Mega Piranha!
I’ll go on record saying that there are far too few movies out there with titles that have “mega” in them. Luckily, as of 2010, there is…. (cue drum roll)
MEGA PIRANHA!
Watch the trailer in all it’s B-movie glory:
Yes, it’s not a spoof. Check IMDB. The effects look like something that came on a free training DVD for After Effects (although the CGI piranhas are not that bad if you put them in perspective…). Reminds me of another great piece of art called “Shark in Venice” which just features stock footage of sharks, lots of continuity mistakes and Stephen Baldwin’s man boobs. Wait a second… He actually was diagnosed with breast cancer according to Wikipedia? I guess that makes that joke a bit tasteless. Oh, and he’s also a hard-core right-wing guy who “threatened to move to Canada if Barack Obama was elected” (source: also Wikipedia)? Life is stranger than fiction.
Anyway, I’m digressing. This is a good opportunity to post a video clip that I had lying around on my hard disk for quite a while. It’s from a SciFi TV movie called “Heatstroke” and it’s exceptional in its goofiness. I think that’s a nice example of misguided CGI. A guy in a rubber suit would at least have given the impression that somebody cared about the movie. I pity the guys who had to work on this beach scene:
[flowplayer src=’heatstroke_beach_scene.mp4′ width=608 height=336 splash=’heatstroke.jpg’]
Pixels
Short animation by Patrick Jean and the French VFX studio “One More Production“:
The idea is not that new, for example there has been a Röyksopp music video (“Happy Up Here”) featuring space invaders a while ago. But the compositing on “Pixels” is really nice and there are a lot of great ideas from arcade-style start to finish.
(via “No Fat Clips“)
Algorithms
Adobe demonstrates a future Photoshop feature called “Content-Aware Fill” that is the healing brush on crack. It’ll “extrapolate” image patterns to remove unwanted elements or extend landscapes.
Looks pretty amazing in this youtube video:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI
It’s probably based on some Siggraph paper. For example, the content-aware-resizing that Photoshop has since CS4 was also demoed at Siggraph first:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns
The algorithms that are currently developed in this field are simply amazing. Here’s the one that will put me out of work in a few years: automatic image composition based on a simple doodle:
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
Or this one on image stabilisation:
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TlCGh5Pc90
And finally this all-time favourite from 2007 (!) that apparently still hasn’t made it into a commercial product: An algorithm that seamlessly inserts high-resolution photos into a low-resolution video. Or removes unwanted elements. Or removes reflections. Or seamlessly changes what was behind those reflections.
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.
Tilt/Shift
Sometimes an advertising idea is pure genius. The kind of “that’s so cool and easy, why didn’t anybody think of this before?”. Like this German telecom commercial with a tilt/shift lens.
And then you find out that indeed somebody thought about it first and that the ad is at worst a rip-off and at best a commissioned piece of work. But pretty to look at nevertheless!
Here’s a piece of an Australian photographer who utilized that look on a number of clips:
