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Terrestrial Human

Somewhere between Manga and Anime, Manga 2.5 is following in the footsteps of Marvel and others, producing Motion Comics of popular Manga. They start by getting a contract to produce a popular Manga, then scan the whole thing in. They remove the dialog balloons and replace them with Japanese voice actors and English subtitles. Since they are embedding audio they also add sound effects as appropriate. The panels or frames are broken apart and colored, and limited animation in the style known as Motion Comics are added. The end result is something that you watch happen rather than read, for a lot less money then it takes to create a real animation or anime.

It is an interesting art form, and I do like the stuff produced by Marvel a lot. So far all I have seen of this group are a few trailers, but it has the potential to be quite good. If you were interested in trying your hand at this kind of thing, Smith Micro has an excellent software suite for a reasonable price with Motion Artist. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the software lets you be creative while automating a lot of the tasks; for instance you can set up the key frames and it automatically generates all the tween frames that get you from one key frame to the next. Trust me when I say having to animate each and every frame yourself gets tedious real fast, whether at 24 frames/second (fps) for film or 29 fps for TV, whereas you might have 4 to 6 key frames per second. Another very useful function is having the mouth layers pre-built for speech with a module that automates building the phonem map out of your imported MP3 file. Lip sync is about the hardest kind of animation to do, from my perspective, all that fiddly stuff should really be done by the computer anyways.

Hello, and welcome to the future! There are a ton of films coming out in the New Year, I am just going to touch on a few of the better known ones that I am excited about. From Marvel, we are getting Captain America: The Winter Soldier on April 14th, Amazing Spider-Man 2 on May 2nd, X-Men: Days of Future Past on May 23, and Guardians of the Galaxy on August 1st. The dates are best guesses, since production or contract realities may shift them about, as always.

We get 2 from Michael Bey this year, Transformers: Age of Extinction on June 27, and for some reason he is also doing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Megan Fox on August 8.

Besides the ones already mentioned there are several other sequels and/or reboots, with Godzilla on May 16th, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For on August 22, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on July 18th, The Hunger Games Mockingjay (Part 1) on November 21st, and The Hobbit: There and Back Again on December 17th.

There are also a number of unique properties that have not previously been movies that I am eager to check out, most of which are smaller independent films which I will be mentioning down the road. A few of the larger productions include The Lego Movie on February 7th (that one looks like a serious hoot), The Edge of Tomorrow on June 6th, Jupiter Ascending on July 23rd, and Interstellar on November 7th.

Yes, it should be a hell of a year for movies, and I am looking forward to it.

After New Years we get a few movies worth checking out, including Paradox, a story about a theoretical physicist who’s wife is murdered. He build a paratime device to allow him to jump between parallel universes, looking for one in which she is still alive. Unicorns is about a teenage girl who retreats into a fantasy world when her first romantic entanglement turns violent. This one doesn’t seem to be genre really, but it is as indie as they come, so I thought I should at least mention it on the off chance it does go into a fantasy realm.

Shaolin Warrior comes very close to being genre, since all martial arts movies are fantasy films at heart. I don’t mean because of the various gods and demons that sometimes populate them, that is a matter of personal belief and spiritual worldview. I am referring to the superhero-like powers the fighters have, which enable them to do many things on a par with Captain America, Thor, or Spider Man. The other movie that looks interesting this week is CBGB, a movie about the punk scene centered around the legendary club n New York.

In TV there is a BAFTA-nominated fantasy/supernatural program focused on teens called Wolfblood. They are high school aged werewolves who must hide what they are even from their closest friends, or their entire specie may be hunted down and killed. Like being in high school wasn’t stressful enough. This release is the first season of the CBBC series, hopefully season 2 will be along soon.

In Anime, So I Can’t Play H: Complete Collection is not the most subtle series you will run across (Hint: in these kind of titles, the H always stands for Hentai). This is about a teenage boy who makes a deal with a Shinigami to let her use some of his essence to stay in this world, but instead of taking years off his life like a normal goddess of death would do, she drains off his lecherous libido. Now he has to figure out how to get those feelings back, or he will completely miss out on a major aspect of any mans youth. Fate/Zero: Complete 2nd Season continues the epic of the Holy Grail Wars, with Zero being (rather confusingly) the 4th such war, but the first one to take place.

Ikki Tousen: Great Guardians is the third series in the original martial arts with exploding clothes franchise. Each of these high school students is the reincarnation of one of the most famous martial artists from throughout history, and they will battle it out to see who is the best. Chrono Crusade is coming out in a S.A.V.E. edition, which means if you shop around you can pick up the entire series about the premiere Combat Nun of the 1920s (and her demon sidekick) for around $20.