Continued monotonous congratulations to director Pen Ward, co-directors Larry Leichleiter, Hugo Morales, and Frederator Studios in general on their smash hit “Adventure Time,” proof to everyone everywhere that people like things that aren’t lame.

I will withhold congratulations from Nickelodeon, who assisted in the short’s production, until they successfully refrain from scuppering it somehow like they did with Ren and Stimpy and Invader Zim. Until then: take that, network TV, the internets, and all other forces of evil!

(via Frederator.)

(Via Transbuddha.)

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.)

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.

Adobe’s got a prototype of a 19-lens lens array which allows after-the-fact focus and depth-of-field modifications. The main impetus for the lens (apart from The Awesome) is the spectre of 20-megapixel cameras; current lenses can’t focus sharp enough to take advantage of so many pixels.

An infographic and detailed write-up is available at Popular Science.

(via Feed.)

From the 1953 film Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko.

DivX is shutting down Stage6, according to this blog post. It’s too bad — they’re by far the best-quality video hosting site online.

The post, in summary: they couldn’t sell it or find a way to spin it off into a separate company, so they’re turning out the lights. Something else will come along to take its place eventually. DivX was rather perfectly placed to support such an enterprise; its codec is more-or-less exactly tuned to streaming high-quality video. Hopefully the loss of Stage6 will bring market pressures to bear on somebody with a better business model.

In the meantime, I guess this means the search is back on for a video host for my animation… aren’t we all tired of youtube’s ultra-low quality yet?

I can see outer space!

Coilhouse recently posted a gallery of some awfully odd-looking models.

The primary distinguishing feature among the group seems to be those wide-set alien eyes, as exemplified by the gelfling to the right, Masha Telna. Lawdy!

I have difficulty believing she isn’t one of Chris Cunningham’s creations, as seen in the Playstation ad he did in 2000, “Mental Wealth:”

I’m led to believe it was done by keying deformers on the video, by hand. That’s a lot of keys.

“Mad Eye” Sergio

Once upon a time, the STRUT crew held a character design contest; from the winners, they assembled a team of artists to construct a free 3D character, rigged in Maya, for release on the site.

“Sergio,” the result, looks great; I’ve downloaded the character and played with it a bit. I had to tweak the texture paths to get everything working, but it seems to be a solid rig with a lot of potential. He’s not as limber as something like Generi, but he’s also closer to what you’d find in a commercial production: high-quality design, with the limitations and restrictions of a character with a unique shape and personality.

As a bonus, there’s a making-of page. It’s long and has a lot of fluff, but the modeling and rigging sections are a good walk-though of the high-to-mid-level processes involved in character construction.

“Sergio” was designed by Joel Smith, modelled by Lisa Griffiths, and rigged by Andy Seredy.

The Riddler Brick

Joe Maller updated his iTransmogrify! iPhone bookmarklet, which now converts many more types of Flash-based video embeds to clickable iPhone links.

So I’ve updated my own auto-iTransmogrify! script, suitable for embedding on your own site. Once embedded, when an iPhone visits your site, all convertable elements will automatically be converted for it, and any future updates to the script will be automatically propagated. Yes, it will be magical.

For even greater ecstasies of convenience, I’ve put the script in a .js file, downloadable here:

iTransmogrifyToo!.js

Include this script in your footer, or after your page’s </body> tag, by referencing it as below:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://zoomy.net/iTransmogrifyToo!.js"> </script>

You may either hotlink directly from my site by using this code verbatim, or use your own copy by uploading the .js file to your root web directory and replacing “zoomy.net” in the script reference with your own domain name.

So far this update doesn’t affect my own site, as all but three videos I’ve posted are on YouTube, and those three are in formats which aren’t yet supported. But we live in hope.

On December 31, Steve Ogden, founder and writer of the online independent animation zine AnimWatch, called it a day. Disappointed in AnimWatch’s low readership after its four-year run, he announced his decision to stop producing the website in order to devote more time to his own films.

AnimWatch’s focus on independent animation was unique. Its thoughtful edited content, including film profiles and interviews with independent animation producers, clearly took a lot of time and effort. In his announcement of the site’s demise, Steve consoles himself with this thought:

If there were an easier way to run a site like AnimWatch, someone else would be doing it.

Well, maybe. It’s easy to think that since the world is so chock-full of nonsense, all the good thoughts must have already been thunk, but I have more faith in the infinite number of monkeys.

(more…)

Waiting for the cat bus

Look, it’s a Totoro, complete with umbrella, at an appropriately rural bus stop in Nagasaki Prefecture.

43-year-old Yoshiyuki Yamamichi said he crafted the statue out of scrap wood, boat cushioning, and polystyrene “to improve the image of the area.”

(via Anime News Network.)

And in reading Wikipedia’s Totoro article I discover that there is a 14-minute sequel called “Mei and the Kittenbus” which is only shown periodically at the Ghibli Museum.

Lego of mystery

I noticed that the YouTube movies I was embedding in my posts (as well as all embedded YouTube videos everywhere) showed up as “broken plugin” icons on my iPhone, even though the iPhone supports YouTube videos and can play them from links.

Last week Joe Maller released a bookmarklet for the iPhone called iTransmogrify! that fixes this problem in an ad-hoc band-aid sort of way. You download it to your computer, then sync it to your iPhone, and then when you find a broken embed you hit this bookmarklet and some JavaScript trickery replaces the embeds with follow-able links.

I didn’t want that extra step when testing my own site, so I made an automatic workaround.

(more…)