Watchmen

Watchmen, in my opinion, is one of the greatest comics ever written. Shamefully, I hadn't read it until after I heard they were making it into a movie, but I'm glad I finished reading it before the movie came out. Quite possibly my favorite thing about Watchmen is that none of the main heroes (other than Dr. Manhattan) have any super powers. They're just masked crime fighters, most of them are corrupted by something.
I think the movie adaptation is great from the standpoint of how closely they followed the comic. A lot of superhero movies recently have strayed so far from the original story that was intended to be told. They practically used the comic as the story board for the movie and the costuming and casting was spot on.
The one main problem I had with the movie was the lack of cultural significance it had compared to what the comic when it was originally written. It doesn't have quite the same meaning as it would have 20 years ago but i still enjoy it for what it is.

Spider-man Spider-man does whatever a spider can!

Spider-man is another one of my favorite super heroes. I loved watching the cartoon as a kid. One of the things I loved most about Spidey wasn't his powers. It was the fact that he was an ordinary guy. Superman is an alien and Batman is a billionaire who's parents died, how are you supposed to relate to them. Spider-man was just a kid who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up with great power and in turn had to take of great responsibility. I always felt like Marvel heroes were much more relatable than DC heroes. In Marvel comics, most of heroes are ordinary people trying to fit in in a crazy messed up world. In DC, the heroes are for the most part all crazy, half of them are aliens. And what's with Aquaman?

Anyway, I also love Spidey's character design. His suit is sleek and cool and his powers allow for him to be in some pretty dynamic fights. Here come's the Spider-man!

nananananananananananananananana BATMAN!

Everyone knows about Batman so there's not a whole lot new I can say about him. He's the Dark Knight. He's the savior of Gotham City. He dresses like a bat and fights crime. When you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous and in fact, it kind of is. But he's one of my favorite super heroes. I watched some old Adam West Batman with my dad when I was a kid. Its funny how a hero like that could change to Christian Bale's version of Batman. Just look at them
He went from a goofy looking guy in tights and a cape with witty one-liners and bat-everything to being a raspy-voiced crime-fighting machine. Why so serious? Isn't it obvious, because Adam West isn't Batman anymore and now he demands to be taken seriously. Also, I love the new Batsuit. I want one.

Robot Chicken

Robot Chicken is another incredibly stupid 15 minute show on adult swim, but it's another one of my favorites. The premise of the show, if you can even call it that is explained in the opening credits. A mad scientist brings a dead chicken back to life with robot parts and straps it down and forces it to watch about a dozen TV screens at once so it can learn about humanity. This really doesn't matter to the show, because the whole show is just a series of back to back clips of stop motion animation done with action figures. Many of the shows gags are based on pop culture from today and cartoon shows from the 80's. They also did two full episodes with entirely clips about Star Wars. I'm glad people are keeping the art of stop motion alive. I think the show is hilarious even though it can at times be ridiculous and offensive

Metalocalypse

Metalocalypse is a cartoon on adult swim about the worlds richest, most famous and most brutal rock stars. They are in a band called Dethklok and they're completely ridiculous on top of being completely stupid. Its really a pretty dumb show sometimes, but I always laugh. Every episode has original music, metal songs recorded by the show's creator, Brendon Small. Brendon plays just about every instrument in the recordings and voices most of the characters. I always find it interesting that adult swim can have shows that are only 15 minutes long. It somehow works, especially with shows like this that are so stupid.
One of the funniest episodes was the pilot episode in which the band got and endorsement from Duncan Hills Coffee and had to write a jingle for the commercial. Being the worlds most famous band, they put on a huge concert in the middle of nowhere and dumped boiling coffee on their fans. Its a completely stupid show, but it works for me somehow.

Emma Overman

Emma Overman is an Indianapolis painter who all of you should know about. She has a gallery at the Harrison Center for the Arts at 16th and Delaware. The first Friday of every month, her gallery, along with dozens of other galleries are open to the public for an event called First Friday. If you've never heard of First Friday, you should really check it out. There's some great artists there, but Emma is by far my favorite one. You should really check out more of her work. It's cute but at the same time slightly creepy. My favorite piece by here is "Invisible Dan and the Midnight Snack" in which, Invisible Dan, a floating top hat and a pair of white, gloves holds a try of treats. I love the colors and the shape of the painting. Its not that often that you see an artist using an oval shaped frame, especially one with such an antique look with such an interesting art style. Check out here site here.

Invader Zim

Invader Zim is one of my favorite Cartoons of all time. It's hilarious and at the same time disturbing. It was on Nickelodeon when I was younger and a couple years ago, I bought all three seasons of it on DVD.
If you don't know anything about Invader Zim, it's about an alien invader named Zim who, on his planet, is considered a bumbling idiot, so they send him on a "secret mission" to earth just to get rid of him. While on earth, he's constantly trying to take over and constantly being thwarted by Dib, a kid who is obsessed with the paranormal to the point no one believes anything he says.
I love the art style of the show. It's like a combination of cute a terrifying. I think the reason it ended up being canceled was because of how sick and twisted some of the gags in the show were. Things like children eating a pile of cockroaches or a restaurant called Bloaty's Pizza Hog, similar to Chuck E. Cheese. I could not stop laughing at that part.

Zim also has a cute, incredibly stupid robot named Gir who everyone loves because of his ridiculously high pitched voice and his incredible stupidity. It's a great show and I wish there were more episodes.

Spirit Tracks

The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks is the newest addition to the Zelda Series, and I mean NEW. It just came out last week. I got my hands on a copy fresh off the truck at Gamestop and played way more than I should have considering it was the last week before finals and I had a lot to do.
The Spirit Tracks is for the Nintendo DS and had some great new additions to the gameplay. Most interaction in the game is controlled by the touchscreen with the stylus. You tap where you want Link to go and he goes there, tap an enemy and he attacks.

This game also added a new game mechanic, driving a train around the world map. Rather than giving you full freedom to explore the game world, you draw a path on a map with your stylus and the train follows that path. You can turn at intersections to change your path and fire a cannon at enemies as you truck along. I think this mechanic works to help the game world feel much larger. In previous games, you could walk from one end of the world to another, but in the one, knowing that you have to take the train makes the world seem HUGE.

Another new story element and mechanic added was having Princess Zelda's spirit with you throughout the entire game. She helps move the story along and in some areas, she can control Phantoms, huge walking suits of armor. When she's controlling the Phantom, you draw the path for her to follow so you can control two characters at once.

I think the game is a great new addition to the series and gave me a reason to keep my DS. Great story line and interesting new characters. Also, if you're a fan of the series, you'll know that Link has never had much of a personality. In this game he has a bit more of one. I won't ruin it for you, check it out.

Twilight Princess

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess brought Zelda to the next generation. As Ocarina of Time did, it revolutionized the way that we play Zelda. Where Ocarina brought Zelda into the third dimension, Twilight Princess gave Link a new way to play, the Wii Remote. Using the Wii Remote, your swings translate into sword slashes in the game. The graphics are also greatly improved and the story is great. This has to be my second favorite game of all time. There's so much action and I love the story and the characters and the art style. It doesn't have quite the wow factor that Ocarina of Time had because a lot of the surprises of playing in a 3d world had already happened but they tried some new things and I thought it was great.

Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is my favorite game of all time. It has been for about 10 years and I have played through the entire game at least 20 times. What is it about the game that makes it so great? Why is it that I can play the game every year around Christmas time and still enjoy it just as much as I did the first time? Well for starters, It brought a great game series into a new dimension. It had a huge immersive game world that I could explore. It had great music and a great story. I'm inspired every time I play it.

It's truly a timeless classic. I hope one day I can make a game that has the same qualities as this game. I want people who play it to go back and play it over and over again and inspire gamers to want to make games just like this game did for me.

Terrorism In Video Games

Recently a high profile game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, was released. This game contains a very controversial level. It's been getting a lot of flack from the media because of how shockingly violent it is. In this level of the game, you play as a terrorist in an airport mowing down innocent civilians.
Is this really necessary to the game? The game gives you the option of skipping the level without hurting the progress of the story. They being the case, why even have it in the game? I love video games, and some of my favorite games have significant amounts of violence in them, but this is just beyond me...
Video games already get enough bad press for "causing violence." There's no good reason I can think of to put something this controversial in a game, knowing full well that everyone will criticize it. Violent video games are banned in some countries like Australia and this game isn't going to help change that.

If you want to see the scene, you can watch it below, but be warned, it's pretty disturbing...

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

Anyone who was a kid in the late 90's knows exactly what I mean when I say "gotta catch 'em all!" POKEMON! The game that everyone loved in elementary school and the show that everyone watched when they got home from school.

Thinking back, it's CRAZY how popular the game was. Everyone I knew as a kid played the game, collected the cards, and watched the show. And the creators must have done something right because they're still making Pokemon games, cards, and shows and they're still popular with kids. My girlfriend's younger brother is OBSESSED with it. It's hilarious because it reminds me of myself as a kid.
Exploring a world and capturing hundreds of creatures and forcing them to battle each other seems cruel but I guess it appeals to kids for some reason.

Fable 2

Fable 2 is an open world fantasy role playing game. That's pretty much a game where you play a character in a fantasy world and you can pretty much do whatever you want in the game. It gives the player a large world to explore and lots of quests to complete and skills to gain. I thought it was a really fun game, but there was one thing I wasn't to crazy about, the lack of story. As a student of Digital storytelling, I feel like narrative can be really important in games and it's something that more and more games are letting go of. There are ways to give the player more freedom without sacrificing narrative and I would love to explore those in my career as a game designer. I'm really interested in experimenting with branching narrative. Sort of making it like a "choose your own adventure" but have the decisions based more upon subtle things rather than flat out asking you "follow the knight or go back."
Don't get me wrong, there were some things I liked about Fable 2, but there were a lot of things that could be improved.

Spore

Even though Spore has been out for a while, I still feel like it's worth talking about. For those of you unfamiliar with Spore, it's a "god-game" where you play as evolution. You start out with a microscopic organism that you can customize and as you progress, your creature gets more options for customization. Eventually, your creature will sprout legs and swim to land. Then you can further evolve your creature to have more parts and customization options. You progress to be able to have more creatures in a pack and eventually, a tribe, and then a civilization.
The game is constantly changing and everything is procedurally generated so the animations and music are generated by the computer rather than created by designers. The thing I love most about Spore is the Creature Creator. You can design the ugliest, most impractical creatures that would never survive in the real world or build the most powerful intimidating killing machine you can imagine. Really the whole game comes down to whatever the player can imagine and that is really cool.

Davy Jones

In my opinion, the COOLEST CG character in any movie has to be Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Man's Chest . He is so cool. What's not cool about having tentacles for a beard, a crab claw for one hand and a peg-leg? I also love the technology they used to capture him. During production, they managed to perfect live motion capture, so rather than shooting two plates, one with all the actors and one sans the CG actor, they could do it all in one plate, motion capturing the live performance instead of capturing a separate performance in a studio.

I'm fascinated by motion capture and have always wanted motion capture equipment to play around with. It seems so fun! And the combination of Bill Nighy's acting and the CG used to create the final version, Davy Jones is so amazing!

Augemented Reality!

I did my project 9 on an augmented reality application and thought it would be cool to discuss augmented reality on here. Wikipedia defines augmented reality as "live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with virtual computer-generated imagery - creating a mixed reality." Sounds really cool doesn't it? You can use a computer or even a mobile device with a camera or GPS to view computer graphic elements superimposed with real life! There are a lot of potential applications for it. The example I used in my project would be for gaming, but it also has more "practical" applications like assisting in repair. Using augmented reality you could tell what part is what and how it works.

It can also work in the medical field so you could see the inner anatomy on top of the real live person like this.

Augmented reality isn't exactly new, but recently, with mobile devices with larger displays and cameras, it has picked up a lot. I'm really interested in seeing what kinds of new things emerge from this technology.

(another great example of augmented reality is watching football on tv. The yellow "first down" line and ads around the stadium are put in by a computer!)

Steampunk

Steampunk is a genre of alternative history. It's thinking back to history and thinking "what if this was invented then?" A lot of steampunk material is influenced by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. It combines steam-powered and mechanical advances with Victorian culture. I personally love the idea of steampunk and think there should be a lot more steampunk material.

With internet DIY culture, there has been a huge increase in steampunk "artifacts." There are tutorials online on how to build steampunk goggle, clothing, and even computers.

There's a lot of really neat stuff online detailing this awesome phenomenon. I think it would be really cool to write a work of steampunk fiction or design a game in a steampunk setting. There's a lot of great design ideas that steampunk can inspire.

Razia's Shadow: A Musical

Razia's Shadow is a concept album by Thomas and Paul Hunter, released by Thomas' band, Forgive Durden, through Fueled by Ramen Records. The story of the album is divided into two parts. The first part tells the story of the creation of a world filled with angels but divided by the arrogance and insecurities of one of the angel. After the world is split and after generations of darkness, the second part of the story tells of how the world is reunited through love and sacrifice.
The music of Razia's Shadow features a lot of different bands such as Gatsbys American Dream, Say Anything, The Hush Sound, An Angle, The Dear Hunter, The Matches, Saves the Day and Panic! at the Disco and of course, Forgive Durden.
I really like the music and also the story. It flows really well and features a lot of bands that I like. one really neat thing about it is that only about half of the vocal tracks were recorded in person. The other half were recorded by the vocalists and sent in through the internet, and all the orchestral music was produced with software. Great use of technology.

Orcs

In Lord of the Rings, the heroes face thousands of Orcs. What's an Orc? It a goblin-like creature Tolkien created for the world of Middle-Earth. There are many different types of Orcs in Lord of the Rings. They're terrifying creatures and every type of Orc had to be designed.
A lot of the Orcs were designed by Warren Mahy, a designer at Weta Workshop in New Zealand. He got pigeonholed into designing baddies for Lord of the Rings because he was so good at it. His design work for the movies was great! They look so evil and its great because it gives the heroes something to want to destroy, something they will want to stop because they're so evil and terrible

The Witch King

The Witch King is another character from the Lord of The Rings. He was once a king of men, but after being tempted by the dark lord Sauron, he became a Ringwraith.

In Return of the King, they redesigned the Witch King for the final battle. They originally designed him with a full helm with spikes, but it looked too similar to Sauron from the first movie, so they tried to make him look more Wraith-like. They gave him a helmet that only covers part of his face and has one big spike that sticks up and other smaller spikes that stick out like a crown of thorns. They made the helmet look as though he was still wearing the hood of a Ringwraith under his helmet. He looks super cool and intimidating, one of my favorite bad guys in the movie!

My Precious

Gollum is an excellent example of 3d graphical technology. Without CG, Gollum, one of the most important characters in The Lord of the Rings, would have been really lame. I recently re-watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings DVDs and the stuff about how they made Gollum was so cool. They shot two plates, one of the actors performing the scene with the actor who played Gollum in a weird jumpsuit, and one without the Gollum actor. They later used motion capture technology to capture the Gollum actor's performance and put it in the final version of the film. This was one of the first CG characters in a movie that actually had a major role. They did such a good job with the CG for him, especially for the time. A lot of earlier movies that tried to use CG along with live action just looked bad. With Gollum, sometimes its hard to tell he's even CG. And the technology is getting even better. I can't wait to see the new Avatar movie!

The Lord of the Rings

There's so so so much I could say about Lord of the Rings, the books and the movies. I read the books for the first time when I was in middle school after reading The Hobbit for like the 4th time. It was just before the movies were released and I was really excited to see them.

I LOVE how Tolkien built off the world he created in The Hobbit and built this HUGE fantasy world. I love the themes in the story like the battle of good versus evil, fighting temptation, and the fact that the smallest of us all can do some of the greatest things.

I also LOVE how Peter Jackson interpreted the books and made them into movies, if you can even call them movies. I like to think of it as one cinematic experience that lasts 12 hours. The brilliant use of computer graphics combined with miniatures and traditional sets along with greenscreen and motion capture. Its just incredible. I'm going to write a few more posts about Lord of the Rings. Ready?

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Repo! The Genetic Opera is a rock opera that takes place in the not so distant future. When a pandemic of organ failure cripples the population, Genco, a company that makes genetically perfect organs saves the day by offering financing options on their organs. But if you miss a payment on your organ, Genco sends the Repoman to repossess your organ!
Its a dark story with dark music but I love it. I love the character and set design of the movie. Its set in a bleak world and surgery has become something of a fashion statement. One of the characters, Pavi, has a sick obsession with faces and throughout the movie, he replaces his own face with other faces.
It's one of my new favorite movies and it was an instant cult classic. Its got a great soundtrack, great costumes, and its pretty gory. I think its great.

Beardyman Beatbox recepe

This video is cool and hilarious. Beardyman is a British beatbox artist who has a whole lot of talent. In this video, he talks about how to make a beatbox track. But he does it in the style of a cooking show. Its incredible that he could make all those different types of sounds with his mouth. And the use of humor in his video is great, treating each type of sound as a different ingredient and putting it all together for the mix.
Here's another one of his videos, him beatboxing in a supermarket. Its pretty great.

Electric Car music video

They Might Be Giants is one of my favorite bands. They're essentially a "nerd rock" band, singing songs about math, science, and history. They've recently put out a few childrens albums with educational songs. On their album Here Comes Science, they have a song called Electric Car and it have a great music video. I think its a great fusion of New Media and Old Media. They created the characters for the video by cutting out shapes from cardboard, paper and cloth. Then they photographed each piece and put them together using photoshop. Then using aftereffects, animated the pieces. They posted a "making of" video that shows a lot of the process. I think its great to see the finished product and see how it was made. I also think its a cute and fun way to help kids know about electric cars.

Autotune the News

While I'm on the subject of Autotune, I can't pass up talking about Autotune the News. With the popularity of Autotune, its gotten to the point where a lot of "artists" don't even bother trying to sing at all, they just talk and let Autotune do all the work. This lack of effort inspired a band called The Gregory Brothers to try something new, Autotuning things that weren't supposed to be music to begin with.
They take news clips and Autotune them to make them into songs, throwing in other material by green screening themselves into the news clips. They also Autotuned the clip of Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift at the VMA's. Its quite hilarious that his "unintentional singing" sounds pretty much just like his songs on his album.



I think its great that they're making fun of the whole hip hop autotuned genre by making music out of clips of people talking.

I AM TPAIN!!!

There's an iPhone app out now called I Am TPain that is has Autotune. If you're unfamiliar with the term Autotune, it's computer software originally designed to be used for pitch correction in music studios. Artists have been secretly using it for years but when Cher put out her song Believe, the used Autotune for a new effect that the creators didn't originally intend. Rather than pitching the note slightly to make it sound better, they used the software to make a huge pitch jump. Ever since then, that type of sound picked up and now rather than using Autotune to sound like a better singer, the use Autotune as a feature in their music.
With the I Am TPain app, you can talk into your iPhone and it will play you voice while Autotuning it so it sounds like you're singing. Now you can sound like TPain or Kanye. I think its stupid but it really caught on.

Lady Gaga???

While I'm on the subject of fashion, I would like to talk briefly about Lady Gaga. I willy begin by asking a simple question: WHAT THE F***???? Some of her dresses that she wears on stage are absolutely ridiculous. I can't take her or her music seriously when she's wearing such ridiculous clothes. A couple years ago, Bjork wore her swan dress and everyone thought she looked crazy.
Is Lady Gaga just trying to one-up Bjork???

Some of Lady Gaga's weird outfits include bubble dress
Kermit dress

and what some people call "slim jim dress"
Come on Lady Gaga... Your musics not that great and you look stupid.
She probably only wears such weird dresses because she likes the attention she gets by having everyone think she's insane, but whatever. It's not okay to wear a dress made out of Kermit... EVER!!!!

Animal Haircuts

So I just saw that my friend Tombob posted some blog posts about some weird haircuts so I wanted to do him one better. A while back, I stumbled across these photos of models with their hair cut to look like the heads of different animals. It was one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen but it was oddly somehow beautiful at the same time. So without further ado, here are the animal haircuts.

These hairdos are designed by Japanese weird art designer Nagi Noda. She built them out of hair weaves with a mesh of wire sculpted into the animal shapes. Weird yes but I think its great. Its fun and interesting and bizarre but it works really well and looks beautiful.

Lightsabers

By far, one of the coolest weapons in any movie ever is the lightsaber. What's cooler than a sword that's made out of a laser that can cut through anything (except other lightsabers) and can block laser guns??? So awesome. As a kid, I always loved to pretend to be a jedi with my toy light-up lightsaber.
I found this cool diagram on how a lightsaber is made. It's crazy how a movie prop that was originally made out of a handle for a camera flash with a dowel rod could become one of the coolest weapons ever. I also love how no two lightsabers are the same. They all have different handles and different colored blades depending on who it belongs too.
Thank you George Lucas, for giving me a new way to be better than my younger brother. Lightsaber fighting rules!

Lord Vader

The tale of Anikin Skywalker's path to the Dark Side and his redemption at the end of Return of the Jedi. Darth Vader is the baddest of the bad guys! I was so intimidated by Vader as a kid, and as I watched the original trilogy over and over again I thought it was interesting that such a bad guy could end up saving the galaxy by destroying the emperor. Then the newer trilogy came out when I was between 10 and 14. This new trilogy showed Anakin's descent into evil and how he became Vader. Anakin/ Vader is such an interesting character because he's so arrogant and powerful and misunderstood. He originally had good intentions but they blinded him and he ended up hurting the ones he loved.

On top of being such an intriguing literary character, Vader has one of the coolest costumes! He's got this soulless black helmet and black leather suit with robotic parts underneath. So scary and awesome
!

Yoda

A wise man once said "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." It doesn't matter that he was a puppet. Yoda is a staple character in the Star Wars saga. He's so lovable. Whats not to love about the weird love child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. He's a little green hermit who can levitate a space ship with his mind.
I love where digital technology has taken Yoda. Don't get me wrong, I love the stiff old puppet version, but I love how bad ass they made him with the digital version. We always knew he was powerful, but he's so humble, without the digital Yoda, we'd never really know just quite HOW powerful he is.