Fox is usually the last network on the planet I would recommend to people as a place to get their product distributed, but there are signs recently that it might be improving. With its renewal of Dollhouse, it has finally proved it understands there are gains to be made beyond the current weeks ratings. Part of that new understanding has to have been caused by another Joss Whedan property, Firefly, which sold 440,000 copies in its first week of release as a DVD, even though Fox had canceled the show. Now they are running a competition to add to their animation lineup, and YOU could be that animator! The contest entry point is at Aniboom, and they are looking for a 2 to 4 minute animation segment showcasing why your concept should be picked up by the network and produced into a weekly series. If you ever wanted to build your own sci-fi, this is a perfect opportunity to get started.
Ghost In The Shell 2.0 is not a remake of the Starwars school, but rather an updating of the original masterpiece using modern animation tools and techniques. Scene for scene, it is exactly the same movie… except it looks and sounds better. There is an excellent collection of old and new frames for comparison at Asian Blueray Guide to give you an idea of the differences between the two versions. Expect it out in the US come August or September. If you can’t wait, it will be playing at Annecy, the worlds biggest animation festival. The Festival starts June 8th and runs to the 13th, showing over 500 films from 63 countries, including 10 feature Film Official Selections including Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Redline. The 2.0 trailer…
Yes, it is time once again for Sci-Fi London, that truly amazing film festival held at the Apollo Piccadilly Circus and many nearby locations. This is the eighth year for the festival, and it is bigger and better than ever, starting Wednesday the 29th and running through Monday the 4th. It has become the event where the Arthur C Clarke Award is handed out, as well as the Sci-Fi London Awards. For those who want to build their own, they have created the SFL Lab where scientists, comic artists, leading genre writers and filmmakers will present a full program of classes, including things like Filmaking for small screens. For the more gonzo build-your-own types they held the 48 Hour Film Challenge a few weeks ago (so they could show the results at the SFL festival). They handed out titles, dialog, and props to 71 teams on Saturday, and on Monday 55 of those teams returned with finished films. They will be doing many World and UK Premiers, including the films The Hunt for Gollum, Eyeborgs, Eraser Children, The Clone Returns Home, and one of my personal favorites, Cyborg She. They will be screening X-Men Origins: Wolverine before it opens in UK theaters. And so much more; wish I could get the time off from work to be there, but at least I can watch Sci-Fi London TV!
Everyone should try their hand at building their own SciFi, using whatever tools work for them. One of the more expressive and accessible formats is animation; pretty much everyone can enjoy and follow a good video. And using animation avoids all those real-world constraints like special effects budgets and the laws of physics. 2D animation puts you in the realm of traditional cartoons, a format made popular over the last hundred years or so, and there are a number of free tools and a host of training resources available online. For instance, one of the commercial software packages, ToonBoom, has a few free online tools at Animachines. One takes your WebCam output, blends a simple animation, and gives you an animated gif you can use on your pages. The other lets you do frame-by-frame animations using 4 simple shapes for your building blocks. Much more powerful are the Open Source programs you can download and install, like Pencil, which runs on MACs, Windows, or Linux, and gives you a traditional hand-drawn animation environment that works with both bitmap and vector graphic images. Another is Animata from eastern Europe, designed to let you build backgrounds and animations for live theater/concert environments. K-Toon from Brazil was primarily for Nix systems (Unix, Linux, etc.) but now can be used everywhere; development seems to be stalled a year or so back, but it is still worth a look. Another great open-source program is SynFig, still under current development but mostly for Nix systems. It has tweening automated, which reduces the workflow steps necessary to create quality animation and puts feature-film level animation into everyone’s hands. Then there are programs like Creatoon, no longer supported but still a tool that can help you build your animations.
When those in the US finish filing their taxes, here is an event to help you relax; Beer Wars. The movie will be showing at a few hundred theaters across the country, another of the Fathom Events series. Besides the documentary itself, there will be a live panel discussion by some of the leaders of the craft brewing scene. A little later in the month the same group will be running Death Note: Change the World, the third live action installment to the franchise. The presentation will be on the 29th of April for those who prefer original-audio subtitled, and the 30th for people who prefer an English dubbed soundtrack. These live action films join the Manga and Anime collections to give you more choices on how to enjoy the series. If you are not already familier with the story, you can watch the anime online at Joost for free to bring you up to speed before the event.
Word is that Greg Bear will be writing the HALO Forerunners trilogy books, due out next year from TOR Books. Considering his background for writing epic galaxy-spanning SciFi, this is a good choice. The classic SciFi Anime Van Dread has just been released as a complete series box set by Funimation. With a slogan like If the enemy doesn’t kill them, their hormones will you have to suspect this one is silly fun (and it is, watch free episodes online at the previous link to prove it). Funimation is also running a 6 hour anime marathon at the Comic Book SciFi Con in LA on April 26th.