I am happy they have renewed The Expanse for a second season, because there is so much story in the books that there was no way they could fit it into just 10 hours. Of course, they haven’t aired all of the first season yet, but it is good to know another one is on the way.
Terrestrial Human
This amazing tribute to Hayao Miyazaki is from dono on Vimeo. He built it using Blender (3D modeling and animation), Gimp (graphics/painting creation/editing), Octane (real time 3D rendering) and Natron (matting, masking, and compositing). I will point out that all of them except Octane are free, open source software that rival any of the commercial software packages which do the same job. I am sure everyone will be surprised that the music he used is by Joe Hisaishi. It looks like he modeled and rendered the scenes, sets, and backgrounds in 3D but composited the original 2D characters into those scenes, including scenes they were never in before for some of them, creating a wonderful visual effect. Many thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one, and my only problem now (as someone else said in the comments) is deciding which Miyazaki masterpiece I want to re-watch tonight, after watching so many old friends on the screen together after all this time.
Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.
Put together by John SmithVFX, this Sherlock/Doctor Who mashup from 2013 is quite nicely done. Looking at the Wholock VFX Breakdown, which is the second video here, it becomes obvious this was primarily a masterful job of masking, compositing, and chroma/light balancing to create the finished product.
Pretty much nothing this week, unless you are near one of the theaters showing Detective Chinatown, and even that won’t be available in very many theaters until next week. This might be a good time to catch up on recent movies you have missed.
In Movies we have the somewhat silly The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, complete with an attack squad of zombie kitty cats. I suppose I should also mention Deathgasm, another horror/comedy but with a heavy metal beat. I think the non-genre Memories of the Sword, a historic fantasy of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (roughly a thousand years ago), is the best movie bet this time around. I did not see anything genre in TV this week, and Anime only has one new release; Dai-Shogun: Great Revolution. That one is from a parallel universe where giant steam-powered robots fought off the foreign ships, so the 1868 Meiji restoration never happened. Japan is left still fragmented, with various warlords running different areas and the Tokugawa Shogunate fighting internally for control of the fragments.
The animation was created by Janis Skulme for the music video of Olga Korsak’s Behind Closed Doors, and filmed at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The paintings and statues were brought to life using Crazy Talk 7 and an array of painting, video editing, and compositing software. To give you an idea of what’s involved in a project like this I have included his Video Effects Showreel 2014, which includes a number of instances of the original footage, and the steps they went through on their way to the final product. The fact that the song and performance are so powerful go a long way to making this a memorable video.
Olga Korsak – "Behind closed doors" from Janis Skulme on Vimeo.