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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Nochmal Feuerwerk
Am 4. Tag des neuen Jahres geht nach Einbruch der Dunkelheit das Böllern wieder verstärkt los. Eine gute Gelegenheit für ein Video vom Neujahrsspektakel am vergangenen Wochenende:
(movie by Max Chan)
How To Report The News
A spotlight on the visual language of TV news and a funny template for almost every damn report on BBC and CNN nowadays.
I love the youtube comments that pick up the tone of the video:
This is an immature comment using various words related to genitals to insult a random person for no particular reason.
Childhood Memories
I still fondly remember a book I had when I was a child. It was about dogs running and driving towards a big tree where they had a party. I couldn’t remember the title though.
Not anymore! I recently stumbled upon its original English version on the internet. It was called “Go Dog Go” and it’s still in print although I couldn’t find anything about a German version. Not even Amazon seems to have it.
But here’s the video version I found on a Chinese video portal. It’s a bit hypnotizing (and probably not by Dr. Seuss at all) but contains all the small details I couldn’t remember anymore (or rather overlooked when I was a child, like the recurring boy-meets-girl-theme).
Who Let The Cats Out?
Gestern war ich auf einem Konzert von Katzenjammer im Atomic Cafe. Die vier Norwegerinnen machen eine Musik, die wie eine Mischung aus nordisch angehauchtem Folk und Western-Polka klingt. Wäre ich Musikjournalist, würde ich vielleicht schreiben sie klängen wie ein Vikingerschiff auf Partykurs voller Mädels plus Weird Al Yankovich. Wäre ich ein guter Musikjournalist, würde ich mich für diesen Vergleich schämen 
Auf alle Fälle haben Katzenjammer auf der Bühne schlichtweg Spaß. Und Talent. Denn jede der vier besitzt eine großartige Stimme und spielt mindestens 2 Instrumente. Das im Internet verfügbare Lied “Bar in Amsterdam” ist eindeutig das fetzigste und “kommerziellste” Lied ihres Albums “Le Pop”, das Video dazu gibt es hier:
Inside Nature’s Giants
And now for something completely unrelated to visual effects or far-eastern megacities:
I’ve always loved well-made TV documentaries, you know, the ones before it was necessary to do MTV-style editing and swoooosh-booom-bang-sound effects for everything just to keep young viewers from zapping away.
Youtube hosts Channel 4′s excellent series “Inside Nature’s Giants”, where they show real dissections of some of the animal kingdom’s largest species. It’s a bit bloody, but WOW, it’s a million times better than all those Star Trek Holodeck-CGI-stuff that’s usually put into animal documentaries (yes, even this show has it).
