Coming up on Hulu on the 24th, TokyoPOP will be presenting America’s Greatest Otaku. This isn’t a one-time award show, but a documentary series that has the TokyoPOP team touring the country looking to see who will qualify for the grand prize. Meanwhile, beginning this presidents day weekend, Viz Media starts streaming the US premier of Neuro, Supernatural Detective. They have the first 5 episodes online to watch right now, and this is a bit of an experiment for them. They haven’t even picked up the Manga yet, but if enough people “like” the Anime (click the red heart on the streaming page), they will sign the contract and bring it to the US.
Yep, Firefly is about to start running on TV again. This time around, it is being hosted on the Science Channel, and the physicist behind the Science of Science Fiction, Dr Michio Kaku, will be explaining the science used inside each episode. It kicks off on Sunday, March 6th, with the pilot and first episode, and continues each Sunday after that… in order and in HD! Of course we have seen these episodes before, but according to Nathan Fillion speaking with EW, he is ready to make more episodes the moment anyone makes the offer. Or if he wins the lottery and can make them himself, whichever comes first.
Just a reminder that season 3 of Being Human, the original Brit version, kicks off on the 19th on BBC America. While not the same day as the UK treatment they are giving Doctor Who, it is still only a few weeks behind, instead of the 6 months to a year behind we used to get. Also, tonight they are running the BAFTA Awards coverage, which is kind of the Brit version of the Emmy’s and the Oscars combined. I will be watching and cheering on Inception, which got nominated in a number of categories, including Best Film.
In live action movies we have a few lesser known but amusing films. The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu is the tale of a man in a dead end job who is told he is the only surviving descendant of H.P.Lovecraft, and given an ancient artifact with which he must defend the world. The other selection this week, equally erudite, is Oppai Chanbara: Striptease Samurai Squad, in which a collage girl learns on the death of her mother that she has inherited a sword and a deadly legacy with which she must protect the oppressed. Besides their other similarities, both of these are just a bit silly, so should be fun. The more serious movie out this week has the return of Cloud and Wind in The Storm Warriors. Based on the manga series Fung Wan, this is an indirect sequel to 1998’s The Storm Riders, but in between we have seen Wind and Cloud in the Zu Warriors series of movies, played by the same actors. It is also worth noting this Hong Kong film is the first big budget Chinese language movie shot almost entirely in bluescreen.
For TV, the winner has to be Dr. Who: A Christmas Carol, the Who Christmas special from this past December. This is one of the best kind of Who episodes, sad and poignant and also full of forgiveness and redemption. The other TV program worth mentioning is the 1989 miniseries version of Around the World in 80 Days, finally available on DVD. The cast for this version was amazing, and included Pierce Brosnan, Eric Idle, Peter Ustinov, Jack Klugman, Roddy McDowell, Darren McGavin, Lee Remick, Jill St. John, and Robert Wagner along with many more.
In Anime, the clear and overwhelming winner is Summer Wars, in fact it is the best program of any kind being released on DVD this week. Among the multiple awards this film has is the Japan Academy Prize for the Best Animated Film 2010, won in previous years by The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Paprika, Tekkonkin Kreet, and Ghost in the Shell. A high school math genius and systems analyst is hired by his secret crush for a summer job, which turns out to be posing as her fiance to her family. Since until then he spent most of his time living in the powerful online VR community known as OZ, he is quite out of his element. Then he gets an unusual mathematical puzzle on his cell, and when he solves it, it unleashes a dangerous AI that takes over OZ with the goal of using it as the platform to launch an attack on real reality to bring about the destruction of us all. After that, it gets very interesting (in the Chinese curse meaning of the word, May you live in interesting times). This project is visually amazing and highly entertaining, and if you only add one DVD to your collection this week, this should be it.
Also out this week, Needless Collection 1 is the story of mutants with special powers who came into being in the aftermath of WWIII. They run into conflicts among themselves and when interacting with normal humans. I haven’t had a chance to see this yet, so I can’t speak to its quality.
For those of you running the Xfinity App from Comcast on your Apple devices, you should have been prodded about a week ago to upgrade the App, which now lets you watch Video On Demand directly on the iPad. The same functionality for the Xfinity Android App should be released any time now. The video appears to currently be limited to the Premium Channels, like HBO and Showtime, but more networks will be coming soon.
Despite the earlier report that only the first episode was going to be streamed in the US Fractale is still becoming available at Funimation each week. I am glad they resolved that issue, but it lead to the creation of an excellent explanation of Territorial Rights on the Funimation blog page that is easy to understand and actually makes sense.
Right Stuff and Nozomie have started streaming The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye. Think Tank Girl, but the tank (named Bogie) has a serious attitude problem, so they make a great team.
Over on the Syfy Video page you can watch full episodes of Being Human (the US version), Sanctuary, and the full first season of Riese: Kingdom Falling.
12 memorable sci-fi movie moments was posted by Blastr just a day or two ago, and the animated GIFs there inspired this article.
Blastr used some elegant animated Sci-Fi GIFs in this one. When I use the phrase elegant while speaking of computers I am referring to using minimal coding to achieve maximum effect. In this instance, the GIF images are fairly high rez, but only a small number of pixels per frame are actually changing state. So, for example, the Moon GIF is 500 pixels wide by 222 pixels tall, weighing in as a very crisp image of 184KB. How can the file size be that small? Around 150KB is the base image, which never changes; a slice of the image 80 pixels wide by 140 pixels tall is the man jogging for 8 to 10 frames which loop back to the beginning.
Just like the MPG video that makes up your broadcast TV or cable signal, they give you the basic image (referred to as a Key Frame) and then only have to give you the pixels that are different in the next frame, and the frame after that, etc., until they come to the next key frame. In that way they have to send you a complete new hi-rez image every half second, or second and a half, and not the 24 to 29 times a second that online and TV video requires. The in between times they only have to update the pixels that are different from the last image, leaving you with a lot less bandwidth to transfer the same amount of visual information.
This particular page of animated GIF images is the best collection I have ever seen for demonstrating these principles. They use several different techniques to achieve these effects as well. The small slice of screen trick that the Moon GIF uses can also be seen in the Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Young Frankenstein animations. The Vertigo and Clockwork Orange animations cover a much larger area of their respective pictures, but use a trick involving the boundaries of an image segment. In both cases the shirt of each character supplies the material to be manipulated (it can be any other object with a border to be flexed), and any given pixel along the edges between the light and dark parts of the picture is set to cycle between 4 to 6 values of brightness and color. The end result is that the difference between one frame and the next is just as small in terms of number of pixels changed (information density), but the visual effect you observe takes on a whole different aspect.
Another technique demonstrated there can be seen in the two different Blade Runner GIF’s, distributed changes. In the Cityscape image, they are distributing 5 different areas of the image as tiny little animation segments, each much smaller than the single area that Moon or Dr. Strangelove gave us, but working on the exact same principles of an upper left and lower right corner for each animated area, with its own defined pixel changes. In the second Blade Runner animation the distributed change is a variation on the Boundary animation style, where this time the boundary is between raindrops and air. Any given onscreen atmospheric pixel only has to cycle between 6 separate values in sequence, and that 6 value range only needs to be defined once for all of them, to be used over and over for each.
There are many more ways to refine your animation (or any other streaming video you are building) for maximum visual effect with minimum bandwidth burned, but these are a few of my basic favorites. Thanks for taking the time to read through this set.
There really is a competition focusing on America’s Greatest Otaku, and it could be you that brings home the prizes this time. The contest is being held by TokyoPOP, and it runs from Monday, February 7th (yes, that is tomorrow) until Friday, February 11th. Each day of that five day period will see a different contest being presented, each a day long and each giving you a shot at some great prizes. You can get the official rules here, and then log into the America’s Greatest Otaku site each day this week to enter each new contest as it comes up. The documentary series that all of this is in support of launches on Hulu on February 24th.