In April of last year I commented on Dante 01, a French film that looked pretty interesting. If it made it to the movie theaters it snuck right past me. It is now out on DVD, available from Amazon or Blockbusters. The folks at SciFi Cool posted a trailer and a lot of stills, and it still looks interesting. Also at SciFi Cool, a very tasty video from Transformers 2 that was run at Showest. IGN posted a great trailer for Moon, a movie in the tradition of Silent Running and 2001, where the characters and concepts mean far more than the special effects (although those are there as well). Finally, Ron Perlman had a Chat with BloodyD about his upcoming venture as Bubba Nosferatu. There really are some quality science fiction films on the way!
Terrestrial Human
At least for this competition, but I have to agree with the majority of results. The poll was put together at Total SciFi, and coming in at number one was the Doctor Who Theme, by Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire. By the first note, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind what the show is; how many theme songs have that power? In second place was the Red Dwarf theme (and did you check out the Terry Pratchett interview about this months Red Dwarf special?), with The X-Files in third. Hot on its heels came Buffy the Vampire Slayer in fourth place, and Star Trek TOS came in at 5. The rest include the 7) Twilight Zone, 8) Battlestar Galactica, 9) Quantum Leap, and 10) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I have no clue how Thunderbirds ended up on the list. Here are a few variations on a theme…
Here are a few 3D creation tools everyone should have in their arsenal. First up, DAZ Studio 3D; while not Open Source, this one is one of the best 3D software packages ever built, and released online for free. The other killer application is Blender, a full-service Open Source 3D program with more support than you had ever suspected was available. Between these two, you will be able to create anything you can think of for a 3D environment, and never have to pay a penny to pull it off.
Everyone should try their hand at building their own SciFi, using whatever tools work for them. One of the more expressive and accessible formats is animation; pretty much everyone can enjoy and follow a good video. And using animation avoids all those real-world constraints like special effects budgets and the laws of physics. 2D animation puts you in the realm of traditional cartoons, a format made popular over the last hundred years or so, and there are a number of free tools and a host of training resources available online. For instance, one of the commercial software packages, ToonBoom, has a few free online tools at Animachines. One takes your WebCam output, blends a simple animation, and gives you an animated gif you can use on your pages. The other lets you do frame-by-frame animations using 4 simple shapes for your building blocks. Much more powerful are the Open Source programs you can download and install, like Pencil, which runs on MACs, Windows, or Linux, and gives you a traditional hand-drawn animation environment that works with both bitmap and vector graphic images. Another is Animata from eastern Europe, designed to let you build backgrounds and animations for live theater/concert environments. K-Toon from Brazil was primarily for Nix systems (Unix, Linux, etc.) but now can be used everywhere; development seems to be stalled a year or so back, but it is still worth a look. Another great open-source program is SynFig, still under current development but mostly for Nix systems. It has tweening automated, which reduces the workflow steps necessary to create quality animation and puts feature-film level animation into everyone’s hands. Then there are programs like Creatoon, no longer supported but still a tool that can help you build your animations.
And you can play God Games too! The SIMS are nice, but limit your godhood to a single environment on a single planet. To get into the game from a Universal level, try Discover’s Star Formation. You start with a dust cloud, and set up conditions to optimize star creation as gravity nodes gather mass. Another fun one is the Universe Sandbox, where again you start with the basic laws of physics, and modify the parameters to create your desired results. For a Gods-Eye view of the universe, you can try World Wide Telescope, the Windoze ripoff of the classic Open Source monster Celestia. And if you like the Open Source version better, be sure to visit Celestia Motherload, with a ton of upgrades and plugins, including the Selden Ball data.
If Ashton hits 1 Meg viewers at UStream, and beats CNN for numbers, he is going to buy 10,000 anti-malaria mosquito nets and distribute them where they are needed. Support this effort! If you login live, you can also hear a great rant about how the media will evolve (or already has), and you too can build your own chunk of the future with it! And he made it, the celebration is starting now. Which means we all made it; we are all creating the future for which this is just an example. You don’t have to be famous to pull this off; you just have to have an idea you want to spread, an attitude you need to get out there, and/or the desire to create something of your own.