I'm sure everyone's posting this everywhere, but I thought I'd pass it along too.
Nocturna trailer

Wow, thinking about it, traditional animation works so much better for cats... Ah well.

~ Cat

Unfortunately, after only a couple of weeks of being back at school, I've grown tired of all music... or at least any of the music that I have access to (Pandora, radio, shared iTunes in the labs..) so today I started playing through some of online lectures that my Games and Society teacher linked and recommended to us, and most of it is really great stuff.

TED Talks
This is from an annual conference hosted by BMW which brings together the worlds leading experts on "ANY subject area offering something fresh and important." They all run about 15min, although I wish they were a bit longer, seeing as everyone is being forced to rush - but I guess it's more about a general survey of knowledge in multiple areas as opposed to anything too specialized.

The most worthwhile ones I've seen so far have been from Bjorn Lomborg (talks about priorities in dealing with the world's problems), Robert Wright (how the responsible persuit of one's own personal interests lead works in favor of humanity) and Wade Davis (National Geographic - speaks about the steady averaging out of world culture and language).

Also interesting is this talk by James P. Carse about finite and infinite games (as well as religion and unquestioning belief)

~ Cat

PS - if anyone wants to recommend any music to me, I would appreciate it. The problem is that I can't really work to anything slow (which is why Pandora and the radio are letting me down) and I'm tired of dance music..

I was poking around the internet today and discovered that my favorite series, the Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake were made into a "fantasy opera" at some point. They were already made into a BBC miniseries in the early 90s, which I strongly recommend to people looking for something a little different and slightly uncomfortable, but I thought I'd put this out there (not that any of us will probably have the opportunity to ever see it..) Looking through the images and listening to some of the [sort of boring, typical-sounding] music (which you can listen to here) it seems like it could either be very interesting (as Peake definitely gave them enough to work with) or... not really worth anyone's time (like that production of Faust I saw last summer...) Not to give the impression that I'm much of a theatre person anyway.

But all of you should read the books. I discovered the site through an interesting path actually - I was reading about the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test which I'm now very curious about and saw the term hysterical realism, which sounded interesting, and read that Peake's work could be described as such. Also in there is a mention of Moby Dick, which I'm currently [slowly] reading - and I'd recently noted was similar in style to Gormenghast. Go me.

~ Cat

Pan's Labyrinth

One more since I'm thinking about it:
Pan's Labyrinth Interviews off of Rotten Tomatos

Nothing super-insightful if you're looking for some sort of in-depth talk about the film, just a couple of words from the director and a few actors. Interesting to see anyway. (Also, the guy in the Pan suit is going to be the Silver Surfer in the new Fantastic Four - when he's not CG. I don't know why they're making that movie.. but.. the Silver Surfer is pretty cool.)

~ Cat

Attempt to add content to my blog:



Also, since I seem to post in pairs, uhh, here's some more figure stuff if anyone cares. They're from last semester and awkwardly arranged in a doc I threw together to get my teacher's opinion on what to put in my portfolio.

Zune
If anyone hasn't noticed, Microsoft has a pretty cool advetising campaign going on for Zune. Here's a collection of commercials, all roughly based around the concept of sharing. (Play button when you mouse over is for video, eye is for stills)

While I'm at it, other really cool advertising sites to check out:

Psyop
Of particular interest is Psyop's Propaganda section, in which they advertise for themselves. The Psyop Anthem, along with one of their other commercials were both in SIGGRAPH's electronic theater a couple of years ago (how I found out about them in the first place)

The Mill
The Mill is an effects house, so they have some film stuff and music videos as well. A list of their showreels is on the left menu set - under "showreel" (obviously). It seems they've changed the setup from overall reels (they used to have a CG one, NY, London, and overall) to reels of full commercials (arranged by.. director??). That really bugs me, actually... I prefer viewing colletions of bite-sized, awesome effects set to music... but I'm sue they had their reasons.

Also, illustrators - I'm stalking you all through the social network that is Blogspot. Keep up the posting - I love seeing your stuff, regardless of whether I actually know you or not. On the same note, I'm going to make an effort to start actually posting a bit more (we're getting into rendering, so I'll actually have something to show soon) even though I don't think anyone actually reads this thing.

~ Cat