Animation – Page 48 – Strider’s Web

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!

Something to Do: Movies, 7Feb13

There are an assortment of fun films coming to the big screen this week, starting with Vampire Academy, an action/comedy/fantasy that has an excellent soundtrack. If you want to skip the action component, try out The Lego Movie for a dose of pure silly fun. Also in the silly fun category although not strictly genre, A Fantastic Fear of Everything is a Simon Pegg comedy. It is a bit strange on the release dates, since it comes out this Friday in US movie theaters, but it came out on June 8th of 2012 in the UK, and you have been able to rent it to stream online for a while now. Also, the web site seems to be down, but I am including the link anyways in case it is just a server issue.

If you don’t feel like laughing this weekend, Sinbad: The Fifth Voyage is all about the action, and from the trailer at least looks to hold true to the original Sinbad tales. And one I would enjoy seeing on the big screen is being re-released in NYC, and with any luck perhaps it will have a limited run so the rest of us can see it. The French masterpiece Alphaville may not have invented Space Noir as a genre, but Jean-Luc Godard’s movie certainly put it in the public eye.

Something to Watch: DVDs

In Movies About Time is a romantic fantasy involving the Groundhog Day premise; you do each important event over until you get it right. It was in the theaters just a month or two back, I feel certain they are going after the Valentine crowd with this one. It is a very nicely done movie with a lot of heart, so not a bad choice. The animated comedy Free Birds also comes to disc, but although I am an animation fan I can’t say this one really caught my attention. A better bet for animated entertainment this week is Justice League: War, a direct to DVD feature film.

In TV, while not a fantasy, the historical epic The White Queen deserves a mention, about some power mad women who stopped at nothing to get on the British throne.

We do much better in Anime this week, leading off with Fairy Tail – Part 8. This magical guild continues to do as much damage to their fellow guilds and the surrounding buildings and terrain as they do to the demons they are called upon to defeat. AKB0048 Next Stage Complete Collection is a bit silly but a lot of fun, as season two rolls out the 77th generation of the ultimate IDOL group going across the galaxy singing and shooting. Why shooting? A number of planetary governments have outlawed “things that disturb the heart”, including music. So the girls swoop down on a planet, set up a live concert which is also spread on the planetary net, and sing and dance until the police and soldiers show up. At that point, they have to fight their way back off the planet and head for the next one. If nothing else, this series is a great way to collect a bunch of AKB48 music. BTW, the English version of their home page is broken at the moment, dumping you back to the Japanese version if you try to go to it, but all of their other English pages appear to be working.

Blessing of the Campanella: Complete Collection is a mash up of medieval quests and robotic harems, with supernatural meteor showers and automaton artisans. Plus a lot of time spent hanging out at the beach in between quests and mysteries. This package includes all 12 episodes of the series plus the OVA. I found the provenance of this a bit confusing at first, since the home page with streaming video in the US is over at Funimation, but the DVD release is coming from Nozomi/Lucky Penny/Right Stuf. It turns out that the original simulcast run was at Funimation in 2010, with a DVD release from that distributor in 2011. Normally I do not post re-releases here unless they are important in some way, but I completely missed the series the first time around. Since it is new to me, I am claiming that as justification and posting it anyways.

AV Linux 6.0.2

AV Linux is another incredibly powerful boot-from-DVD build focused on a specialist task set and workflow, and once again it is centered around audio/video production (hence the name). It has all the tools most of us will ever need to create, edit, and compile our projects into coherent multimedia presentations. Like most Linux builds, the default menu buttons and icons are aligned across the top of the screen (although you can move them to any screen border you like best), and they have a small collection of the links to the stuff the developers felt was most important on the screen proper, like help files and the install tools.

Like more and more operating systems, they also have an Icon Bar running down one edge of the screen, giving you a smartphone-like collection of apps/programs to access from your start screen. Again, you can rearrange any component of the desktop to suit your own preferences and habits, like throwing the Icon Bar to any other border, but since this is a Live DVD, you will either have to remaster it, or install it on a Flash Drive/Hard Drive, to get it to remember your preferences from boot to boot. Besides making your choices persistent, installing it on a thumb drive will also allow you to update all the programs and install more of your own, so you can tweak it into the perfect tool set for your projects.

The build itself includes an amazing range of Audio, Graphics and Video content creation software demonstrating the excellence of Open-Source solutions, and the fact that they are free is just making a good thing better. This one is designed for a 32bit computer, meaning this Operating System is designed to turn a regular OLD PC or Intel Mac into an Audio/Graphics/Video workstation with power you won’t believe. I have been somewhat surprised to discover some of my legacy computers are able to outclass some of my newer Windows systems for multimedia creation after booting them from this kind of Linux Live DVD.

The video at the end of this post is for the LAST version of AV Linux; this version is way better! But he covers a ton of stuff included with the OpSys (no great surprise, he coordinated building it, so he knows it best), and most of the basic stuff is the same. Only the names have changed, to protect the innocent Apps (sorry, I couldn’t resist). It gives you a wonderful overview of a lot of the software packages included in the last release, and as always the latest version has all of that and so much more. If you are an audio or video creator and work inside computer environments, this will give you an excellent understanding of which tools you will want to call up for what processes.

Animate Short: Premier Automne

This is an amazing animation, by Carlos De Carvalho & Aude Danset. It doesn’t use or need words to tell its story, the pictures really are worth a thousand words. In Premier Automne, one lives in the winter, the other in summer… and one day, they meet on the border, and their lives are changed forever. This has won a ton of awards from around the world, and with good reason.

Something to Watch: DVDs 28Jan14

There is not a lot coming out this week, but there are a few things. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is animated silly fun, and the only US movie I can recommend this week. From Korea we get The Cat, a story about a woman murdered on an elevator with her cat being the only witness. Park Min Young takes the cat in at the request of the police, only to have strange visions and mysterious events start to happen to her. And from Italy, France, and Spain, Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D has all the sex and violence they could cram in and still get an R rating, with Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing. That last is an interesting choice, since he played Dracula in 2005’s Dracula III: Legacy. And I am not quite sure why the only web site I could find for this Italian movie was in Japan.

The only TV show worth mentioning is Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain, an award winning animated series about trying to take over the world, which was wiped out by the network that bought it for broadcast.

In Anime, Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan: Demon Capital: Set 1 is the only new release, continuing the story of the Nura Clan’s fight against the Yokai. One of the most powerful Yokai, which are somewhere along the demon-monster-spirit spectrum, has returned to Earth after his defeat by the Nura several generations ago. They will have to defeat him again to protect their town and family. These 13 episodes are part one of season 2. There is a cyberpunk classic being re-released this week: Serial Experiments Lain – The Complete Collection. The artwork and animation are amazing, the story is a surrealistic mystery that takes place among the Wired, from a time before the world went wireless. If you haven’t seen this one before, you get another chance. You can also watch it online at the Funimation home page linked here.