This isn’t a joke, and it is amazing. You really could win a walk-on role in Star Trek Beyond. Want in? Then go hit This Button and fill out some forms! If you are a Trekkie like me, you will hate yourself if you don’t even take a shot at it! Plus, even if you don’t win (and the majority of us won’t) you will have helped improved the lives of more people than you have ever shared a major sports stadium with. Assuming that, unlike me, you have actually been to a sports stadium.
This introduction to the SIGGRAPH convention experience starts with a practical guide to organizing to attend any large convention. He uses the same techniques many of us developed going to Comic Con or any other large Sci-Fi or Anime convention, but without having to go through three or four conventions gradually learning through trial and error how to organize your time and map out the convention space. So I recommend anyone who wants to attend a large convention watch the first 10 or 12 minutes of this presentation. He then goes on to break down the process of computer animation into its component parts by type of activity, giving a very clear understanding of how it works. If you have any interest in creating your own animations this is a great introduction. That shouldn’t be a surprise, since ACM SIGGRAPH is the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group, GRAPHics which started life as an organization in 1967, held its first convention in 1974, and became an Internet NEWSGROUP back in the early 70s as well. The latest convention, coming up at the Los Angeles Convention Center the 9th through 13th of August, 2015, will be the 42nd time the event has been held.
Pay attention; this might be the world we end up with if we are not careful. A Darwinian Future is not exactly a positive way to move forward through time, but it is one of the potential paths the human race might follow soon. I had to include the VFX Breakdown as a stream for this entry, so you could appreciate the construction. This was made by 3 folks: 2 Actors and 1 Camera person. When was the last time you saw a production pipeline that small that created a story you wanted to watch? As if that wasn’t amazing enough, all post production was done by one guy on a home computer. Meaning, you could create a movie this good yourself, at home, in your spare time.
Awesome Con in Washington D.C. this past weekend certainly lived up to its name, and its rep. They had a huge collection of actors, artists, and authors (and that only covered the first letter of the alphabet) doing their best to make the gathering memorable. Pretty much all of the guest actor/voice talent celebrities manned (personed?) a booth on the bottom level, off to the side of the hucksters area by the primary entrance, most of the time they were not doing a panel or presentation. Between those two groups were the artists, both Comics and Fine, with quite a few other visual disciplines mixed in. That last sentence gives you the idea, but not the scope, unless you expect there to be a hundred or more impressive illustrator/storytellers on the multiple-football-field sized area you are crossing to get to your next scheduled event.
They had some presentations I never expected, like Twisted Toonz, where a group of world class voice actors played out a famous movie as totally different characters than the ones in the original. This year the film was The Wrath of Kahn, and the voice of Wini The Pooh coming from the bridge of the Enterprise was one of the the least disconcerting aspects of that presentation. I can’t wait to see another show organized around the same principle, it was absolutely amazing and entertaining! Although the voice actor tasked with being Bill Cosby for one part of it kept looking out at the audience like he was trying to find an escape route.
Have you been planning how to make your movie, but can’t afford all the location crews it will take to get the filming done, let alone at the quality level your vision requires? Then perhaps what you really need is a drone, not a film crew. With this kind of technology at your fingertips, you can reduce your total production costs by an order of magnitude, and the control interface is simple enough for anyone to learn. OK, I admit that this video of the LilyCam is basically a commercial, but it is also the best introduction I have yet seen to help everyone understand the potential such toys have to help you create your own masterpiece. In my mind, this is one of those Paradigm Shifts in the way we can do things that no one expects, and everyone wonders how we ever got along without after they saw it in action. Thanks to The Great Dismal for the heads up on this one!
Possibly one of the best parody videos I have seen anytime recently, Kung Fu Avengers: Civil War would have become a cult classic if it had been made in China sometime in the late 70s or early 80s. It tends to make you wonder what other gems you might be able to create on your own, doesn’t it?