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.
The folks over at Academic Earth believe everyone deserves a world-class education, so they have put together a collection of free online courses from the top schools on the planet, including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Not content to stop there, they have also put together a wonderful little collection of short educational videos they refer to as Electives, designed to tweak your curiosity, engage your attention, and encourage you to seek out more information. The example I am embedding here is from a true literary classic, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a book named for the temperature at which books burn. I will be ransacking this excellent site for months and years to come taking advantage of the resources freely on offer, and I urge you to do the same. Thanks to the folks at Worlds Without End for the heads up on this one.
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming to Anaheim, CA on July 21st through the 25th, and they have released their Dailies preview for this year. The Dailies are roughly 90 minutes of computer generated animations by both new and returning artists, each of whom gets to show two minutes of video and say a little something about their project. There is some truly amazing work on display, as you can tell from the preview. For those of you who haven’t been on the internet since the beginning, SIGGRAPH stands for Special Interest Group, Graphics, and they have been the cutting edge of computer animations since 1983.
Sounding a bit like everybody’s favorite virtual idol, Passepied just released a new CD this week, and the first track is a song called S.S from that release. They have been around since 2009, getting their major label deal with Warner Bros. Japan in 2012, doing some great music fusing a lot of different styles, but centered around pop and impressionistic. The fact they named themselves after the last movement in Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite pretty much says it all. Their music videos are also a treat, the lead singer having graduated art school influences them all, and I just had to grin about the Power Rangers in this one. The second track I included is an older song of theirs Yūyake wa inochi no umi, which makes their impressionist influences more obvious. And yes, that third video is from them as well, originally posted in December of 2012.
Jackie Chan reprises his roll as Drunken Master all over Edo era Edo, Japan (they changed the name to Tokyo a few hundred years ago, thus ending the Edo Period) in a short film for Kirin Beer. He spends the film training his young friends to fight and drinking beer, then watching them fight while drinking beer. Until his male protegee is defeated, at which point he beats the crud out of the leader of the opposition, of course. This short film is in Japanese, and you can tell the difference between Jackie saying a phrase in Nihongo (the actual name of the Japanese language) and a voice actor being dubbed over him but trust me when I say you will not have any problem following the action. Everyone knows about Japanese Sake, or Rice Wine, but Japan also brews some of the best beers in the world, and Kirin happens to be my personal favorite, so I am not surprised they put this project together. Go ahead and watch, it is just 7 minutes of silly fun.
Posted by the Nerdist Channel, the Animal Fighting Championships is done to the song Underdog by the band Wallpaper. They filmed it on a super high speed Phantom Flex camera to get that amazing high quality HD slo-mo effect. Chris Hardwick and the gang at Nerdist find some amazing stuff.