The comic-con is coming next week, already sold out, and filled with some amazing guests. For those of us who can’t be there, G4 will cover it, as will several hundred bloggers.
Fathom Entertainment brings another exclusive Anime event to the big screens across the US. This time around they have the feature film Eureka 7 – good night, sleep tight, young lovers, playing one night only on Thursday, September 24th (yes, that is 2009). Tickets went on sale today for its only other big-screen showing in North America, and its North American Premier, at the FanTasia 2009 Film Festival in Montreal, CA, on July 28th. Purists will want to be at the FanTasia showing, which is in Japanese and subbed; the Fathom presentation will be dubbed.
The Fantasia International Film Festival 2009 starts this Thursday, July 9th, and runs to the 29th. The films include a dozen of my favorites that I never expected to hear about being on a big screen, like Cyborg She and The Clone Returns Home, as well as many others I would love to see but never have, like Rough Cut and 8th Wonderland. There are even some I would go to just because of the silly titles, like Lesbian Vampire Killers. It doesn’t hurt any that Montreal has near-perfect weather in July.
Since I don’t have the option of going there, my sights are set on something a bit more temporally restricted: Otakon 2009, the Otaku-friendly Anime Con also held every July, this year from the 17th through the 19th. It kicks off with a performance by VAMPS, and has way too many guests and events for me to go into here; visit their Guests and activities menus for a full rundown.
And finally today, I had to share this video of Guillaume Estace playing the Star Wars Cantina song on a Chapman Stick. Enjoy…
It is a slow week in Sci-Fi; there are no new episodes on TV this week, because of the holiday coming up (why waste them when the audience isn’t watching TV?). There could have been a monster movie released, since holiday weekends do good box office, but no. Probably no-one wanted to compete with last weeks Transformers 2 and next weeks Blood, The Last Vampire (see the latest trailer here or watch the one before that, below). I don’t know about the book/graphics novel releases; I basically empty my wallet on the counter every time I hit a Borders/Barnes and Nobel/Waldenbooks, and I find if I do my best to ignore the release announcements I can keep from going in more than twice a month. On DVD this week the Stargate Atlantis final season and only half of season 3 of Eureka was all we got (except for a few anime titles I went looking for, but none of my local outlets stocked them). I love Eureka, but why would I buy half a season? Do they think I want to pay $60 for the privilege of being made to wait for the whole thing, when instant gratification would cost me $35? The flip side of that coin is the fact that only the first half of season 3 has aired so far, with the second half kicking off next Friday, July 10th. So if you want to catch up on the story so far, it may be the way to go for you. Yes, this is a slow week in Sci-Fi, but next week promises to be better.
Miku Hatsune is the name of a Virtual Idoru, or Idol. She sings whatever you program her for, because she is software that takes your input and generates custom made anime music from it.
Miku was sampled from anime vocal artist and singer Saki Fujita, who brought to life characters in Bleach, Speed Grapher, Shuffle, and many others. Including Zoku Sayonara ZetsubÅ Sensei, the show where she actually played the character Hatsune Miku. The software she (and a number of others) was sampled for is Yamaha’s Vocaloid2, a program that lets you enter the lyrics and notes for a song, select the singers, and generate the music. Or you can input the lyrics and play the computer keyboard in realtime to generate the notes. Unlike most software (OK, pretty much all software) I mention here, this program isn’t free by any means, and the crippleware version you can download to try is limited to 5 words and very truncated song length.
But I had to post about it, because very few news reports out of Japan make it to the US. There are Widgets for Miku, multiple CDs released, large user communities, dedicated music players to embed on web pages like the one below, entire anime’s built around the Miku songs generated, other anime voice artists who have since been sampled and call her Big Sister; and for the entire month her sample set was released it was the number one best selling item on Amazon Japan in any category. Pretty impressive for someone who doesn’t actually exist, isn’t it? Rumor has it there is a newer version of the software as well. You might also want to download the MikuMiku Dance animation software to make your own dance videos to go with the songs you create (that one is Freeware, and you probably want the multi-model English version).
Watch Hatsune Miku 3D Bleach Ending Song Remix PV in Animation | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
For the last few decades, one of the major players in the graphics/3D modeling/rendering/animation arena has been Caligari Truespace. Their all-in-one 3D software suite sold for $600 and required nothing else to take you from start to finish on creating your own models, movies, animations and commercials. You can download it here for free, and you can see the full specification list to get an idea of just how powerful this tool set is.
While not completely free (you have to buy the magazine), you can get Realsoft 3D 5.1 on the disk that comes with this months 3D World Magazine. Another industrial grade software suite, this one normally sells for $750, and again covers every aspect of the 3D modeling and animation process from beginning to end.
Both of these are professional fully featured animation packages, actually used to create things you have seen online, on TV, and in the theaters. If I had to choose between them I would go with Truespace, but that is probably because I have used it for the last decade or so and was always impressed with the results it gave. I don’t have the same hands-on experience with Realsoft, so I have no basis of comparison so far. Thanks to Vesa (a name, not a credit card) in their Tech Support group, who helped solve my registration issues, I now have the chance to find out, and will report back here about it.
Caligari’s Truespace was bought about a year ago by Microsoft, who changed the price to free. The idea was to make this the core tool for creating content for their Virtual Earth project in their ongoing battle with Google. The economy train wreck means Microsoft has pulled back support for the product a few weeks ago, so you should download all the software, plugins, and training materials for your archives now, as at least some of them may be going away.
With Realsoft 3D, they have released version 6 for the full money amount, and are offering an upgrade deal (just under $400) for those who install 5.1 from the magazine. Basically a variation on Trialware without actually crippling the software before making it available; it is only missing the new bug fixes and features of the more recent version. The June issue of 3D World actually leaves the stands on June 24th, so you still have 2 weeks to go out and find a copy; after that it will be gone.
According to this BBC announcement, there is more in store for David Tennant’s run as the Doctor. Besides the remaining specials we already knew about, he is signed up for a major part in two episodes of season three of the Sarah Jane Adventures. The new season of SJA starts in September in the UK and will run for 12 episodes. I addition, David has signed on for a series of short animated Who episodes which will also feature the voices of Georgia Moffett, David Warner and Lisa Bowerman. And while he was not directly mentioned, the BBC has confirmed that a movie script is in development for a theatrical Doctor Who treatment. I can’t wait to see it on the big screen! On the small screen, new this week is Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers, based on the book series by Mori Hiroshi. Oshii used the same 3D CG animation team involved with his Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence production. Besides the Ghost in the Shell series of movies and TV shows, previous creations of Mamoru Oshii include Urusei Yatsura, Blood: The Last Vampire, Patlabor, and a whole lot more.