I do enjoy Augmented Reality Apps, and wanted to mention one from the new movie Walking With Dinosaurs that is both educational and silly fun, and carries my favorite price tag: Free. It allows you to embed and position whichever dinosaur you select into the photographs you take and teaches you a bit about them in the process. The Walking With Dinosaurs App comes in both iPad and Android flavors.
I continue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and wanted to create my own images to use as wallpaper, icons, buttons, and other applications. For this set, my inspiration was an art form developed somewhere between 1880 and WWII, where they only had the chemical set to capture black and white photographs. They would print them out at the highest resolution they could manage, which usually made the grain of the film stock on the negatives obvious (kind of the 1930s version of pixelation), and then hand paint the prints to create their own version of classic portrait paintings. The results were often quite attractive, in a paint-outside-the-lines kind of way, and it was interesting to see which areas they decided to color and what they left black and white, showing what they thought was important within the image. So here are a few pictures I created in that style celebrating the first Doctor, and I will probably share a few more over the next week or two that celebrate other Doctors.
Hope this spooktacular night is finding you up to your neck in fun. Happy Halloween, everyone! The picture started life being a yard near my local grocery store, I took a photo and converted it to this.
I just stumbled into this show, and it is excellent! TECHNE: The Visual Workshop Special on NHK Premium is an experiential creative education TV show. In each episode they focus on one one visual technique and shows a whole lot of short video pieces made using that technique. The reason they have all those pieces is they challenge people to create their own new films using it, and then submit it to them. While the show is in Japanese, it runs English as its SAP or Second Audio Program. A lot of the entries are folks using the TECHNE logo in their pieces.
The first video is from NHK Online, and is a bunch of those short logo videos by a boatload of people strung together. The music video I am including is by Masashi Kawamura, one of the shows creators, and it gives you a feel for the kinds of things the program is doing.
SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.
MechaCon is the largest Anime Con in New Orleans, and runs this year from August 23rd to the 25th. There will be a ton of things going on there, including Cosplay and AMV competitions, with a wide range of guests to see and events to attend. What makes this memorable for me is the Red Carpet Affair, their opening night formal dance and party. The theme this year is When you wish upon a Deathstar, and they are encouraging costumes that are a blend of Disney and Star Wars, in honor of the franchise changing hands. I particularly like the Deathstar as Micky Mouse image, it is quite a hoot.
Your picture will be taken tomorrow, so be sure to look up and smile and wave for the camera. The camera is on the Cassini Spacecraft, and it will be taking a picture of the Earth from the shadow of Saturn (because taking a picture of the Sun does bad things to unprotected cameras). This is a recreation of the original Pale Blue Dot event, when Voyager took a picture of Earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune. Take a peek at the last time Cassini took our picture in 2006 to get an idea of just how amazing an image this could be. The woman who headed the Voyager imaging team in 1990 and is on board the Cassini imaging team taking these photos, Carolyn Porco, wrote a great article about the event you should check out. About the only part of the project I am not in favor of is their Message to the Milky Way transmission on the anniversary of the event, using Earth’s strongest Radio Telescope as the transmitter. Why let the Berserker’s know we are here before we have to? Thanks to Richard Branson for the heads up on this one; while I got Carolyn’s tweet about it, Richards blog entry had lots of juicy details.