I have my own password rant, but Tobuscus seems to sum it up rather nicely. He at least covers all the major points I do, and one I missed; enjoy.
There are two tasty choices this weekend; Kick-Ass 2 could be even more off the hook than the original. Hit Girl gets grounded, and Kick-Ass teams with a group of costumed vigilantes inspired by their original antics. Based on the trailers I have to say Jim Carrey’s character looks well and truly twisted. The other film worth checking out this time around is the docu-drama Jobs, and there is one thing I am hoping they deal with. That is their near mythical raid on Xerox PARC, where they supposedly stole the idea of the mouse and its use with clickable icons to create a graphical user interface. That GUI format was later supposedly stolen from them as Bill Gates madly played catch-up and replaced DOS with Windows in his bid to compete with the Mac. As with all such mythologies, the reality was a bit more complex than that (see the Stanford story linked above), but it made a great story.
The Blender Foundation is constantly testing and improving the free open source 3D modeling and animation software Blender, and part of that process is to get the funding to allow a talented team of people to do some actual animations with it. This one is called Sintel, it was made back in 2010 and has a lot of heart. Hit their site to download the free open source Blender and start creating your own animations and 3D objects today.
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming up on July 21st through the 25th, with the latest and greatest in graphics development for movie production, gaming platforms, and scientific visualization. Some of the presentations and exhibits each year focus on new and emerging technologies, and as usual they have put together a prevue of some of the more interesting ones. A few of these are silly, and more of them need context to understand their potential applications, but a couple of them are obvious game changers that will revolutionize how we do things once they get into full production. And as a special bonus, I am including their Real Time Preview for this year as well.
It is true, there is a new Ghost In The Shell project with an all new series of videos and a new story line. This one is called Ghost in the Shell: Arise! and it is made up of four 50 minute episodes. It looks like it will bring all our favorite characters back together again in that same cyberpunk universe we have enjoyed so many times before. Episode 1 hit the big screens in Tokyo last week, but I figure it will be at least the end of July before the DVDs get released here and we get to enjoy them. There may be a few rare theaters that will throw this on the big screen in the US, but I haven’t found any yet. If you find one of them, give me a shout; I would really like to be there!
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming to Anaheim, CA on July 21st through the 25th, and they have released their Dailies preview for this year. The Dailies are roughly 90 minutes of computer generated animations by both new and returning artists, each of whom gets to show two minutes of video and say a little something about their project. There is some truly amazing work on display, as you can tell from the preview. For those of you who haven’t been on the internet since the beginning, SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group, Graphics, and they have been the cutting edge of computer animations since 1983.