Mildly interesting details follow.

Turntablism, courtesy of the Scratch Perverts and director Chris Cairns of Partisan, with visuals by The Mill.

More at neurosonicsaudiomedical.com.

The guy at the end is Plus One scratching Schlomo.

There’s some 3D in there for flava, but the heads themselves are relatively lo-fi: it’s likely just time-remapped video, synchronized with its own audio track on the vinyl. Clever lads.

[Via Motionographer.]

YouCity‘s New York map is what I always wanted to make in SimCity, but more so. You can browse around the map on their homepage.

Watch in HD at Vimeo.

[Via Digital Urban.]

For your viewing pleasure, here it is in terrible YouTube quality.

Here are the rules.

The Rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So. The Facts:

(Via Transbuddha.)

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.)

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?

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.

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.