Category: Art

Categories
animation

Big Buck Bunny

I’ve played around in the open source 3D modelling software Blender a little bit. It may not be as fancy as the retail software on the market today, but if you compare it with versions of Maya or MAX from just a few years ago, it blows them out of the water.

A team of creative folks used the free software to make a short animated cartoon, Big Buck Bunny. They were funded by Blender foundation support and pre-orders of the DVD by the Blender community.

Big Buck Bunny Movie Poster

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so it’s free to watch and distribute so long as the credits are attached. Theoretically you could even download the source files, remix the movie and then sell it for a profit. Here is the original movie via YouTube:

Watch Big Buck Bunny now on YouTube or one of the many other official viewing options.

Categories
Art

Displacements

Displacements is an immersive film installation by Michael Naimark. He first filmed three people interacting in a typical Americana living room. Then the space and objects were painted white. The camera was replaced with a projector putting the action and colour back into the room with just light. The results are surreal.

Displacements is an immersive film installation. An archetypal Americana living room was installed in an exhibition space. Then two performers were filmed in the space using a 16mm motion picture camera on a slowly rotating turntable in the room’s center. After filming, the camera was replaced with a film loop projector and the entire contents of the room were spray-painted white. The reason was to make a projection screen the right shape for projecting everything back onto itself. The result was that everything appears strikingly 3D, except for the people, who of course weren’t spray-paint white, and consequently appeared very ghostlike and unreal.

Unfortunately the video linked from Vimeo has been taken down, but you’ll find a video in the link above.

Categories
Music

Weezer’s Pork and Beans Music Video

Mmmmmmm, Weezer’s new memelicious music video Pork and Beans is the best meme inspired creation ever.

Shot May 7-10 in North Hollywood, CA, this video features a cast of, well, many! And what a cast! An amazing group of well known “Youtube celebs” was tracked down and flown in so they could do their thing(s) with the Weezer men. Its pretty much impossible to properly describe what went down, so just have a look!

I particularly liked it when Rivers Cuomo embraces the “Leave Britney Alone” guy. If anyone was ever overdo for a hug, it’s Chris Crocker.

Update: Wired’s interview with the director.

Categories
humor Music

Air Guitar Nation

This summer my family is holding their once-every-five-year reunion out near Mountain View, just on the eastern cusp of the Rocky Mountains. One of the things we’ll be doing is rocking out with a music jam. Not everyone in my family plays an instrument, so I suggested that those not playing should bring their air guitars. I figured just about everyone can play the air guitar, but it wasn’t until I saw the documentary, “Air Guitar Nation” did I truly know the depth and potential of the invisible instrument.

AIR GUITAR NATION is the feature documentary about the year that air guitar swept America – from New York to Los Angeles and then all the way to northern Finland. AIR GUITAR NATION chronicles the birth of the US Air Guitar Championships and the personal journeys of those talented contestants who are vying to become the first World Air Guitar Champion from the United States. Every August, the Air Guitar World Championships bring thousands of fans all the way to Oulu, Finland to see the world’s best air guitarists battle it out for 60 seconds of mock stardom. For years, the USA was missing in action. Enter the first official US Air Guitar Championships. What starts as a friendly contest above a New York strip club becomes a battle of naked ambition played out on the national and, ultimately, the world stage.

Here is a short clip from the movie, please enjoy as C. Diddy gives the most amazing air guitar performance you’ve ever seen:


[C. Diddy Air Guitar Nation – YouTube]

Categories
Music Statistics

The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music

Using data from the Whitburn project, Andy Baio of Waxy.org just wrote an extensive entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

Did pop songs stay on the top 40 charts longer in decades past? Were there more one-hit-wonders in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s? He’s done some great parsing of some really big data sets, and the results are very interesting.

Categories
Art

Drew Burrows “In Bed” Art Installation

Perhaps this virtual girlfriend in bed installation will appease the lonely art connoisseur. Weird but interesting, from Drew Burrows:

Categories
Art article biology

MoMA Kills Art

One of the senior curators at the MoMA had to end the life of a tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells after it grew so fast that the cells began to clog the incubator.

From the New York Times article:

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

This is just a taste of the interesting kinds of developments we’re going to see from biological science in the near future.

(via)

Categories
Art humor

IATT Bulletin 1147

What would you do first with the ability to travel through time? Desmond Warzel shares some clever writing, with Wikihistory, a message board by time travellers.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?

Categories
animation

Color Wars Morph

Competing in Ze Frank’s Color Wars, people have been recreating their childhood photos and posting them to the youngnow gallery. Here are a bunch that I animated using a morphing program:


[Color Wars Young to Old Morph – YouTube]

Categories
animation

MUTO a wall painted animation

If you’re looking for something arty, creepy, yet mysteriously compelling, check out MUTO, a short animated film that uses public walls as a backdrop for animated creatures.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

(A segment of this film originally titled Fantoche, linked previously).