Uncanny Valley  

It is hard to believe that the orangutan, "Maya," in a new commercial for the Scottish electrical utility is a real, well trained animal actor—she's not, she's 100% computer generated.

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 Film  

What do you get when you combine robotics, projection-mapped 3D computer graphics, and an actor all working together in perfect synchronization. It's a five-minute short film called "The Box" — and it is amazing.

What do you get when you combine robotics, projection-mapped 3D computer graphics, and an actor all working together in perfect synchronization. It's a five-minute short film called "The Box" — and it is amazing.

The short film was produced by San Francisco-based design and engineering firm Bot & Dolly.

The creators describe the film as being both an “artistic statement and technical demonstration”, one that explores “the synthesis of real and digital space through projection mapping on moving surfaces”.

The creative director for Box is Tarik Abdel-Gawad, who also worked on the upcoming film, Gravity, controlling robotics for the complicated special effects sequences of the film.

“Box” explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.

To create this stunning effect, Bot & Dolly used an actor, two high-resolution projectors, two 2D monitors, and three industrial robots (one for the camera) that were synchronized and controlled by integrating their own software with Autodesk Maya.


What is more amazing is that this is a live performance captured in-camera.


SOURCE  Colossal

By kree8tiv

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 Animation  

Check out this wonderful series of Disney cartoon scenes superimposed on their real life models.

T his series of images features some of the classic Disney cartoon scenes superimposed on their real life model that were used. It is not clear if the actors' movements were used for rotoscoping, but the actors clearly influence the animation.









SOURCE  Retronaut

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 Film  

Plot Point Productions has strung together classic and iconic shots where the actor has his or her back to the camera in the center of the frame.

In a stunning edit of Hollywood films, Plot Point Productions has strung together classic and iconic shots where the actor has his or her back to the camera in the center of the frame.

After seeing this inspiring video, you will understand the power of the shot.

Jason Silva says of the piece, "This is just DRIPPING WITH AWE."

The music used in the piece is, "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" by Moby.

The movies are:

00:05 - The Aviator
00:10 - The Legend of 1900
00:12 - Synecdoche, NY
00:15 - The Shining
00:17 - Beyond the Black Rainbow
00:19 - Once Upon A Time In Anatolia
00:22 - Baraka
00:24 - Walk The Line
00:25 - The Runaways
00:26 - The Fifth Element
00:28 - Dark City
00:29 - Hamlet
00:30 - Network
00:31 - Black Swan
00:34 - Lenny
00:35 - Dennis Leary: No Cure For Cancer
00:36 - Bronson
00:37 - Fantasia
00:38 - Southland Tales
00:40 - The Iron Lady
00:41 - Hugo
00:43 - The Searchers
00:45 - Prometheus
00:48 - Event Horizon
00:50 - The Fifth Element
00:53 - Doctor Who: S01E02
00:55 - Sunshine
00:57 - Tron Legacy
01:00 - Stargate
01:02 - Starman
01:04 - Kundun
01:07 - Enter The Void
01:09 - Inglorious Basterds
01:11 - Watchmen
01:14 - Sin City
01:16 - Gangster No. 1
01:18 - L.A. Confidential
01:21 - Christine
01:23 - Hero
01:26 - House of Flying Daggers
01:28 - Akira Kurosawa's Dreams
01:31 - Predators
01:33 - Alexander
01:35 - Kingdom of Heaven
01:37 - There Will Be Blood
01:40 - The Cell
01:42 - Valhalla Rising
01:45 - Snow White and the Huntsman
01:47 - Alexander
01:49 - Immortals
01:52 - John Carter
01:54 - Troy
01:57 - Thor
01:59 - The Matrix Revolutions
02:04 - The Abyss
02:08 - Event Horizon
02:13 - Watchmen
02:18 - Another Earth
02:23 - Take Shelter
02:27 - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
02:32 - Constantine
02:37 - War of the Worlds
02:46 - Close Encounters of the Third Kind
02:48 - Knowing
02:51 - Hero
02:53 - 300
02:56 - Take Shelter
03:01 - Beasts of the Southern Wild
03:03 - The Proposition
03:06 - Snow White and the Hunstman
03:08 - Interview with the Vampire
03:10 - Alice in Wonderland
03:13 - Heat
03:15 - Rendezvous with Rama (Vancouver Film School trailer)
03:17 - Star Trek Generations
03:19 - Minority Report
03:22 - Skyline
03:25 - Inception
03:27 - X-Men: First Class
03:30 - Carrie (2002)
03:32 - The Day the Earth Stood Still
03:34 - Hamlet
03:36 - Valhalla Rising
03:39 - Jericho S01E01
03:41 - The Divide
03:44 - Dark City
03:46 - The Day the Earth Stood Still
03:48 - Mission to Mars
03:51 - Life of Pi
03:52 - The Fountain
03:58 - Fight Club
04:03 - Pan's Labyrinth
04:07 - The Empire Strikes Back
04:12 - Gone with the Wind
04:22 - What Dreams May Come


SOURCE  Vimeo

By kree8tiv

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 Film  

The film "Choros" directed by Michael Langan and Terah Maher modernizes the visual echo technique developed for scientific study in the 1880's pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge.

The experimental film "Choros" directed by Michael Langan and Terah Maher modernizes the visual echo technique developed for scientific study in the 1880s.

In the late nineteenth century, a photographic technique called "chronophotography" began to develop, whereby multiple photographs would be taken in rapid succession to study the movement of a given subject.

Eadweard Muybridge famously filmed a horse in motion in 1878, providing the world with its first taste of motion pictures when the images were displayed on a spinning zoetrope.

Several years later, the French physicist Etienne-Jules Marey developed a stunning variation of this technique when he captured multiple poses of a subject over time onto a single frame of film, rendering a kind of visual echo.

 Design  

Mike Friton is a freelance shoemaker, weaver, paper sculptor and innovator with over 30 years of experience at Nike. In a short video, Friton, tells his story of how he came to be known as "The Innovator."

Mike Friton is a freelance shoemaker, weaver, paper sculptor and innovator with over 30 years of experience at Nike.

In this video from Cineastas, former track and field athlete at the University of Oregon and designer, Friton, tells his story of how he came to be known as "The Innovator."

In high school, Friton decided to join the school's track and field team, which would lead him to the University of Oregon where he specialized in the Steeplechase. The event required an athlete to jump over five hurdles and then move on to a water jump.

Designing and putting together his first shoe, Friton took into account the amount of weight the shoe had stepping out of the water. He then figured out how to include holes in the structure in a way that wouldn't damage the shoe’s integrity.

Friton is the type of designer that goes above and beyond by thinking of mind-boggling ways to expand the variation of athletic footwear.

 Architecture  

Accelerating The Southern California Institute of Architecture into the 21st Century  the new SCI-Arc Robot House, initiated and designed by faculty members Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser, builds upon the school's strengths to create a next generation platform for experimentation and speculation on the future of architecture.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) course “Eye, Robot” focuses on the intersection of computation, robotic fabrication, and cinematography.

The course explores robotic motion control as a creative medium for designers, mainly through the use of the custom robotic animation software platform, designed specifically for the SCI-Arc Robot House.

Accelerating SCI-Arc's pace, already at the leading edge of digital design and rapid prototyping, the new SCI-Arc Robot House, initiated and designed by faculty members Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser, builds upon the school's strengths to create a next generation platform for experimentation and speculation on the future of architecture.

Situated conceptually and physically between studio and shop, academy and industry, the double-height 1,000-square-foot Robot House is a research space for hands-on collaborative experimentation, advanced multi-robotic platform, and exploration and architectural agency. Exploring opportunities outside of traditional digital production, our six state-of-the-art Staübli robotic systems offer a new design environment which focuses on Institute-approved research and coursework.

 Animation  

Paperman is a 2012 black-and-white animated short film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and directed by John Kahrs. The short blends traditional animation and computer animation and is now available online.

For people who missed Wreck-It Ralph at the end of last year, Disney Animation’s Paperman has debuted online, giving everyone a chance to look at the Oscar-nominated animated short that blends hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery in a beautiful, innovative way.

Paperman is different from many recent cartoons, not just because of the limited color palette and retro styling of the characters and the world they live in, but because it doesn’t look like the generic, quasi-photo-realistic CGI that is becoming more and more common. Paperman actually looks as if real people have created it, not machines, and that’s something we haven’t really seen in feature animation for years.

That’s intentional, according to the man behind the short. Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman “really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled.” After looking at the work of Keane — a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects – Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. “I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can’t we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven’t done before?”


Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

 Animation  

Using the technology his animation is about, illustrator Lew Keller has created a three minute whiteboard animation about Ray Kurzweil and the meaning of the Singularity.

The whiteboard animation above explains, in three minutes, the Technological Singularity, a concept made famous by Ray Kurzweil and other futurists.

Technological change is happening at an exponential rate, leading to a date in a future we can barely glimpse. Kurzweil, author of the book, The Singularity Is Near.

The film was illustrated  shot, edited and co-written by Australian artist and illustrator, Lew Keilar and Stephen Smith served as co-writer and collaborator.