More than a trailer, a bit less than a featurette, it looks like they are doing a first class job of relaunching the Robocop franchise. And for the easily confused, no, this was not filmed at CES the other week. Looks like it could have been, though.
If you are an artist or creative media enthusiast of any kind, I would like to recommend the boot-from-DVD Linux build known as Open Artist. 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. So if you feel like creating or modifying your own font, there is a subfolder under Graphics with about 5 different font editors, as an example. They have some general category icons across the top of the screen, 2D, 3D, Audio, Video, and so forth, as well as the main menu, to help you jump right into the tool suite you need to create or modify your current project. After booting it a number of times and exploring (and launching a bunch of programs to check them out), I can honestly say I have never seen a more far ranging collection of creative programs. It includes everything I would expect to be in such a tool set, and a bunch of stuff I never even knew existed. It also includes a full range of servers and other distribution tools, plus all the normal software any good operating system should have, so you can surf the web or read your email while working on your projects.
The build is based on Ubuntu 12.04 but they installed a lot of non-Ubuntu programs, configuring them to play nice in the environment, including not just other flavors of Linux but also Windows code running under Wine. One of the most impressive details is they tweaked the GNOME and NAUTILUS interfaces so the key-press shortcuts don’t interfere with most of the program shortcuts; so you wont accidentally launch an FTP program while you were trying to save a graphics image, again as an example. There was a lot of thought put into making the entire package work as a whole, and keeping the fiddly bits from biting you in the posterior while trying to use it.
If you want to make it boot and run faster, update your software packages to the latest and greatest versions, and have space to store your raw materials and project files, but don’t want to impair your computers normal operating system, the 2.5Gig live boot DVD can be installed to a 16Gig USB stick. That gives you 10Gig for the existing software to unpack and install itself to, 4Gig in a separate partition to save all your project files to, and another 2Gig of expansion space to add any other software you think might be useful. It also gives you the option of using a lot of other features only accessible from an installed version, like alternative desktops with a minimum footprint, launching a specific program or set of programs you always work in at boot, and so forth. And let’s not forget being able to set up all your software to load with your own preferences already configured, which is always a plus.
You can also do like I did, and use a 32Gig USB stick, partitioning the other 16Gig in Fat32 (or whatever your preferred Windows file system format is). Then you can use that partition as both still more storage for your project files, and a convenient way to transfer the various media between your two operating systems. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.
Bottom line, I like this Live DVD build a lot. Download Open Artist, burn the ISO (Image File) to DVD, and start checking it out; you might be just as impressed as I am! Be sure to grab the DVD version, which is a Live DVD, rather than the Base Distro, which needs to be installed to a hard drive before you can add the other programs yourself (WAY too much work for me!).
Her opened in very limited release back in December, this week it goes into wide release, after winning a number of awards. The Legend of Hercules also comes out this Friday, and it looks like they took some pains to keep it close to the original story line.
In somewhat more limited release is EVANGELION: 3.0 – You Can (Not) Redo; mostly it will only be playing for one day in each theater, but there are a bunch of US and Canadian theaters on the list. Two of the theaters are within driving distance for me, I can’t wait to see the latest chapter in the rebuild of the franchise on the big screen.
Somewhere between Manga and Anime, Manga 2.5 is following in the footsteps of Marvel and others, producing Motion Comics of popular Manga. They start by getting a contract to produce a popular Manga, then scan the whole thing in. They remove the dialog balloons and replace them with Japanese voice actors and English subtitles. Since they are embedding audio they also add sound effects as appropriate. The panels or frames are broken apart and colored, and limited animation in the style known as Motion Comics are added. The end result is something that you watch happen rather than read, for a lot less money then it takes to create a real animation or anime.
It is an interesting art form, and I do like the stuff produced by Marvel a lot. So far all I have seen of this group are a few trailers, but it has the potential to be quite good. If you were interested in trying your hand at this kind of thing, Smith Micro has an excellent software suite for a reasonable price with Motion Artist. It has a bit of a learning curve, but the software lets you be creative while automating a lot of the tasks; for instance you can set up the key frames and it automatically generates all the tween frames that get you from one key frame to the next. Trust me when I say having to animate each and every frame yourself gets tedious real fast, whether at 24 frames/second (fps) for film or 29 fps for TV, whereas you might have 4 to 6 key frames per second. Another very useful function is having the mouth layers pre-built for speech with a module that automates building the phonem map out of your imported MP3 file. Lip sync is about the hardest kind of animation to do, from my perspective, all that fiddly stuff should really be done by the computer anyways.
The most interesting film this week has to be Her, a story about a writer who installs a new artificially intelligent operating system designed to meet his every need, and discovers himself drawn into a relationship with it he never expected. Don’t expect explosions and chase scenes, Spike Jonez doesn’t usually do that kind of science fiction; this story is all about intelligence and the heart. We also get Walking with Dinosaurs 3D this time around, quality animation with a story about survival and triumph. This is from 20th Century Fox, with BBC Earth doing the UK airplay, and plays a lot like some of the better classic Disney stories. I think I will probably have to see them both, and I have to say it is nice to have a choice between two stories that have never been told before. It comes complete with a free Augmented Reality App that lets you take photos of your surroundings with dinosaurs in them and a lot more.
Thought I would try out using the Android WordPress app to see if it was easy or not. It did take a bit of poking and prodding to figure out which icon did what; hope I didn’t delete too many entries in the process. Of course, a build up of fatigue poisons could be playing a part in that fight, since I just spent the last 5 days in London celebrating the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who
The one thing it seems to be lacking is the ability to create HTML tags and JavaScipt and source code in general. Looks like my shuttle bus is here, one more hour and I will be home. This has been serious fun.