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Terrestrial Human

Something to Watch: Discs

This is a good week, with several offerings in each category. Iceman has Donnie Yen as a Ming Dynasty palace guard, wrongly accused of a murder. When he and the three guards chasing him end up frozen, they get defrosted 400 years later, continuing their fight across modern China. The animation How to Train Your Dragon 2 is the second film of three in this series. I quite liked the first one, and am looking forward to this one since I missed it in the theater. The Movie category is rounded out with a documentary, James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenge. This is the project he used to refine the development of his 3D camera system, just before he used it to make Avatar.

In TV we get True Blood: The Complete Seventh Season, which brings this series to a close. The camp classic Batman: The Complete Television Series starring Adam West and Burt Ward, are serious when they say complete. All 120 episodes and 3 hours of extras are included. Finally Star Wars The Clone Wars: The Lost Missions continues to detail the conflict between the Republic and the Separatists as the Jedi war grows closer.

In Anime, Patema Inverted appears to be an animated remake of Upside Down, and could be quite interesting. Sailor Moon: Season 1 Part 1 is being re-released in North America with a brand new English translation, making it almost like a whole different series. Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3 is a typical story about the school club the protagonist joins. But in this case, the school club is a serious survivalist team out drilling in the woods, and friendly fire may be their most dangerous enemy; this is the complete series.

My mental choices are completely interfering with my school romantic comedy takes place in the kind of universe where a game premise suddenly takes over our hero’s life, and seems to be designed as a curse more than anything else. Finally, High School DxD: New Season 2 is filled with still more zombie stomping action as the Archangel Michael joins the Occult Research Club in the battle to protect the living.

More and more of what I watch is streaming video, and less and less is based on some kind of physical media. I guess the reason these weekly entries focus on the discs is there is too much streaming Sci-Fi and Fantasy, especially out of Japan, that no single person could possibly cover it all. I think a team of three people, all doing it full time, could do it the way it should be done. But one person, doing one entry a week? No chance. I will probably start mentioning my favorites again, though, in case anyone missed hearing about them.

Do-Wap Animation

A couple of classic tunes put together in minimal time to tie them to an animation, created in iClone. The minimal time factor explains why the lip sync is so bad, and the crudeness of some of the other animation aspects. But while as a viewer I can critique these as not being as perfect as the music videos from world class productions like Frozen, as a creator I am in awe that a single person working from an extremely tight deadline managed to put out anything at all, let alone anything as tightly animated and choreographed as this. I mean, compare the budget, timeline, and production staff between the two projects and see if you don’t understand what I am referring to. Kudo’s to Jay for creating such amazing product under this kind of constraint. And he did it using a couple of my all time favorite tunes, always a bonus!

BFI Player Sci-Fi Collection

The folks at the British Film Institute has recently made available an interesting collection of the best global cinema on-demand, some on a pay-per-view basis, some for free, most of it amazing, and a few things you just won’t find anywhere else. Movies like Only Lovers Left Alive, Under The Skin, and most of the things presented at the most recent BFI London Film Festival. They even have a Days of Fear and Wonder science fiction collection. While I prefer most streaming services monthly fees, rather than the pricier per-viewing charges, I am going to have to sign up with them to at least see some movies I have heard of that have yet to be released here. Plus, the payments support the BFI, an organization as worthy of support as the AFI.

DAZ Quick Start tutorial

I have sat through a lot of tutorials about how to do things in a 3D CGI modeling and animation software package before, and this one just made me grin. Jay Johnson has a kid who had an animation project in mind, which he shared with his dad. Dad installed the full free DAZ Studio Pro software suite on his computer, the child beat on it for half an hour getting nowhere, and gave up in frustration. Jay then showed his kid how to use the software to make his project come to life in about 20 minutes, and he reports that two days later the end result was amazing according to dad.

That event caused Jay to assemble this 20 minute Quick-Start Guide for DAZ Studio Pro, paring the process down to just those components needed to get a project started and come up with a final product. Mind, he did jump to the various library segments that he knew held the components needed for the specific project to hand, so you can expect to spend a bit of time looking through each area for the building blocks required for yours. But the important part is the way he trimmed back the process to just the bare bones required to complete the task. Follow that process, and save your work often under incremented file names so you can go back to any step of it later. Once you get the first one built, you can go back and tweak any aspect of it to your hearts content until you get it perfect, but this tutorial should help you get started (and finished) a lot quicker than you expected to.