Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay for Anomalisa, an animated film that has won a number of important awards on the film festival circuit and received an assortment of critical praise. If you don’t recognize the name, he also wrote the screenplays of a couple of other movies I really liked, Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It will be in a limited number of theaters December 30th, and pretty much everywhere come January. Which tells me Charlie is going to see if he can’t pull off a small collection of Academy Awards for his latest masterpiece.
It looks like they have put some effort into Warcraft: The Beginning, which will be hitting theaters on June 16th, 2016. There is nothing to their web site so far, but there is a little bit of info on their facebook page. Personally, the trailer sold me; I will definitely be in the theater for this one.
In the animated short film Sumer by Alvaro Garcia the ionosphere has been destroyed, and the planetary ecosystem followed close behind it. The animals and plants died a while ago, leaving one small group of humans in an artificial environment. In nine minutes this film tells quite a complex story, and in the year it has been making the Film Festival circuit it has won over 50 awards, including winning 14 Festivals outright. Thanks to CGI Bros for making this available online.
These are the Top Art Submissions for September 2015 from Daz Studio, and they are all quite well done. For those of you who have not been playing with it, it is an excellent and free 3D modeling and animation program which is integrated pretty closely with Poser. Meaning you can not only share a lot of the same resources between the two environments (including everything you create yourself), but also that any skill set you learn in one program is directly applicable to the other. Take a look at this trailer to give you an idea of what is possible, and see if you don’t feel the urge to try to create a little something of your own.
This introduction to the SIGGRAPH convention experience starts with a practical guide to organizing to attend any large convention. He uses the same techniques many of us developed going to Comic Con or any other large Sci-Fi or Anime convention, but without having to go through three or four conventions gradually learning through trial and error how to organize your time and map out the convention space. So I recommend anyone who wants to attend a large convention watch the first 10 or 12 minutes of this presentation. He then goes on to break down the process of computer animation into its component parts by type of activity, giving a very clear understanding of how it works. If you have any interest in creating your own animations this is a great introduction. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group, GRAPHics which started life as an organization in 1967, held its first convention in 1974, and became an Internet NEWSGROUP back in the early 70s as well. The latest convention, coming up at the Los Angeles Convention Center the 9th through 13th of August, 2015, will be the 42nd time the event has been held.
I thought I would post a few pictures of myself and a friend of mine hanging out on my Balloon House. I generally keep it parked a hundred meters above sea level somewhere above an island paradise. You have to love Virtual Reality environments like Second Life; they can be so whimsical.
