There are a very few artists I have ever seen who can pull off this kind of stage presence: David Bowie, Mylene Farmer, Fee Waybill, a very few others. And yes, the links between this one and Bowie’s Glass Spider tour are obvious. But if I had to pick just ten musical genius’s and limit myself to only their creations for the next thousand years, Mylene Farmer would be on that list. Just to put it in perspective, she only felt the need to sue two people for supposedly stealing her dance routines and music video structures: one for the one Michal Jackson allegedly stole, and the other one when Madonna allegedly did the same thing for a different song. If you don’t already know who this singer is, you have a serious treat in store for you.
Tomorrow is the day that MetroCAF 2012 takes place: the annual SIGGRAPH event honoring the best animation talents that NYC-area schools can muster. This year’s jury has selected four outstanding achievement pieces to be honored at MetroCAF, but even the least of these entries are amazing bits of work. If you have ever built computer animations yourself, you know how much work goes into these kinds of projects, and how much time even the simplest of steps can actually take. Watch the trailer, and prepare to be amazed. And even if you don’t know how to do this stuff, you should be able to appreciate the results.
This short from 2008 France is quite well done, and is part of the Esma Movie collection on YouTube. Strangely enough, most of the credits go to the orchestra, and not so many to the animators.
The group is Volkerball, the song is from their album released this April and is called Radioaktiv. This group is a bit more metal than I normally go for, and definitely has delusions of being Rammstein, but I liked the song and loved the video they built to support the music.
A short but intense and well executed Sci-Fi story, with some amazing CGI work. The Gift was created as part of the Phillips/DDB London/RSA collaborative effort to show off the video quality of some Phillips TVs. What is amazing about this piece is that DDB London wrote the five lines of dialog, and handed it to five different directors, who made five totally different films. The phillips.com/cinema web site doesn’t seem to be there any more, but it looks like they uploaded everything to their YouTube account. If you want to see them all on a single page, check out the Creative Review article.
Not the whole sun, just one little strand of plasma. But that one little strand was many times larger than Earth, and was traveling at 900 miles per second when it left the sun on August 31st this year. NASA had a number of observation platforms able to get a look at it, so they put together this rather amazing video. The music is quite tasty as well, wish I knew what it was. The music is not as good on the second video, but it is quite silly and celebrates the recent landing of Curiosity on the red planet, so I felt the need to include it.