Sci-Fi

Whether you love or hate TRON: Legacy, few would argue it’s a beautiful movie. Every penny of the Disney sequel’s reported $170 million budget is undeniably on screen in the form of all kinds of different special effects.

Bradley Munkowitz, aka GMUNK, was the lead animated graphics artist on the film and led a team that created about 10 minutes of those special effects. But not some big action set piece like one usually thinks of when talking about special effects. He created the user interfaces and holograms found in various scenes. In the world of Tron, those visuals are some of the most important things on the Grid. GMunk has uploaded six videos highlighting his work from the film, in context. They play like etherial, effects heavy movie/music videos. Check them out below.

All the below videos are from VFX Breakdowns. What you’ll see are edits of the final film with either the UI or holograms the animated graphics team created for that particular scene.

TRON GFX Disc Game from GMUNK on Vimeo.

TRON GFX Throne Room from GMUNK on Vimeo.

TRON GFX Rectifier Globe from GMUNK on Vimeo.

TRON GFX Fireworks from GMUNK on Vimeo.

TRON GFX Portal Climax from GMUNK on Vimeo.

TRON GFX Solar Sailor from GMUNK on Vimeo.

Which video do you like best?

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Playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises might have made Tom Hardy a household name, but it wasn’t his first major genre sequel. The actor – who really hit the radar of film fans starring in Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Bronson – previously appeared in Star Trek: Nemesis as Shinzon, a villainous clone of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and a video of the actor’s screen test has surfaced online. Check it out below.

Thanks to E! Online (via Trek Movie) for the heads up.

Obviously, the audition footage is edited together with footage from the film itself and sort of jumps all around but it’s really fun to watch this retrospectively. You can almost see the movie star beginning to exude from him. Granted, it would take six years until his break out role – Bronson – and after that, another four until his huge coming out party, Dark Knight Rises so a decade passed from then to now. In between, films like Layer Cake and Inception certainly helped, and Warrior was a star making performance in an under appreciated film, but it’s hard to deny the real milestones of his career were this, Bronson and Dark Knight Rises.

Did you remember Hardy was in this film? When you saw it, did he stand out?

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The teaser trailer for Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus — his return to the narrative landscape of his 1979 film Alien — was one of the best teasers we’ve seen in a long time. We have no idea if the script, heavily revised by Damon Lindelof from John Spaihts‘ original draft, is any good, or if the picture will hold a candle to Alien. But damn, it looks beautiful.

Here’s something that will give you a slightly better idea of what’s going on in Prometheus, however. It isn’t a trailer, and it isn’t footage from the film. Rather, it is something that plays right into the rumor that surfaced yesterday about the character played by Guy Pearce. What we’ve got is a TED Talk… from 2023. Check it out below.

As mentioned above, note that this is a promo clip only — as you’ll see in the credits below, it wasn’t directed by Ridley Scott, though he did oversee it. It does not appear in Prometheus.

So that’s Peter Weyland of Weyland Corp, aka one of the two companies that joined together to eventually become Weyland-Yutani, the corporate entity that plays a huge part in the Alien series. What does he have to do with the story in Prometheus? That talk should have given you a pretty good idea; it certainly doesn’t leave much to the imagination with respect to the legend of Prometheus and this film’s story.

Here’s what the TED page for this talk offers:

Peter Weyland has been a magnet for controversy since he announced his intent to build the first convincingly humanoid robotic system by the end of the decade.

Whether challenging the ethical boundaries of medicine with nanotechnology or going toe to toe with the Vatican itself on the issue of gene-therapy sterilization, Sir Peter prides himself on his motto, “If we can, we must.” After a three year media blackout, Weyland has finally emerged to reveal where he’s heading next. Wherever that may be, we will most certainly want to follow.

Conceived and designed by Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof and directed by Luke Scott.

There is more info about Peter Weyland at that page, too. And if you want more background on this clip, writer Damon Lindelof has a Q&A at TED where he talks about creating the video. He explains, in part,

I said, “l’ll write this thing, and we’ll put it in front of you guys, and if you think it’s cool, we would love to platform it at TED, and make it only viewable through TED.” Because I liked the idea of exposing a more general audience to, “Wait a minute, I’ve never heard of this thing. There’s more talks here.” I thought it could be mutually beneficial — as opposed to overtly cram-it-down-your-face viral marketing, which I don’t think anyone wanted to do.

Ridley Scott directed Prometheus; it stars Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Rafe Spall, Logan Marshall-Green, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson. The film will hit theaters June 8, 2012.

Ridley Scott, director of “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” returns to the genre he helped define. With PROMETHEUS, he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race.

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Some of the biggest genre-oriented directors out of South Korea have, in addition to their signature features, dallied with segments in anthology films. Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) did a part in the film Three…Extremes; Bong Joon-ho (Mother, The Host) did a segment for Tokyo!; and Kim Jee-woon (I Saw the Devil, the upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Last Stand) did a segment in 3 Extremes II.

Now Kim Jee-woon is going back to the anthology, as he is a producer and director on Doomsday Book, a three-part anthology about the end of the world. Yim Pil-sung (Hansel & Gretel) is his co-conspirator, with the directors each doing one segment solo and collaborating on the third. As his solo effort, Kim directs a segment about a robot that develops its own consciousness. (Pictured above.) An English-subbed trailer is now available; check it out below.

Frankly, a lot of this footage plays like parody — the cuts from dialogue like “the mysterious virus” to “you mean this robot thinks on its own?” to “the meteor is approaching” could be right out of a Saturday Night Live or late-night talk show comedy skit. But I have faith in Kim Jee-woon, and suspect there’s more going on here than suggested in this teaser.

There’s a bit of history to this one, as best I can tell the two solo segments were shot some time ago, with a third originally set to be done by director Han Jae-rim.  But Han’s story was never shot and the film went dormant for some time before Kim and Yim co-directed a third segment, allowing the film to be completed. (Twitch recounts some of that history.)

Here’s the official description of the film as it stands:

Two acclaimed Korean directors unfurl three unique stories of human self-destruction in the modern high-tech era. In a hope to restore the humane compassion in the insusceptible modern age, the film displays an alternative form of genuine humanity. And thus you are stepping into the world of future, where a series of unexpected stories awaits you. All these stories originate from the earth. From the very earth you live on.

The original reported plot descriptions for each of the three segments are below. Han’s segment is described as a musical, which should clue you in to the fact that the entire enterprise might not be quite as much a duplication of American sci-fi/disaster tentpoles as the footage above suggests. But we don’t know how much of that storyline survives in this version of the movie.

• “Heaven’s Creation,” directed by Kim Jee-woon
  A story about a robot who gains consciousness and the absurdity that follows.
• “The New Generation,” directed by Yim Pil-sung
  A clever action film told from the point of view of a boy who has become a zombie, this segment explores how humans lose control of planet Earth, becoming mere food for a different species.
• “The Christmas Gift,” directed by Han Jae-rim (never shot)
  A musical movie that re-interprets the beautiful love story “The Christmas Gift” by O Henry, this project confronts the basic instincts of a woman and her last chance to survive after witnessing the end of the world.

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Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

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Archetype, This short film by Aaron Sims is really impressive. You should watch it

With this one-minute trailer, the short film Meaning of Robots just became a film I’m very interested to see. The trailer at first seems to be a pretty straight-forward document about Mike Sullivan, a nice old guy who makes robots. But look closely at his designs, and you’ll see they’re a bit more… sexualized than what you might expect to see. That’s just the beginning.

This trailer is great stuff, but it is definitely not safe for work thanks to language, which will make a lot more sense when you check it out. Please do so.

“Oh, and here’s a robot fucking machine.” Boom. If you needed a short film to program in front of Shame (or maybe Lars and the Real Girl or Air Doll), looks like this could be the one. Sounds like this is a weird little tale of obsession and sex, and that’s just about perfect fodder for a short. Plus, those robots look awesome. The robotic Maria from Metropolis would approve.

Matt Lenski directed this little piece of gold.

The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.

[via FirstShowing]

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Compare the complex model of what a computer can use to control sound and musical pattern in real-time to the visualization. You see knobs, you see faders that resemble mixers, you see grids, you see – bizarrely – representations of old piano rolls. The accumulated ephemera of old hardware, while useful, can be quickly overwhelmed by a complex musical creation, or visually can fail to show the musical ideas that form a larger piece. You can employ notation, derived originally from instructions for plainsong chant and scrawled for individual musicians – and quickly discover how inadequate it is for the language of sound shaping in the computer.

Or, you can enter a wild, three-dimensional world of exploded geometries, navigated with hand gestures.

Welcome to the sci fi-made-real universe of Portland-based Christian Bannister’s subcycle. Combining sophisticated, beautiful visualizations, elegant mode shifts that move from timbre to musical pattern, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional interactions, it’s a complete visualization and interface for live re-composition. A hand gesture can step from one musical section to another, or copy a pattern. Some familiar idioms are here: the grid of notes, a la piano roll, and the light-up array of buttons of the monome. But other ideas are exploded into spatial geometry, so that you can fly through a sound or make a sweeping rectangle or circle represent a filter.

Ingredients, coupling free and open source software with familiar, musician-friendly tools:

• Two projectors
• A monome
• Processing, the elegant and artist-savvy free software for visual code
• Ableton Live and Cycling ’74′s Max for Live, acting as the interactive glue with the sound world
• Drumaxx, Image-Line’s tasty physical-modeled drum synth
• Native Instruments Battery, the sampled drum engine
• Eclipse, the free IDE, for Java coding in this case
• Community Core Vision and reacTIVision (based on our previous info, at least), free and open source community-based projects for making the interfaces you see in movies happen in real life.

Another terrific video, which gets into generating a pattern:

Now, I could say more, but perhaps it’s best to watch the videos. Normally, when you see a demo video with 10 or 11 minutes on the timeline, you might tune out. Here, I predict you’ll be too busy trying to get your jaw off the floor to skip ahead in the timeline.

At the same time, to me this kind of visualization of music opens a very, very wide door to new audiovisual exploration. Christian’s eye-popping work is the result of countless decisions – which visualization to use, which sound to use, which interaction to devise, which combination of interfaces, of instruments – and, most importantly, what kind of music. Any one of those decisions represents a branch that could lead elsewhere. If I’m right – and I dearly hope I am – we’re seeing the first future echoes of a vast, expanding audiovisual universe yet unseen.

Previously:
Subcycle: Multitouch Sound Crunching with Gestures, 3D Waveforms

And lots more info on the blog for the project:
http://www.subcycle.org/

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June 19-20, 1982. Two dates that will live in infamy for Star Trek fans. Those were the dates of Ultimate Fantasy 1982, a Houston-based convention that turned into an epic debacle eventually dubbed The Con of Wrath. It was mere days after Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan hit theaters, a high point for Star Trek fandom, and the event was billed as one of the first times the entire main cast of Star Trek were appearing together. But everything that could have gone wrong at the con did.

Trek enthusiast Larry Nemecek is producing a documentary about this convention, also called The Con of Wrath, and has created a trailer to help raise awareness about its existence and to help get it completed. Watch the trailer and read more after the jump.

Thanks to Film School Rejects for the heads up on this project. Here’s the trailer.

And here’s the description of the film from the official site, www.conofwrath.com.

This one weekend in June 1982 saw the rise, and fall, and rise again of a dream, wrapped up in one of our most retro-cool moments in film history: How one ambitious Houston fan and his band of friends sold the dream—the first-ever, all-cast Star Trek extravaganza … complete with laser shows, orchestral hoopla and a revolving arena stage—and then just failed to sell the tickets.

Or … was it really that simple?

It’s a car wreck of a story about a mysterious “sellout” status told to would-be ticket buyers … con staff who go into shock when the truth is revealed … fans wrongly kicked out of their hotel rooms … dealers who “pass the hat” to keep the doors open … the incredible “burning planet” … and the unsuspecting Hollywood folk who walk into this potential PR nightmare.

And it’s also a personal story: my first coming-of-age con road trip—and I’m thrilled, after all this time, to preserve it for the ages in my first film project, “THE CON OF WRATH.”

It sounds like a blast and I can’t hear more about this debacle (the convention, not the movie). If you’d like to contribute, either financially or with personal experiences, there are links over at www.conofwrath.com.

Have you experienced anything like that before?

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It's not the stunning CGI movie quality trailer for NCsoft and Carbine's WildStar that has my heart beating so hard. Nor is it these forty-four screenshots, covering the races, combat, and environments of this gorgeous space born adventure. It's not even the bunny girls (though they certainly help). So what is it? More »