Alex Roman has spent a year creating one of the most astonishing CG short films that I’ve seen in a long time: The Third & The Seventh (HD version at vimeo).
The film can be best described as a meditation on architecture, photography and the sense of space and depth in the world around us.
Alex Roman recreated several modern buildings as 3D renderings and then uses some quite amazing craftsmanship to give the viewer a sense of depth with very subtle animations where the virtual camera slowly floats through the buildings, with ever so slight changes in focus.
Many of the effects are so subtle, especially in the first half of the film that I didn’t even believe that I am looking at CG rendered versions of the buildings. Alex has a great sense for lighting and clearly must have spent many hours tuning the lighting set ups to create extremely photorealistic settings. Only in the second half of the film, when he introduces surrealistic effects, does it become apparent that we have been looking at computer graphics all along.
Here is a video with some of the scenes as compositing breakdowns in case you want to see a peek under the hood of several of the scenes in the film.
It should be mentioned that Alex also created the soundtrack for the film, making this all around a major tour de force.
China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups in the country, a fact that is easy to overlook when one travels through the major population centers which look dominantly Han. A trip into the countryside very often reveals a different picture, with smaller villages sporting very different faces and sometimes also different attire from the typical Chinese street clothes.
Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.
I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.
New York based artist Josh Gosfield has created a quite astonishing piece with his “Gigi Gaston, The Black Flower” exhibition, which just recently closed at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Manhattan.
Gosfield manufactured the life story for an imaginary 1960s French singer, complete with posters, records, many magazine covers and even a music video and documentary material. All of it done to excess.
I would have loved to see the pieces in real life and really hope this show makes it to the Bay Area sometime – the style of the artwork on the records and the magazine covers captures the feeling of the 60s in every detail and the range of the created evidence of Gigi’s existence is amazing.
Gosfield spent more than a year working on this project and not only must have photoshopped his heart out, he also commissioned songs to be written and created a short film documentary about the life and times of Gigi.
What is interesting to me is that while browsing through the pictures and looking at the videos, knowing all along that this is fake history, every now and then doubt sets in – maybe Gigi Gaston did exist! And if so, where is Gigi now?
Due to some random link-clicking I ended up on the Star Trek Phase II website, which I had not been on for several years… This is the site of a group of Star Trek fans that spend considerable time and energy on creating new episodes of the original series. It is interesting – and frankly quite amazing – how far fan-films have come!
Their latest episode – Blood And Fire – has amazing production values way beyond any of the original Star Trek episodes and probably even better than most of what you’ve seen on Next Generation. The torrent site at the link above has both parts 1 and 2 of the double episode.
The story of Blood And Fire is very deep and is based on a script that was originally developed for a never-realized Next Generation episode. It deals in one story arc with homosexuality, and in a pretty action-packed main story line with a rescue from a bloodworm-infested research vessel while the Enterprise is under attack by Klingons.
But what is really standing out is the technical quality of the show – the props, the lighting and the color coordination are spot-on and the special effects are quite impressive.
I very much remember the first time I saw an Atari 800 in person back in a office supply store in my hometown in Germany – it must have been 1982, when most affordable home computers where small plastic boxes with the simplest possible keyboards, often no sound, and quite often black-and-white TV video output.
The Atari 800 towered over these other machines, with cartridge ports under a neat lid in the top and the large keyboard in an extremely heavy case. And that machine was able to provide very robust graphics and amazing sound for the time.
Many hours were spent “testing” that machine and the few games available in that store, but I never bought an Atari 800 until much later when I got myself an Atari 800XL in the mid-80s when they were on sale for ridiculously little money after the Atari ST series machines had come out.
The 8-bit Ataris, during most of their production time, were overrun by cheaper competition, chief among them of course the Commodore C64, which had a slightly simpler architecture and a cheaper price, which helped in attracting huge sales numbers worldwide and as a result of that the full attention of software developers everywhere.
There were many great early arcade game conversions for the Atari 800 and I have very fond memories of both Mr. Do and Dig Dug among others. An original release for this machine was Lucasfilm’s Rescue on Fractalus – which made the most of the limited 8-Bit machine and certainly was one of the highlights of this era.
While I usually pretend to keep abreast of what books are coming out, this one was a surprise purchase, oh, about ten seconds after entering our local Barnes and Noble late last week: “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett.
For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to the checkout counter filled me with glee. And it’s good – started reading it and like it a lot.
At the same time, I got my copy of Memories of the Future by Wil Wheaton. I’ve read most of the original posts that make up the base material for this book, and I already know it’s great. So I’m going to try and read it slowly to enjoy all the nuances of the final, edited book.
Every now and then the Internet reveals something amazing about us and the rainbow of cultures we represent on this planet… Kazumi just now called me over to her computer to look at the video below, and – wow! – that is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a very long time!
Mesmerizing and inspirational don’t even begin to describe the art behind this video. And what really blows me away is the confidence and fast, flawless performance of the artist. Check it out:
The recent wave of layoffs in the publishing industry was probably just the beginning in a process that will eventually lead to a new equilibrium far away from the current state of the industry and all eighteen points by Bruce Sterling are worth a thought.
I don’t think any of the existing large publishing houses will survive in their current form since even if these businesses want to change at this point (and that’s a big IF), there is preciously little that can be done.
Ditch paper and go online? Yes, but the ebook market is already carpet-bombed by small startups and behemoths like Sony and Amazon.
Make everything a free download to support paid copies? Yes, but that should have been done long ago. That would have been GREAT advertisement before the Internet started to drown in free content, but now?
Go viral? Yep, like everybody else. Doesn’t help with the revenue, though.
At this point traditional publishing is dead, with the possible exception of coffee table books and niche publishers that will sprout like weeds around the edges of the old system. There will still be book stores and new books from many (many!) more smaller publishers, but the times of million-dollar advances for books and monolothic publishing deals will be over for good.
Last year I had picked up the first US translation of one of Arimasa Osawa’s books – Shinjuku Shark, and just recently I’ve found a new translation in his series around a cop in Tokyo in our local Japanese bookstore.
The title is The Poison Ape, and where Shinjuku Shark was an in-depth study of Tokyo police procedures, this new book is a hard, cold-edged dive into Tokyo’s brothels and the many illegal immigrants from China and Taiwan that live and work there.
Detective Samejima hasn’t changed much since the last book, but this case is definitely rougher. Samejima stumbles over a case of drug sales in Tokyo’s subways that leads on to illegal immigrants, but there is much more going on as a bloody feud between Taiwanese gangs spreads into Tokyo, rapidly decimating gang members and bystanders alike.
The book is a good read and offers insights into a Japan that a casual traveler to the country would never see, but it is also a very brutal book, probably in many ways a more truthful account of the underbelly of Tokyo’s society than most writers would dare to offer.
Last weekend we had a chance to see the Japanese movie “Departures” as a preview of its official release in the US during the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Departures won this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film, and it must have been a close call as best film all around.
Where to begin? It’s a movie about funerals, or specifically about the act of transferring bodies into the casket, which traditionally is often done in a cleansing ceremony in the house of the recently deceased before the undertaker removes the body.
The story is beautifully crafted around the life of the young man who finds himself freshly jobless and uprooted, as he stumbles into the unusual job of preparing the dead, while at the same time trying to hide this new income source from his wife.
It is a testament to the craftsmanship of the film makers that this movie is not just incredibly tasteful around its morbid subject matter, but the sequences with the deceased take on a beauty, elegance and meditative rhythm that makes the experience uniquely emotional for the audience.
The movie opens on May 29th across the US and if you only see one foreign movie this year, I’d make it this one – and maybe bring some tissues.
Alex Roman has spent a year creating one of the most astonishing CG short films that I’ve seen in a long time: The Third & The Seventh (HD version at vimeo).
Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups
New York based artist Josh Gosfield has created a quite astonishing piece with his 
