Ex Hex is Pop Punk for today, and they do sound quite tasty. The tracks below are from their recent live visit to Soundcheck WNYC-FM, and should give you an idea of what this band is about. You can hear more of their songs at their home page, including some from their recent session at WAMU-FM. And as you can probably tell from the studio music video below, they are a D.C. band.
It is now called Project Almanac, but when I first blogged about it back in January the name was Welcome to Yesterday. It does look like it could be a very interesting time travel movie, fully grounded in the law of unintended consequences. Of course, it might just collapse into a horror type film as well; we will find out on January 30th.
There is a very creative guy called Joey Shanks who puts together videos that are tutorials in how to create various kinds of special effects in association with PBS. One of his recent projects was to show how to create a scientifically accurate Black Hole like the one in the movie Interstellar. The video allows you to see step by step how each element was captured by the camera, and then gives you a peak at how they look when all the elements are added to the composite layer by layer. This is not how the effect was actually created for the film, in part because a big piece of Joey’s approach is to do as many elements of a given build using real world objects and a camera to film them as possible. But it does give you enough information that you might get some really good ideas of how to build your own effects. I found out about this series from Cinefex, a great place to learn more about how the effects you see on the screen get built, and who is doing them.
Black Hole creation | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.
It looks like we have a viral site for the upcoming movie Jurassic World in the form of Masrani, a telecommunications company who bought up InGen facilities after the death of John Hammond. According to Jurrassic World dot Org, which is either a fan site or another marketing team (I am not sure which), the first trailer will be out in another week or so. Thanks to Empire Online for the heads up.
There are many aspects to a SIGGRAPH convention, but one of my favorites has always been the Computer Animation Festival, and the SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 con coming up next month looks to have a good collection. The gathering takes place in Shenzhen, China, from December 3rd to the 6th, and as always will feature the cutting edge in what is being created in the world of computer graphics.
The winner this week is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, the next installment in the Hunger Games saga. They had to break this one into two pieces, not because the book was huge, but because so much of the story happened off the page and was just mentioned as something the primary characters heard about. That doesn’t work as well in a movie, so those parts of the plot needed to be brought to the screen. Also out this week are Extraterrestrial (aliens out to kill you) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (vampires out to kill you), but why go there?