In North America in 1982 there were a limited number of companies fighting for the home computer market, and with 20-20 hindsight it is obvious that Apple was the winner of that battle. But my own system of choice that year had the same overall computing power, plus a few dedicated chip sets that meant superior 8 bit graphics and sound processing. Plus it had a built-in programming language that made it easy to create your own audio/visual sequence complete with text overlays. This is the state of the art Christmas demo sequence from Commodore that year, and if you remember what any of the other systems available at the time could do, it will be obvious why I thought this one was the way to go. Merry Christmas!
Sometimes words are not required, as this animation from House Special proves; enjoy.
This tasty little animation is called Orbitas, and was put together by the students at PrimerFrame, an animation school. Some of the student created productions have won awards, and after watching this gem it will be obvious why. You should take this as inspiration to build your own.
In Movies we get Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the second film in the recent reboot of the classic series. This set of films is probably the best example of the state of the art in computer generated characters I have seen. Also this week, the live action version of Kite, based on the groundbreaking anime classic.
In TV, The Strain: The Complete First Season is a show about viral vampires, as done by Guillermo Del Toro and a few other award winning writers. Also out, The Simpsons: The Complete Seventeenth Season continues the animated silliness for more years than I even dreamed were possible when the show first hit the airwaves.
In Anime, Diabolik Lovers: Complete Collection finds Yui sharing a home with 6 vampires, and keeping them at fangs length is becoming quite stressful. Note that this is the DVD only; the Blue Ray version will be out at the end of February. In the magical combat comedy we get Fairy Tail: Part 14, bringing episodes 154 through 164 to North America. Finally, Queen’s Blade: Beautiful Warriors is a 6 episode OVA series telling the tales of the most recent contestants as they make their way through the world after their competition.
The animated George Lucas film Strange Magic will be in theaters on January 23rd, and should be a lot of fun. It looks like some of the same folks are involved who created Epic if the character design and animation style is any indication.
This week we get The Imitation Game, the true life story of Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist. He was in the forefront of the project to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win WWII, without him we might have lost the war. Benedict Cumberbatch gets to play the great man this time around. If you prefer your spy’s animated rather than real, The Penguins of Madagascar is quite a bit funnier… but it also stars Benedict Cumberbatch, so he is in both of my selections for this weekend.