“Krapooyo,” made by Yannick Puig, creator of I Lived on the Moon, in 2005.

Cory Bobiak made this music video in Flash for the song “All Under” by Sissy.

(via Cold Hard Flash.)

(Via Transbuddha.)

This just in from the Troubleshooting Desk: 3ds Max 8 and 9 do not play well with Microsoft’s Direct3D 8 or 9 drivers as served by this author’s Nvidia GeForce card in XP, at least with ForceWare Release 169.21. Both versions of Max, while using Direct3D, exhibit periodic viewport refreshes that overwrite any other UI elements including windows, menus, and dialog boxes.

Switching from the Direct3D driver to OpenGL in Customize > Preferences > Viewport has solved my problems. Your mileage may vary.

Awesome stop-motion/live-action remake of the best scene in the best movie ever. The sound alone still gets my blood up, on par with the TIE fighter noise.

There are a number of charts and graphs online showing relative populations of cities, metropolitan areas, urban agglomerations, and what have you — but those are vague, empty numbers that leave no impression of a city’s soul.

A bird’s-eye view of a city center gives me more useful information. In the myriad buildings and streets, I see pressures of geography and history coming to bear, thrusting buildings up from the very bedrock like towering, quivering stalagmites of willpower, money, and insatiable greed.

So I took a few screenshots and dropped them here: “City Comparisons.” See if your city’s in the roster — compare and contrast!

Calgary, Alberta, Canada, pop. 1.0m:

Houston, Texas, USA, pop. 2.1m:

In a satisfying validation of my Internet heavyweight status, YouTube finally took the hints I’ve been dropping and started the slow, insidious process of upgrading their image quality.

According to this Motionographer post, YouTube has begun offering higher-quality versions of some of their videos, available either via a link underneath the video or via an alternate link, which is the original URL plus “&fmt=18″.

There’s also a Firefox plugin available which will select this option by default when viewing videos.

More info at the Wired how-to wiki..

(via Motionographer.)

Here’s the first trailer for WALL-E.

And an observation, compliments of blissbat: “It’s a whole movie about R2-D2.”

Funny she should say that: according to the Wikipedia entry, the sound designer is — bingo! — Ben Burtt, sound designer for Star Wars, which makes him essentially the voice of R2-D2. And to top it off here’s a quote from director Andrew Stanton: “I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie.”

The lighting and rendering is quite spectacularly realistic. Again, straight from the wiki article:

After directing Finding Nemo, Stanton felt they “had really achieved the physics of believing you were really under water, so I said ‘Hey, let’s do that with air.’ Let’s fix our lenses, let’s get the depth of field looking exactly how anamorphic lenses work and do all these tricks that make us have the same kind of dimensionality that we got on Nemo with an object out in the air and on the ground.’” […] A cinematographer who worked on live action films was hired to advise Pixar on replicating science fiction films from the 1960s and 1970s, including elements such as 70 mm frames, barrel distortion and lens flare.

I think I need to go take a cold shower after that last sentence.

By Supinfocom students François-Xavier Goby, Edouard Jouret ,and Matthieu Landour, in 2005. The title translates to “In Your Arms” and the design and direction are lovely. This is a tricky style of animation — dramatic and serious, using cartoon characters. The result is something quite like anime.

This is about the cutest darn thing I’ve ever seen.

Directed by Schweitzer Claude Barras.

More details in French and a brief making-of at the poorly-coded official Flash site.

The genie’s song:

Armand, mon bienheureux
(Armand, my lucky friend)
Armand, dés aujourd’hui
(Armand, from today)
Tout semblera plus beau, plus grand
(Everything will seem bigger and better)
Car voilà devant toi
(Because in front of you is)
Le merveilleux, le superbe génie
(The marvellous, the superb genie)
De la boîte de raviolis
(of the can of ravioli)

Final song:

On est si bien les pieds dans l’eau.
(We are so comfy our feet in the water.)
L’un contre l’autre, au bord d’un ruisseau.
(One leaning on the other, on the banks of a stream.)
Il y a rien à faire à part chanter.
(There’s nothing to do except to sing.)
On laisse s’entremper nos doigts de pied.
(We let our toes get wet.)

If I have time I may go through and do a translation, but for now the songs alone will sustain us.

Jean-Pierre Dionnet is an interesting character.

As seen above introducing “Brides of Dracula,” he’s acted as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Robert Osbourne for Cinema de Quartier, a 1980’s Canal+ production.

Originally a comic book writer, in the 70’s he co-founded, with Mœbius, “Metal Hurlant,” better known in the states as “Heavy Metal.”

Here’s a google translation of a one-question interview in which Dionnet spins out on comics, film, film history, dragons, etc., and reveals that he’s working on a film with Marc Caro, co-director of City of Lost Children.

Dionnet’s also been a producer for a number of films, including some in Hong Kong — he’s got a DVD label, Asian Star, which releases remasters of classic HK movies, and he recently announced a collaboration with Tsui Hark, producer of The Killer and director of the entire Once Upon a Time in China series.

Recently (and this is how I came across his name) he was mentioned in connection with the revitalization of Tekkon Kinkreet, though he’s not listed in the credits.

Aside: the Google French translation has made online translation palatable for me — Babelfish was never any better than a worst-case scenario, but once again Google has given me hope.

For modeling practice I just went back to “The Hobbit Guy” Dave K’s poly head modeling tutorial, which I’ve been referencing periodically since it first went up back in ought-two.

I’ve recently been digging on Casanova, drawn by twin Brazilians Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, so I decided to try to make a cartoony villain à la Bá using some tricks from the Sergio rig to keep the lines clean and sharp. The result looks a bit like a Peter Chung character, which is close enough. Those cheekbones could be sharper, especially from the three-quarter angle.

Keeping everything quads while making good edge loops is a huge pain. I know I left a bunch of 3- and 5-sided polys in there. And yes, I bailed on the ears. This is actually my second try: I had a great ear, and Maya crashed during a smoothing attempt and somehow retroactively borked all my incremental saves. It’s just as well — I got a better nose the second time, and everyone knows noses are more important than ears.

Speaking of sharper cheekbones from the three-quarter angle: has anyone done anything with automatically varying a model depending on camera angle? Back in school I had a character called Back-Hand Man, lost in an unfortunate lab accident (the only character I’ve ever had stolen; the culprit took the whole RAID), with a pompadour which I tried to script to always be perpendicular to the camera. It was… kind of finicky.

Another amazing capitalism propaganda piece from John Sutherland Productions, apparently commissioned in 1948 by Harding College in Arkansas. The film isn’t in great shape (it’s missing bits here and there) but the tone is too classically condescending to pass up.

I wonder how they’d explain the sub-prime mortgage crunch in terms of American superiority?

I particularly like the space-kid’s square future-shoes.

Sylvain Chomet, best known these days as the man behind Les Triplettes de Belleville, produced the short “La Vieille Dame et Les Pigeons” (”The Old Lady and the Pigeons”) in 1996. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1997. It’s 20 minutes long but witty and engaging.

The setups are solid and sure-footed. There’s no mistaking the motivations or the reveals, it’s all quite satisfying. The American tourists were plenty fat, but they weren’t quite stupid enough — they had a little too much personality, and it rang false.

According to this interview he spent ten years on this. He also lists his greatest influence as Daniel Goosens. He also mentions Egon Shiele, which is not surprising, and satisfying to learn.

Music video for “Curare” by Bogdan Irkük (aka BULGARI) from “The Distant” EP on Rollerboys Recordings, directed and produced by Swedish mograph house Pistachios.

(High-res Quicktime)

The contrast in styles works pretty well for me — more of either would have been too much. The visual treatment of the 3D matches the old-school electro sound nicely, and the video’s progression matches the song’s perfectly.

Curare is a type of poison used for darts in South America. Pistachios claims inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe and Swedish artist Hans Arnold.