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TECHNE from NHK

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.

Ironic Video Compositing

The fun for me in this super short video segment is not in the video itself, although it is built quite well. Rather, I enjoy it for the irony of the dialog, where the creator talks about trying to build a video using masking and compositing of video source material. Kind of a nice touch in a video that can only exist by using those technologies.

Anime Studio builds

If you are into building your own animations, and you are using Anime Studio as part of your toolset, here are a few videos to inspire you. The first is called Ballade by Yaki, the second is TTTest1NS, the final one is Dark Prints. Each of these is pretty amazing in its own right, and all of them were assembled using a single cost effective animation program. So what are you in the process of building, to show the world?

New Blender Foundation Open Animation

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.

More Strange J-Commercials

Japanese commercials are even stranger than the ones they build to catch our attention in the west. Having said that, a lot of these would work anywhere around the world, but about 25% of them could only come from Japan. That probably has as much to do with the globalization of culture on Earth as it does with the difference in cultures from different parts of the world. As recently as 40 years ago, only about 15% of them had anything in common at all. These days, they are selling you the same products with a slant that they hope will increase sales within the national borders of a given country. That tends to limit creativity, but there are still a few interesting and unique commercials among the collection.

SIGGRAPH 2013 Emerging Technologies Preview

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.