it might just be enough fun to watch to overcome my dislike of horror. There is a non-genre film that also looks pretty interesting, Hail, Caesar!. From the trailers it looks very amusing and the might just end up being the movie that gets my ticket money this weekend.