It is the end of the school year and time for graduation in Japan, a theme reflected in the latest video from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. The track is called Yume no Hajima Ring Ring, and is being released today; if her past releases are any indication, you should be able to pick it up on iTunes if you live in North America. And if you do live in North America, she is on a world tour at the moment, and will be playing in New York, Toronto, and Chicago in March.
This girl sings in a hoodie… and never lets you see her face. The artist is Nano, the first album is West Ground, and the first track is Born To Be. The second track is Savior Of Song from her collection My First Story. I do like her voice and her style, and I appreciate her Robin Williams reference in her URL (nanonano, a rather Mork-like greeting)!
I couldn’t help it, this song was too much fun. I Kveld Med YLVIS isn’t a band, it is a Norwegian talk/variety show with an attitude, and they originally did this track as another comedy skit on their show. It went somewhat viral, pulling in 359,757,676 views (as of the last time I checked), the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in the US watching it. They brought it to the BBC Children In Need Special produced every year to aid kids who might otherwise not get a chance to grow up, and were joined by a bunch of singers you should recognize; how many of them can you name? And then someone mashed it up with 2013’s other runaway silly song, Gangnam Style from Psy. Just goes to show, sometimes when you get silly the world notices and sings along.
Frozen is a wonderful animation, as witness the fact that it won the Golden Globe Award for best animation, and has been nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Animation Long Form and Best Song for Let It Go. Because of this, they have just brought another version to theaters, the Sing-Along, with the lyrics under the bouncing snowflake. The woman who sings this in English, Idina Menzel, truly does an excellent job… So do most of the other singers in the 50 different languages recorded for the film. We have at least three (4 depending on how your counting) new movies out this weekend I want to see, but I would love to see this one again, in the IMAX 3D format. Decisions, decisions…
SIGGRAPH is a venerable name in the world of computer graphics, the name itself being their usenet newsgroup identifier, Special Interest Group, Graphics, from the days before the Web. At last year’s ACM SIGGRAPH convention, for the first time they held a series of four classes they consolidated under the banner of SIGGRAPH University. They are approximately 3 hours each, and they are university level courses in some aspect of creating computer animation. After watching any of these, you will understand the basics of how to create, not just a picture, but an entire project with timelines and interactions between components.
The one I am embedding on this page is Introduction to 3D Computer Graphics, where you get a bit of the history of how the technology got to this point, but you mostly get a complete mental map of how to create your own animated movie from the ground up, in excellent detail, using whichever set of software you prefer. As you might have guessed by now, I prefer to use a boot-from-DVD Linux build that includes free versions of all the different kinds of multimedia production software you could ever need. If you would like to burn your own arsenal of amazing free multimedia creations tools, check out these other posts and select the one that looks best to you: Musix GNU+Linux 3.0 (mostly music recording, mastering, production, some graphics and video), Ubuntu Studio Live DVD (a complete multimedia suite that has everything you need for most projects, organized by workflow, one of the best builds), Open Artist Live DVD (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), and AV Linux 6.0.2, a personal favorite of mine when it comes to A/V Production that will go live tomorrow.
The other classes in this series are:
An Introduction to OpenGL Programming
The Digital Production Pipeline
Mobile Game Creation for Everyone
And there are more coming up later this year, at Vancouver SIGGRAPH 2014!
The 50th Anniversary was in November, but there are still a lot of fun things being released for it. One of those things is the from Silva Screen, in three different assortments. The important one to be aware of is the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary presentation, which includes 129 different musical pieces.