Stunning video - SL meets Star Trek Holodeck meets RL love story
Now if only SL building worked like this - but another classic case of its easier to virtualise us (as avatars) rather than try and virtualise things around us.
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YouTube - Guild Wars Vs World of Warcraft Dance Contest
Great fun bit of machinima.
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Finally got around to putting an anime music video together.
When Joanna was loading up Age of Mythology the other month I thought how well the greek warrior stuff would go with Elvis Costello's Olivers Army. Having finaly got a PC capable of handling video, and tried several video editing programmes before settling on the simplicity of Microsoft's Movie Maker, I spent an enjoyable afternoon putting the AMV together. I'll link it in here until the bandwidth or storage becomes an issue - it's 9 MB in Windows Media format.
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Finally got to the end of all 13 episodes of Serial Experiments: Lain. No doubt about it, it's superb and well worth the time. Next time I'll have to watch it in a more compressed time scale - I see from the blog I started on 31st August!
And what's it all about? By the end there are hints, but not everything. Lain is from the Wired ( the evolved Internet), a programme given a body to exist in, and bridge into the real world. By the end she's outwitted her inventor, rewritten history (literally) so that nobody in the real world knows she was ever there (including her creator), and is having very Contact like discussions with a higher plane in the form of her father. And there's those odd little cryptic bits, like the suggestion that the Wired is in fact a part of something larger, and the asteroid.
Just watch it.
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After AMV here we have Machinima (rhymes with cinema). Machinima are films made using simple 3D games packages, like Unreal, Halo etc. Motion is captured by moving the characters in the game, and the voice track then overdubbed.
I've looked at doing something similar with Alpha Worlds. Oh well, maybe get round to it some time.
Good Machinima resources are:
Apparently the Red vs Blue stuff is very good. There is of course a G2 article on the topic.
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Can't believe I haven't posted about this AMV (anime music video) since I've been showing it to almost everyone I meet ( having it run on the Palm Tungsten is definitely cool ). Quite simply the best AMV I've seen, the superb Avril Lavinge song played against some stunning CGI graphics from the cutaway scenes from Final Fantasy X. Add to which Yuna just looks so good she's worth any entry in my Girl Fridays list. The video's by Cass Morgan by the way.
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Just watched episode 9 where they start showing bits of Roswell footage and a brief history of computing. Interesting that alongside Hypertext and Xanadu inventor Ted Nelson they also show John Lily, ECCO and all. Love John Lily's works, and even been tanking a few times. He's probably best known through the Altered States film with William Hurt.
Interesting computing/hacking timeline at www.robotwisdom.com.
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Got hld of the SE:Lain DVD via eBay. Now just need to set aside the time to watch it :-(
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Haibane Renmei is Yoshitoshi Abe's latest anime. YA did the character designs for Serial Experiments: Lain. Speaking of which I found the SE:Lain Ultimate Fan Guide at the Orcs Nest gaming shop while in London today. I finally get to learn what happens and what the whole story's about - sort of.
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A little late I know but I finally got around to seeing Matrix Reloaded. Expectations having been set suitably low by the reviews I was pleasantly surprised. The white "matrix" images of Zion Control were beautiful and the whole "life as a programme" proposition kept going well. Some of the fight scenes could have been shorter though......
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Anime Music Video (AMV)
Ten hours later and I'm a fully signed up fan of AMV. Totally PR like the more you push into something like this the depper it gets and before long you've found a whole otaku powered cottage industry turning out the videos, showing them at Cons, and sharing them via anonymous-FTP. Best so far has to be Lee's Bachelorette video using the Bjork song (which I love anyway) and clips from Utena, a stunning looking women's anime.
It looks like a current driver for AMV is DDR - Dance Dance Revolution which looks big in the US at the moment and I've seen some coverage of it here in the UK. I suppose those people need something to look at while they do their moves - and the AMV stuff beats most other music videos I've seen recently.
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Transformation - The Becoming Video - Nine Inch Nails/Akira/GITS/Lain
Reading Pattern Recognition is making me think more and more of my hunt for Serial Experiments:Lain episodes as some sort of Footage fetish. Anyway the hunt just turned up a real gem. Transformation is a video made in 2000 by Hsien Lee to a track by Nine Inch Nails that mixes clips from Akira, Ghost in the Shell and SE:Lain into a great industrial noise anime-fest. Find it on Kazaa or at Lee's Kusoyaro site which has a load of great looking anime video projects.
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Current Anime and Manga
Currently trying to get hold of the episodes of Serial Experiments: Lain, an excellent contemporary cyber adventure anime. No giant robots or anything like that, just a school girl searching for a dead friend who appears to have ended up in the net.
Also reading the Manga version of Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell. Not as good as the movie, and the style is very cartoony in places.
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