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!
Here are a few 3D creation tools everyone should have in their arsenal. First up, DAZ Studio 3D; while not Open Source, this one is one of the best 3D software packages ever built, and released online for free. The other killer application is Blender, a full-service Open Source 3D program with more support than you had ever suspected was available. Between these two, you will be able to create anything you can think of for a 3D environment, and never have to pay a penny to pull it off.
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.
And you can play God Games too! The SIMS are nice, but limit your godhood to a single environment on a single planet. To get into the game from a Universal level, try Discover’s Star Formation. You start with a dust cloud, and set up conditions to optimize star creation as gravity nodes gather mass. Another fun one is the Universe Sandbox, where again you start with the basic laws of physics, and modify the parameters to create your desired results. For a Gods-Eye view of the universe, you can try World Wide Telescope, the Windoze ripoff of the classic Open Source monster Celestia. And if you like the Open Source version better, be sure to visit Celestia Motherload, with a ton of upgrades and plugins, including the Selden Ball data.
If Ashton hits 1 Meg viewers at UStream, and beats CNN for numbers, he is going to buy 10,000 anti-malaria mosquito nets and distribute them where they are needed. Support this effort! If you login live, you can also hear a great rant about how the media will evolve (or already has), and you too can build your own chunk of the future with it! And he made it, the celebration is starting now. Which means we all made it; we are all creating the future for which this is just an example. You don’t have to be famous to pull this off; you just have to have an idea you want to spread, an attitude you need to get out there, and/or the desire to create something of your own.
Built around a core of Anime and JRock classic tunes, Jazz and Just Plain Good Music soon joined the mix on my Pandora Anime Radio Station. The result isn’t always what I expected, going off on Blues or Ballads or Backbeat Swing for a time, then bouncing into Alternative, Boogie, Punk, and other forms of quality rock. After a year of tweaking, it seems to play nothing but great music; and on those rare occasions when it doesn’t, I tweak a bit more. What I enjoy most is the amount of world-class music it includes I had never heard before, or even heard of. BONUS!!!