FYI: Early last week, Colin Marshall gave you a heads up that Studio Ghibli, the animation studio behind Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, was preparing to release an open source version of the animation software used to create its films. This weekend, the software–called OpenToonz–officially became available for download. And we can now tell you where to find it. OpenToonz is available on Github, in versions made for both Window and OSX. This link will jump you straight to the download area.
If you make anything great with it, please share it with us.
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Google’s Nik Collection, a photo editing software package designed for professional photographers, once retailed for $149. Today it’s absolutely free to download, for both Windows and Mac users.
Here you can read Google’s announcement, which includes more information on the software package and its capabilities.
Today we’re making the Nik Collection available to everyone, for free.
Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day. As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.
The Nik Collection is comprised of seven desktop plug-ins that provide a powerful range of photo editing capabilities — from filter applications that improve color correction, to retouching and creative effects, to image sharpening that brings out all the hidden details, to the ability to make adjustments to the color and tonality of images.
Starting March 24, 2016, the latest Nik Collection will be freely available to download: Analog Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro and Dfine. If you purchased the Nik Collection in 2016, you will receive a full refund, which we’ll automatically issue back to you in the coming days.
We’re excited to bring the powerful photo editing tools once only used by professionals to even more people now.
Once you’ve downloaded the software, head over to the Nik Collection channel on YouTube where you’ll find video tutorials, including the one below called “Introduction to the Nik Complete Collection.” It’s a good place to start.
PS: Some readers have asked whether this software can work as a standalone program, or whether it needs to run with a program like Photoshop. Here’s what PC Magazinehas to say about that: “Though you can run the seven different plugins in the collection as standalone products, they tend to work better when you integrate them into an existing image editing program, like Adobe’s PhotoShop. ‘(On Windows) You can make shortcuts to the individual .exe files on your desktop and then just drag stacks of images onto them,’ suggested one Google+ user.” In short, you have some options.
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Say you were a fan of Steven Spielberg’s moving coming-of-age drama Empire of the Sun, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and starring a young Christian Bale. Say you read the autobiographical novel on which that film is based, written by one J.G. Ballard. Say you enjoyed it so much, you decided to read more of the author’s work, like, say, 1973’s Crash, a novel about people who develop a sexual fetish around wounds sustained in staged automobile accidents. Or you pick up its predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition, a book William S. Burroughs described as stirring “sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn.” Or perhaps you stumble upon Concrete Island, a warped take on Defoe that strands a wealthy architect and his Jaguar on a highway intersection.
You may experience some dissonance. Who was this Ballard? A realist chronicler of 20th century horrors; perverse explorer of—in Burroughs’ words—“the nonsexual roots of sexuality”; sci-fi satirist of the bleak post-industrial wastelands of modernity? He was all of these, and more. Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today.
In addition to his fictional creations, Ballard made several disturbingly accurate predictions in interviews he gave over the decades (collected in a book titled Extreme Metaphors). In 1987—with the film adaptation of Empire of the Sun just on the horizon and “his most extreme work Crash re-released in the USA to warmer reaction,” he gave an interview to I‑D magazine in which he predicted the internet as “invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information.” This may not seem especially prescient (see, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” for a chilling futuristic scenario much further ahead of its time). But Ballard went on to describe in detail the rise of the Youtube celebrity:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
The themes of celebrity obsession and technologically constructed realities resonate in almost all of Ballard’s work and thought, and ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.”
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
Though Ballard thought in terms of film and television—and though we ourselves play the role of the selecting computer in his scenario—this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc. (See Ballard in the interview clip above discuss further “the possibilities of genuinely interactive virtual reality” and his theory of the 50s as the “blueprint” of modern technological culture and the “suburbanization” of reality.) In addition to the Vogue essay, Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian—“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”
So what did Ballard, who died in 2009, think of the post-internet world he lived to see and experience? He discussed the subject in 2003 in an interview with radical publisher V. Vale (who re-issued The Atrocity Exhibition). “Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the “real” coming many decades ago. As he told I‑D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”
Each card comes with publication information. Images of the flip sides reveal that the sender often considered the publishers’ preprinted sentiments correspondence enough. (It’s something of a relief to realize that social media did not invent this kind of shorthand.)
Bunnies are not the only fruit here… seasonal flora and fauna abound, in addition to more explicitly religious iconography.
Earlier this week, we let you know about the animation software used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli coming out in an open source version free to download. While this makes available to you a piece of the technology used in the service of such masterpieces as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, it won’t, alas, get you any closer to possessing the artistic skills of the Ghibli team. To attain those, you’ve just got to engage in the same long, cyclical process of observation, replication, and refinement that you would when mastering anything.
Luckily, Miyazaki has provided plenty of examples to work with, and even, now and again in his long career, broken down his techniques for all to understand. Here we have four of his sketches, originally published in a 1980 issue of Animation Magazine (月刊アニメーション), which provide visual explanations of how to animate a character running — not an uncommon task, one imagines, for the Ghibli animators in charge of what the Creators Project calls “the constant running Miyazaki’s films are known for.” If you’ve ever tried to animate running yourself, you’ll know that what might at first seem like a simple, everyday physical action requires a great deal of subtlety to get right.
The early motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge gave the world a sense of this when he captured the mechanics of both men and horses running back in the 1880s, but to take those real-world observations and render them convincingly in animation — much less with the characteristic Ghibli smoothness — takes things to another level altogether. “Only Miyazaki man,” said animator LeSean Thomas when he tweeted these images. “Such effortless lines and silhouettes. Years of hard work & learning on display in these sketches!”
To those who wish to follow Miyazaki’s method of animating running in order to go on to making the kind of lavish cinematic stories he and his collaborators have, best of luck; to those who’d rather not put in the decades, well, you can still learn his method of making instant ramen.
Every decade, when the British Film Institute (BFI) announces the outcome of its Sight & Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, cinephiles listen; no less a serious movie person than Roger Ebert called it, among the countless polls of great movies, “the only one most serious movie people take seriously.” When the BFI conducts the poll, it divides those polled into two groups: one for critics like Ebert, and one for directors like, say, Quentin Tarantino, whose thorough knowledge of cinema and absolute seriousness as a movie person almost makes him a critic as well, albeit one who does his criticism in the form of movies.
In the 2002 poll, Tarantino named these as the greatest films of all time:
You can watch two of Tarantino’s 2002 picks, the formally experimental caper comedy Hi Diddle Diddle as well as His Girl Friday, the capstone of the screwball comedy subgenre, for free online. Once you’ve enjoyed the both of them, why not have a look at Tarantino’s selections a decade on, for the 2012 Sight & Sound directors poll, to compare and contrast, with the new titles bolded:
Tarantino’s 2012 selections reveal a clear increase in appreciation, or at least willingness to vote his appreciation, for high-profile pictures of the 1970s — Apocalypse Now, Jaws, Taxi Driver, The Bad News Bears — a decade whose cinema to which the director has made no lack of homage. We’ll have to wait six more years, until the 2022 poll, to get a full sense of how Tarantino’s idea of the canon has changed. Will the grim, satirical, and lurid films of the 70s consume most of his list by then? Will he favor a different era of film history entirely? I’d only put money on one thing for sure about the preference of this filmmaker who loves dialogue even more than violence: His Girl Friday isn’t going anywhere.
On the cusp of success, Henson, along with fellow puppeteer Don Sahlin (the creator and voice of Rowlf) venture to teach kids how to make a puppet out of pretty much anything you’ll find around the house. Such vision appears easy, but it really shows the genius of Henson, as he and Sahlin make characters from a tennis ball, a mop, a wooden spoon, a cup, socks, an envelope, even potatoes and pears. (There a lot to be said for the inherent comedy of googly eyes, and the importance of fake fur.)
An unknown assistant takes some of these puppets and brings them to life while Henson and partner create more–funny voices, personalities, even a bit of anarchy are in play. Surprisingly, Kermit does not make an appearance, although his sock ancestor does.
The man who saw potential puppets in everything is in his element and relaxed. Check it out, smile, and then raid your kitchen for supplies for your own puppet show. And although Henson promises a further episode, it has yet to be found on YouTube, or elsewhere.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The auto industry continues to take steps forward, sometimes big, sometimes small. They’re tinkering with electric and driverless cars, and they’re finding ways to improve the safety of everyday vehicles already on the road. How much incremental progress have we made? Just watch the video produced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. A 2009 Chevy Malibu crashes into a colossal 1959 Chevy Bel Air at 40 miles per hour. And despite its “Safety-Girder” cruciform frame (a safety innovation Chevy developed during the 1950s) the bigger Bel Air didn’t fare well at all. The same applies to the dummy inside.
Here’s how the Institute described what happened to the Bel Air to The New York Times:
This car had no seat belts or air bags. Dummy movement wasn’t well controlled, and there was far too much upward and rearward movement of the steering wheel. The dummy’s head struck the steering wheel rim and hub and then the roof and unpadded metal instrument panel to the left of the steering wheel.
During rebound, the dummy’s head remained in contact with the roof and slid rearward and somewhat inward. The windshield was completely dislodged from the car and the driver door opened during the crash, both presenting a risk of ejection. In addition, the front bench seat was torn away from the floor on the driver side.
The Bel Air got a “Poor” rating in every safety category; the Malibu a “Good.”
Although a lot of America seems stuck in reverse, car design is one area where we’re moving forward, hopefully with even better days to come.
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