The Variety Artisans series is a collection of interviews that explain how all the stuff at the core of telling a story in a movie format works. This particular one is about the Oscar Ballot Guide: Animation Character Design, where you will learn the major points of making a character the audience will want to follow and become friends with. If you enjoy this one, you may want to watch the entire series.
The group Band-Maid are 5 girls playing some excellent hard rock out of Japan while wearing terminally kawaii maid outfits. The first track is Real Existence from mid-2015, the second is Thrill, which was their first single from 2014. The final video almost looks like an audition session they did while looking for a new drummer, but the music is great even if the video is a bit linear.
I watch near-realtime streaming TV shows from Hulu+/Amazon or Cable/Show/Network Apps because being tied to the TV Show clock is so 20th century. To begin I have to mention that RWBY kicked off its new season the other week, filling in lots of the missing backstory pieces explaining how everything got to be like this as well as advancing the current plot line to new levels of tension. This is my favorite animation created in Poser, it is quite nicely realized. It is also streamed from one of my two Asian near-realtime services, those being Crunchyroll and Funimation. They want to simulcast them within an hour or so of their Tokyo/Seoul/Hong Kong air time, but they face the added challenge of getting each episode subbed into English before they can post it online. Sometimes that makes the presentation a few hours late.
But next week we get a number of Broadcast TV shows I have been waiting for eagerly, so it is appropriate I mention them in this post since I will not be watching them as the shows air. In most instances, Broadcast TV shows are available to watch starting at local midnight after their transmission, just like the cable companies VOD presentations (and under pretty much the same distribution contract), and I usually go on a binge the following weekend. I might not be able to wait this week though.
Tuesday brings the long awaited Season 2 premier of Agent Carter, which is pretty much my favorite Marvel franchise. If you missed season 1, you can watch the whole thing for free on their site to get you caught up for Season 2, but you only have a few days to do so. The other stand alone show I have been waiting for is Heroes Reborn, but this time it is the season finale rather than the start of anything; that happens Thursday. And yes, you can watch the entire season of that online for free to get you ready to see how the season closes.
Tuesday also brings the Winter Premier (the 2nd half of the season) of The Flash, kicking off the next round of CW DC Universe stories. That is followed the next day by Arrow, and I expect both of them to be crossover stories gearing us up for Thursday’s Series Premier of Legends of Tomorrow. I am looking forward to this up-leveling of the DC Universe presentation, which finally puts them within range of Marvel’s TV offerings. Somehow, I just haven’t found the excitement in Supergirl, which needs to step up to the plate to be on a par with the rest of the shows.
It doesn’t quite end there. Also this week, on Wednesday Supernatural kicks off the second half of the season, and The 100 adds its own flavor to Thursdays. And finally, next Sunday we get the long awaited rebirth of The X-Files, bringing a true classic back to television. All in all, it promises to be one hell of a season!
The band METAFIVE was formed around Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Takahashi Yukihiro early in 2014, as I mentioned when I posted their video for Don’t Move last month. This time around we have the video edit version of Luv U Tokio, posted on line 3 days ago, and the studio live version of Maisie’s Avenue posted a few weeks ago on December 26th. This band just gets better with each new track I hear from them. Their very first album, META, which includes all of these tracks and many more, hits the shelves in just a few days on January 13th. You can pick it up from your favorite Japanese online music outlet as an import for 2,800 Yen, but sadly it is not coming out in the US at the same time. Locally you can get their track Split Spirit, featured in the Anime Ghost In The Shell: Arise from the iTunes store.
Welcome to the Winter 2016 Anime season where we finally get Gate Season 2 and a ton of other shows! Schwarzes Marken is the new season of the BETA invasion of Earth battles, this time featuring the 1983 East German Army. Once more the human forces are so busy trying to gain an advantage over each other that they are ordered to let other humans die rather than combine against their true enemies (one the alien invaders, the other the commanding officers who issue those orders). Erased has a manga artist protagonist who is forced to repeat the past moment which last threatened his life until he gets it right and survives it. Durarara X2 The Third Arc is also about to start, along with Lupin The 3rd Part 4, both series that don’t really need an introduction from me. Those are just the shows that caught my attention right out of the box, there are a number of others that I need to look into before reporting them here.
This amazing tribute to Hayao Miyazaki is from dono on Vimeo. He built it using Blender (3D modeling and animation), Gimp (graphics/painting creation/editing), Octane (real time 3D rendering) and Natron (matting, masking, and compositing). I will point out that all of them except Octane are free, open source software that rival any of the commercial software packages which do the same job. I am sure everyone will be surprised that the music he used is by Joe Hisaishi. It looks like he modeled and rendered the scenes, sets, and backgrounds in 3D but composited the original 2D characters into those scenes, including scenes they were never in before for some of them, creating a wonderful visual effect. Many thanks to Nerdist for the heads up on this one, and my only problem now (as someone else said in the comments) is deciding which Miyazaki masterpiece I want to re-watch tonight, after watching so many old friends on the screen together after all this time.
Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki from dono on Vimeo.