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Something to Watch: DVDs, 11Feb14

In movies, Ender’s Game was one of the rare films that is true to the book it is based on; both versions are telling exactly the same story. With an excellent cast, powerful performances, and amazing special effects, it is definitely worth joining anyone’s permanent collection. I don’t remember seeing The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box in theaters near me, but it is now coming to disc. It was meant to be the first in a series of YA Steampunk stories based in the Victorian Era’s British Empire, but it did not get good reviews or much in the way of box office revenues, so I suspect it will be the last, instead.

In TV, Sherlock: Season Three continues the brilliant series driven by Steven Moffat. I am seriously waiting for season 4 next year. The Returned is a twisty little series about a group of people who came home to learn that they had died years ago, and when the currently living start dying off it becomes obvious something has followed them back. It isn’t quite a remake of the TV show Les Revenants, but it lives in the same zip code. Doctor Who: The Moonbase is one of the lost stories, available only in partial video episodes, audio drama, or picture book form. It is one of the Patrick Troughton tales for which they have now used animation to restore, so you can watch all four episodes. Not as good as they did for Enemy Of The World or The Web Of Fear, where they actually recovered the original video footage to restore, but a step closer to getting the whole story the way it was meant to be experienced.

In Anime, Kamisama Kiss is about a ordinary young girl who suddenly became a god at the touch of a stranger’s lips. As she struggles to get her new realm under control, she realizes that life may be worth going for, after all. MM! is about a masochist named Sado who joins a club to seek help with his emotional problems. The clubs president may or may not be a god, but certainly wields some interesting powers, and some of the other members include a girl terrified of men and a nurse who forces all her patients to cosplay. The other club members are a bit strange, even by this groups reckoning. Finally, Strike Witches: Season 2 S.A.V.E Edition gives you the girls who were airplanes continuing to defend the home planet from alien invasion during WWII, at a very affordable price. The Funimation home page seems to be saying Season One S.A.V.E edition on BR/DVD is also about to come out, but since I already own it I have to believe they mean they will be re-releasing it. Or maybe the blurb is for a different country.

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Frozen Music

Frozen is a wonderful animation, as witness the fact that it won the Golden Globe Award for best animation, and has been nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Animation Long Form and Best Song for Let It Go. Because of this, they have just brought another version to theaters, the Sing-Along, with the lyrics under the bouncing snowflake. The woman who sings this in English, Idina Menzel, truly does an excellent job… So do most of the other singers in the 50 different languages recorded for the film. We have at least three (4 depending on how your counting) new movies out this weekend I want to see, but I would love to see this one again, in the IMAX 3D format. Decisions, decisions…

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New Live DVD: Scientific Linux

If you are into science in any form, or any kind of educational software, Scientific Linux is your best choice. It is put together by the folks at Fermilab in collaboration with the team at CERN, and you would be hard pressed to find a better group of pure scientists on the planet. It has install distro’s, which is where the real power is; the packages you install will determine what all it can do. Right out of the box it comes with Apache installed and ready to run, like any good variant of Enterprise Linux, and it uses the openafs file system, making it fully compatible with most education and research facilities. To start with I recommend going for the Live CD or Live DVD, which you can run right off the disk, without touching your currently installed operating system. That will give you the opportunity to get familiar with the operating system before you decide to install it, as well as give you a collection of office, programming, internet, and multimedia software. If you have an older system you want to install it to, it has the option of using icewm as your desktop rather thane Gnome or KDE, which need a lot more RAM. It is built on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is an incredibly stable environment. And if you think it is missing some important software, one of the kinds of tool sets it has are things that allow you to install it, install whatever additional software packages you like, and then make your own Live CD, Live DVD, or boot-able memory stick from it, using things like revisor, livecd-tools, or liveusb-creator. The latest version, 6.5, was just released and is ready to be run.

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Join Mars One

Ready to be a part of the first permanent human settlement on Mars? Then you might want to check out Mars One, a group planning on landing the first 4 people in 2024, with 4 more scheduled to arrive every two years after that. The initial missions beginning in 2018 will be to land supplies and robots to build a habitation for the humans who follow.

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SIGGRAPH University Free Graphics Training

SIGGRAPH is a venerable name in the world of computer graphics, the name itself being their usenet newsgroup identifier, Special Interest Group, Graphics, from the days before the Web. At last year’s ACM SIGGRAPH convention, for the first time they held a series of four classes they consolidated under the banner of SIGGRAPH University. They are approximately 3 hours each, and they are university level courses in some aspect of creating computer animation. After watching any of these, you will understand the basics of how to create, not just a picture, but an entire project with timelines and interactions between components.

The one I am embedding on this page is Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics, where you get a bit of the history of how the technology got to this point, but you mostly get a complete mental map of how to create your own animated movie from the ground up, in excellent detail, using whichever set of software you prefer. As you might have guessed by now, I prefer to use a boot-from-DVD Linux build that includes free versions of all the different kinds of multimedia production software you could ever need. If you would like to burn your own arsenal of amazing free multimedia creations tools, check out these other posts and select the one that looks best to you: Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 (mostly music recording, mastering, production, some graphics and video), Ubuntu Studio Live DVD (a complete multimedia suite that has everything you need for most projects, organized by workflow, one of the best builds), Open Artist Live DVD (They took the kitchen sink approach, throwing in every piece of free and open source software that might be useful, and compiled them into folders organized by the type of task you were trying to accomplish), and AV Linux 6.0.2, a personal favorite of mine when it comes to A/V Production that will go live tomorrow.

The other classes in this series are:

An Introduction to OpenGL Programming
The Digital Production Pipeline
Mobile Game Creation for Everyone

And there are more coming up later this year, at Vancouver SIGGRAPH 2014!

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