Interesting Choice Episode 2: Remember the Fish

Episode 2 of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice Episode 1: "F" is for Fish

Episode 1 of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice Episode 0: The Pitch Line

The first episode of Interesting Choice is now up.

Polls are open until noon EST tomorrow, so go to www.interestingchoice.com to vote!

Interesting Choice

I've got a new project in the works. Announcing Interesting Choice: A Webseries As You Like It, a crowdsourced narrative where the viewers decide what happens. In this five(-plus?)-week class project, collaborators Brian Bernhard, Christy Sager and I will be producing a weekly webseries, with each new episode followed by a poll where you are invited to vote on what happens next.

Follow along and join in at http://www.interestingchoice.com.

Our first video will be going up first thing tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

The Last Book

Last weekend, I attended the second annual Global Game Jam at NYU. The Game Jam is a sort of worldwide endurance/speed game-development event in which teams come together and in the course of 48 hours conceive, design, and produce an entire game. The results tend to be quick, dirty, and a little rough around the edges, but often innovative and off-the-wall.

This year, the theme was "Deception," and in the GMT -5:00 time zone, the design constraints were "Rain, a Plain, or Spain." You can check out all the games created for the event at the GGJ website.

I'd like to present our team's game: an action/strategy game for the iPhone called The Last Book.



In The Last Book, civilization has been destroyed by a neverending rainfall. Everything, it seems, has been washed away. Generations after the onset of the deluge, you are the Librarian, tasked with protecting the last book in existence, the only remaining example of the written word. Keep the book dry by collecting and diverting the falling rain, and do your best to hold back the flood.



The rain falls relentlessly, wearing down whatever it touches. Play by arranging pots to collect the water and protect your structure from damage. As the pots get full, you can dump them safely out in the wells. Over time, your pots will wear down, too, so use your kilns to fire up new ones. Protect your kilns, also, because the rain will quickly put them out if they get wet.

Just hold out until the clouds break (two minutes) to collect your reward.

And at all costs, don't let any rain fall on the Book!



Controls: Tap the pots to move them. Select the brick you want to place the pot on, or tap a well to empty the pot. Up to three emptied pots will be stored in each well; tap the well again to retrieve a pot. Tap a kiln that's fired up to start a new pot, then tap it again to remove the pot when it's done.

Currently, in order to play The Last Book, you must have a Mac with the iPhone SDK installed. Download the package and compile the game file in Xcode to play.

For those who are unable to try it out personally, here's a video showing the gameplay:



The Last Book was made with a five-person team, which we christened Brainfall Studios. It was a wonderful group to work with, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to get to know them. Here are the credits:

Design, Story: Jess Haskins
Level Design: Ray Reilly
Programming: Ulf Schwekendiek
Art: R.M. Sean Jaffe
Music & Sound: Justin Mathews



(The team from left to right: Sean, Ray, Ulf, Jess, and Justin).

We had a great time, and we're all interested in continuing to work on the game to flesh it out and eventually release it on the app store. I'll be sure to let you know about it when we do!

For now, here's the link to the game's page on the GGJ site: The Last Book.

Seeing green

Nice video showing the ubiquitous use of greenscreen effects in television, often in unexpected places like ordinary-looking exterior shots for shows like Ugly Betty.



Via Mental Floss.

New Neil

I've belatedly discovered that the entire second season of the hilarious Zelda parody webseries The Legend of Neil is out, and even better, it's still funny.

Fishbowl

A four-minute recording of the tank at Japan's Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, the second largest in the world. PZ Myers of Pharyngula recommends that you "let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes." (The embedded video is HD quality, so you can pop it into full screen right here.) It's definitely better than any screensaver you've got.

The natives are very friendly

Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine encountering a rare flightless parrot in New Zealand in Last Chance to See. It has been suggested that the behavior displayed in this video may explain why it is so endangered.

Via Bioephemera.

Wonderland

Made almost exclusively from spliced and recombined audio samples from Disney's 1951 film Alice in Wonderland, Wonderland, by Australian electronic artist Pogo, is an oddly pleasing album of eerie, rhythmic chillout tunes. All four songs are available for download from Last.fm. (My favorite is Lost.) The first track, Alice, is also available as a music video on YouTube.





Be sure to check out Pogo's other remix work. Classic movie mélange Go Out and Love Someone is well worth a listen.

At the Hotel Paradise

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Ghost of Stephen Foster.

From the album "Perennial Favorites" (Mammoth Records). Winner of "Best Animated Music Video" at the 1999 Vancouver Animation Festival. Directed by Raymond Persi and Matthew Nastuk.

Getting hyped up for the SNZ show tomorrow. I can't wait!

The birds and the trees

The earth moves in this message from Greenpeace exhorting passion for the environment.

Via Next Nature.

Get your Machinarium now

Machinarium, the highly anticipated new game by Amanita Design (creators of Samorost), is due out in October 2009, and is available for pre-order now. Pre-ordering will get you $3 off the regular price of $20, as well as a "pre-order pack" containing a selection of hi-res images and mp3s from the game.

Hear the colors

Synesthesia, a short film by filmmaking duo Terry Timely.

Via shape+colour.

Four short films

World Builder is a blended live action/CGI film by director Bruce Branit. It took one day of filming and two years of post-production work to create this breathtaking work, which details an epic act of creation: in a futuristic holographic environment, a single man builds a fully-realized digital world from the ground up, using a suite of gestural Minority-Report-esqe development tools that should make any designer weep. A labor of love, in more ways than one.

Via shape+colour.





9 is a short computer-animated film by Shane Acker in which a race of diminutive sack-creatures scavenge in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world and try to evade their greatest enemy, a ruthless mechanical predator. It's an intriguing, well-realized world, and there are plans to expand the concept into a full-length feature.
Via io9.

Please Say Something is a mind-blowing short film by animator David O'Reilly. Disjointed and dreamlike, it tells the story of the stormy relationship between a cat and mouse couple. In the future. Amazing.

Via A near life experience.





Maestro is a charming CGI entry in the Portable Film Festival by Hungarian director Géza M. Tóth.

Five minutes before his big performance, the Maestro and his persistent mechanical assistant are in preparation mode. As the clock ticks, life at the top is not all it seems.

Via SleepTight.tv.

Dramedy at the end of the world

More fruits of last year's writers' strike have ripened and fallen to the ground: screenwriter John August has just released the pilot to proposed webseries The Remnants, an apocalyptic sitcom about a tribe of survivors who raid abandoned houses in the suburbs of LA for Pringles and Wiis in the aftermath of a civilization-ending disaster of an indeterminate nature. The tone is hip and ironic, what August describes as "a cross between The Stand and The Office." The well-formed cast includes Justine Bateman, Michael Cassidy, Ben Falcone, Ernie Hudson, Amanda Walsh, and experimental web artist Ze Frank (whose burgeoning collection of flash oddities, artsy webcamery, and multimedia playthings is well worth the detour).

Following the model of Dr. Horrible, The Remnants was conceived and produced during the dark, idle days of the WGA strike and shopped around to advertisers and sponsors for possible development as a new webseries. Though it was at one time under consideration by NBC, its chances aren't looking so good. The upside is that the pilot is now being released to the public, so we at least get to see what we're missing. And maybe it'll somehow generate lots and lots of interest and develop into something in the future.

You can watch the embedded video below, or see it in HD on Vimeo.

Via io9.

Catch up on your sci-fi

Battlestar Galactica returns to tv tonight with the first episode of the long-awaited Season 4.5. If you haven't yet, you definitely need to refresh yourself first with Sci-Fi's highly entertaining recap, Catch the Frak Up!, with rapid-fire narration by Starbuck. Covers pretty much everything, from the twisty plot turns to the universe basics ("'Frak' is a swear word, papers don't have corners, and there's more than one god").

Part I



Part II




And while we're on recaps, if you've never gotten your head around that whole Star Wars thing, get the broad outlines with Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it).

My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top.

Via io9.

Tales in pen and ink

Kunio Kato, a member of the ROBOT Character and Animation team, is a Japanese animator whose quietly surreal films portray a curious world of fantasy and whimsy. This year, his short Tsumiki no Ie ("La maison en petit cubes" or "House of Blocks") won the Annecy Cristal prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market.

In the highly surreal short The Apple Incident (2001), giant apples begin falling from the sky onto a bemused city. Winner of the Best Prize in the 2001 Laputa International Animation Festival.





Dreamy and dreamlike, Aru Tabibito no Nikki ("The Diary of Tortov Roddle" or "A Traveler's Diary") (2003) is a series of unconnected episodes of strange and whimsical happenings in the life of the eponymous hero, a tall traveler in a top hat who wanders the world astride his curiously long-legged pig companion. The film comprises Episodes 1-6. Selected for the 2004 Annecy festival, it was the winner of the Best Prize in the Laputa Animation Festival in 2003 and the Grand Prix in the Hida International Animation Festival of Folktales and Fables.

An excellent review of the film can be found at the Nishikata Film Review.





The adventures of Tortov Roddle continue in the bonus Episode 7, The Red Berry, in which the traveler encounters a garden of hallucinogenic red fruits.





Fantasy Story (2003) is another collection of vignettes illustrating various flights of fancy. It was a selection in the the 8th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF) and the Ottawa 04 International Animation Festival.





Michaël Dudok de Wit is a Holland-born animator living in London whose charming, spare, Japanese-influenced cartoon animations have won numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and the Annecy Grand Prix for his 2000 film Father and Daughter.

The Aroma of Tea (2006) is Dudok de Wit's latest film. It is drawn entirely in washes of tea.





Father and Daughter (2000) is a quiet, moving tale about a young girl awating the return of her lost father.





In the ancient tradition of cat-and-mouse cartoons comes Le Moine et Le Poisson ("The Monk and the Fish") (1994), a delightful, minimalist short about a monk's obsessive attempts to catch the fish he spies in the monastery pond.





Tom Sweep (1992) is a humorous little cartoon about the travails of a beleaguered street janitor.

Musical interlude

John Coltrane - Giant Steps.
Via { feuilleton ].





Gershon Kingsley - Popcorn.





José Feliciano - California Dreamin'.
Via A near life experience.

A sense of place

Morning travelogue is a curiously compelling record of one man's commute to work as he ditches the Tube in order to walk through some of the lovelier and more interesting parts of downtown London. If only we all had such a short, pedestrian-friendly, and pleasant itinerary. The somewhat accelerated tracking and a peppy, danceable tune help, too.
Via Weekend Stubble.






Fed by Birds has just shared a few photographs paired with ambient soundscapes from a recent trip Cornwall, in Cornish Sounds. The captured ambience of waves and seabirds and breezy forests and tolling churchbells is wonderfully tranquil.





I was reminded of Their Circular Life: An Exploration About Human Behavior, an interesting little flash presentation that allows you to cycle through twenty-four hours of sounds and images captured from stationary observation posts in a variety of urban locations. Go fast and watch the day whizz by your eyes, or slow down to listen to the nuances of the place.









At La grange numérique, the panoramic photography site of Denis Gliksman, you can find a number of beautiful 360° scenes, some with sound and animation, like this set of "Spriteoramas" of rocks and lapping waves on the coast of Brittany.

Fourth annual Halloween roundup

Happy Halloween, all. Here are some offerings in the spirit of the season. Enjoy.

Exhibits

A large collection of vintage Halloween postcards on Flickr.
Via Mira y Calla.






Spookshows.com is a treasure of vintage things suitable for Halloween, like this collection of vintage poison labels, or poster art advertising spook shows.
Via Mira y Calla.







The Art of Mourning is an excellent collection of antiques representing various funeral and mourning mementos and paraphernalia. There are also some articles about mourning art and practices through time.
Via Regina Noctis.









Cabinet Magazine visits the Museum of the Dead, a small church in Palermo that curates a startling display of preserved corpses.

There are no tickets and no reductions for this visit to the underworld. A fat, unspiritual, greasy monk just takes the money and throws it into a basket with unexpected abruptness. A guidebook I buy later dresses up the visit and, after a serious discussion of burial customs in different cultures starting in antiquity, talks about all the artworks lining the stairs going down into the catacombs. I don't notice these important paintings. It seems a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what lies ahead is anything but grim.






Games

Ben Leffler is the talented designer behind the spectacular Exmortis series of games (1 and 2; there's also the horror short Purgatorium). I had hoped there would be an Exmortis 3 ready to offer you for Halloweentime this year, but no, it's still in development. There is, however, Goliath the Soothsayer. Rejoice. Play.
Walkthrough at Jay Is Games.





There's also a new sequel to The Bat Company's horror series, Atrocitys: Atrocitys 2: The Revenge. Point-and-click scarefest. Be warned, subtlety is not in their toolbox.





Scuttlebuggery is the latest flash oddity from super-stylish gothic design studio My Pet Skeleton. It's sort of like a game of liquid soccer played between beetles with drops of absinthe and formaldehyde. Is that clear?





In Zombie Inglor, you are an ordinary man who has been bitten by a zombie, and you have fifty days to find a cure. Saving the village from the zombie infestation would be nice, too. This is a neat little RPG game with adventure and combat elements, with some nice touches like day/night changes, weather, and fully voiced characters.
Via Regina Noctis.





How will you fare when the outbreak occurs and undead roam the streets? Take the Zombie Survival Quiz to test your fitness, wits, temperament, and knowledge.





Video

It's time for the annual pilgrimage to Childrin R Skary for the newest works from this prolific gothic animation studio. Check out the films playing in the theater, or visit author Katy Towell's non-Childrin site, Crookedsixpence.com, where you can find more movies like the gorgeously spooky Never Woke Up.







For a whole pile of Halloween-themed animation, check out Newgrounds Presents Halloween 2008, a Flash film fest and competition from the popular Flash gaming site with ten cash prizes for the best entries. Some notable entries:

The Dark Room is slow, dreamlike, and gory, and features some very nice background locations. Aside from that, it's hard to tell just what happened.





While it may not feature the slickest animation around, Vampiric Wit is a short, humorous entry that wins points for its clever premise.





.Alice. is a moody little piece, short on plot, that aims to recreate the effect of a horror movie haunted highway scene. Very cinematic in style.





Fear.net is a horror-themed video site that offers a mix of full movies, clips and excerpts, shows, shorts, and other videos. It's a slasher/thriller/horror lover's playground. Try the Halloween FEAR Fest for some seasonal fun.
Via Regina Noctis.

ADDENDUM: io9 has just posted a great list of several places to find free horror movies online in addition to Fear.net.

For more, check the "Halloween" label for past years' offerings.

Particle rap

Tomorrow is the official inauguration of CERN's breakthrough particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It actually went online weeks ago. I missed it — while the fate of the world hung in the balance (not really), I was off in Alaska, peacefully enjoying the continued existence of the planet Earth. While that was cause for celebration (and if you want to celebrate, io9 has got you covered), just over a week later the LHC was shut down again due to mechanical issues, and will stay down for winterization. Still, it'll be expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and imperiling the Earth again next spring.

So, the point of this post: in order to explain the mysterious, sometimes feared, and much-misunderstood workings of the LHC, a bunch of clever folks bravely stepped up to demystify the project and give the world the reassurances it needed in the form of the brilliant, beautiful Large Hadron Rap. Because science is best popularized through rap, as MC Hawking well knows. If you want to memorize every word and sing along, check here for lyrics and other info.





Don't forget that on the day the LHC went live, Torchwood was there, to make sure the Earth was safe. On "Big Bang Day", BBC's Radio 4 broadcast "Lost Souls", a Torchwood radio play commemorating the activation of the LHC. It's no longer available freely (again, sorry for the lateness — Alaska), but it can be purchased for download, and there's also an audio cd.





And just because the song made me think of it: They Might Be Giants - Particle Man. As dramatized by Tiny Toon Adventures. That was my first introduction to the song, and it's good enough for you, too.

I actually screened several different Particle Man music videos on YouTube, until some peculiar live-action renditions (is that the real TMBG video?) and what appeared to be a slew of similarly-executed entries from some beginning animation class project began to turn my brain to mush, and I simply fell back on what was oldest and most familiar. So enjoy this musical and animation classic on, roughly speaking, the subject of particles. Sort of.






I think what this post needs to finish it off is some MC Hawking. MC Hawking - Entropy.





And now I promise I'm all geeked out. It'll be something classy next time.

Mario Paint jam

Here are a few samples from a whole thriving genre I've only just discovered the existence of -- popular tunes painstakingly transcribed into Mario Paint or Mario Paint Composer. It's the restraints of the form that make it so fun -- startlingly satisfying tunes emerge from a very small palette.

"What is Love" by axelrod777.





Jonathan Coulton - "Still Alive" by geoffnet1.


[Embedding disabled]



Michael Jackson - "Thriller" by geoffnet1.





Queen - "Bohemian Rhapsody" by cat333pokemon.





For more good ones, check out The 10 Most Creative Mario Paint Compilations.

Web is the new tv

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (see previous post) was only the latest and most well-publicized attempt by tv pros to try their hand at making the web a relevant medium for well-produced content, but there are a number of other worthy webseries out there. As with Dr. Horrible, the writer's strike definitely helped spur the growth of the emergent medium by providing a convenient glut of bored and idle creative types who were forbidden from working in the usual avenues. Here's a run-down of some of the projects I've noticed. (In this installment, I'm sticking strictly to professionally-produced live-action comedy series. Wow, look at all those qualifiers.)

If you just like watching webseries with Felicia Day in them, you're in luck, as there are a couple of options. Before Dr. Horrible, she wrote and starred in her own webseries, The Guild, a light comedy about a bunch of World of Warcraft players who are one day drawn away from their computers and brought together in an unprecedented meeting in the real world. A little bit Penny and a little bit Liz Lemon, Day's "Codex" is just a sweet gamer girl trying to make it in a cold and lonely and sometimes pretty strange world.





There's also The Legend of Neil, a webseries written by Sandeep Parikh ("Zaboo" from The Guild) and also featuring Felicia Day. It's a about a guy who gets sucked into a Zelda game one day by improbable means, and the humor, while generally fairly crude, is also pretty irresistible. I'm sure that many hours logged in front of a console playing Zelda will also enhance the viewing experience significantly.

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

Goodnight Burbank, which somewhat grandiosely claims to be the "World's First Character-Driven Comedy Created for the Internet", and further describes itself as "a little 'The Office,' a little 'The Daily Show'" (to which I would probably add "a little 'Sports Night'", a comparison inevitably evoked by the setting), is a fictional nightly newscast in which the anchors let their hair down to gripe and jibe in-between news segments with headlines ripped from real current events. Some of the humor is a bit broad and rather stock, for instance the stereotypically geeky middle-aged newscaster who lives with his mom, remains a virgin, and talks incessantly about Doctor Who and his fantasies involving Klingons, or the episode which is entirely given over to a by-the-numbers retread of an old Abbott and Costello gag (yeah, that one), but the energy and earnestness of the production make it easier to forgive the occasional creative shortcut and just enjoy the simple laughs.





Honesty is a comedy with the simple premise that, when placed in a variety of typical social situations, everyone always says what they're really thinking. This clever, funny series won the 2007 Webby for long form or series comedy.






Wainy Days is billed as the "fictionalized life" of David Wain, which is probably stretching it a bit. Drawing on Wain's sketch comedy roots, the short episodes of the series are absurdist in tone and sometimes dive off the deep end into the simply surreal. Superficially, they're about Wain's romantic misadventures in an outrageous New York City, where people will apparently say and do the darndest things. The series is on its third season and is the winner of the 2008 Webby for long form or series comedy.





Best for last: Horrible People, created by A.D. Miles, is unexpectedly perfect. It's a fake soap opera that takes place during a momentous and very eventful engagement party in which the intrigue and the bodies just keep piling up. The over-the-top plot twists are played straight with a soap's overstated sense of drama, and the tone of the humor, about broken family dynamics and rich people behaving badly, repeatedly put me in mind of Arrested Development. It could be just that the heartless, scheming Mother and Lucille Bluth are drawing from the same archetypal well, or that callous, self-absorbed Michael seemed at times to be channeling Gob (who for his part already behaved like he was living in a bad soap opera), but I could almost hear the ukuleles in the distance.

Creatively, Horrible People belongs to the same The State/Wet Hot American Summer/The Ten talent pool that spawned Wainy Days, and even features a brief walk-on by Wain, but Horrible People benefits from the more structured plot and focused thematic directive of its fake soap format, and presents a more cohesive and rewarding experience than its free-associative, adolescent comedy brethren. The internet is great for fostering that kind of no-rules absurdist comedy, essentially professional versions of kids messing around on YouTube, but Horrible People proves that content produced for the web can be much more, well, televisual.





A golden age of web video seems to be dawning. Having "Horrible" in the title seems somehow auspicious, but I'm hopeful for new projects that can combine the best of uncensored creative freedom and seasoned professional expertise to create exciting shows that comb new territory and tell new stories, without necessarily resorting to college-boy humor and webcam hijinx. If you want to discover more quality work, the annual Webby Awards are a good place to start. Oh, and if you still haven't seen Dr. Horrible, it's still up on Hulu, so I guess that whole "limited time only!" thing was a psych. Off you go.

Not any more

To celebrate successful completion of my refresher course in Illustrator and Photoshop this week, I've chosen to reflect on how I might have accomplished the same thing at home for free by watching the whole first season of You Suck at Photoshop, the award-winning comedic video tutorial series by gloomy guy Donnie Hoyle on My Damn Channel.

If think your Photoshop skills can handle it, the series recently returned for a second season.

For the curious, here's a Time article on the creators, whose identity was a mystery for some time: The Photoshop Guys Revealed!

Supervillains singing

In case you haven't been paying much attention to this Internets thing and haven't heard, let me be the one to inform you that the time is now to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the low-budget musical comedy internet miniseries by Joss Whedon about an aspiring suburban supervillain, the sweet humanitarian he has a crush on, and the do-gooder arch-nemesis who comes between them, played respectively by Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day, and a delightfully hammy Nathan Fillion. Acts I and II are online now (streaming free on the site through Hulu, and also on iTunes), and Act III will be available on Saturday, July 19th. The lot will be taken down promptly on Sunday the 20th at midnight, so don't miss it.





Whedon takes a moment to explain the impetus behind this strange little project:

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

It's the perfect treat for fans of Whedon's work: hip, unpretentious, self-aware genre comedy, silly and funny and touching. The songs aren't half catchy, either. If you couldn't stand Buffy or Firefly this probably isn't for you, but if you're largely unacquainted with Whedon's work and devoted fan cult, there's nothing here to alienate you -- it's just some good fun, with mad science, bulging muscles, plots, heists, and laundromats. And a fair bit of singing.

UPDATE 07/29: All three acts are available for free again on Hulu for a limited time, so you have another chance if you missed it the first time!

Blast from the future

Last month saw the release of the new Futurama direct-to-dvd movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs. (This is the second such dvd -- in case you missed it, Futurama's previous last gasp from beyond the grave was Bender's Big Score, and shame on you for missing it!) It's a rare reprieve for a canceled series, and here's to many more.

To sort of celebrate the occasion, and mostly because I just discovered this and think it's cool, I have a brief selection of videos showing the origins of Futurama's theme song, which was composed by Christopher Tyng and inspired by "Psyché Rock", a song off the 1967 album Messe pour le temps présent by French electronic music composer Pierre Henry.

There's even a great retro-futuristic animated music video (from a 2000 release of the compiled remixes, I believe) to accompany the now-familiar, spacey tune. I just love it. Here's Pierre Henry - Psyché Rock:





The song has been covered and remixed many times (for a full list of artists and versions, see here). This is just one of the remixes by Fatboy Slim (also with some nice animation):





Now you probably want to see the Futurama opening sequence, straight up. You don't want to know how long I spent searching YouTube for a suitable version -- none exists. I couldn't even find a good video for the cool new version from the opening credits of Bender's Big Score. What's going on, Internet? As a substitute, the best I could find was this extended version of the song, which includes all of the various comic subtitles from the opening sequence. (The volume's pretty weak, so be prepared to crank it up.)

Gargoyles lives again

Gargoyles went off the air in 1996. If you thought it was all over and done with, you have some catching up to do.

SLG (Slave Labor Graphics) is publishing TWO all-new series of Gargoyles comics, with new canon stories penned by creator Greg Weisman himself: there's the GARGOYLES main series, with #1-7 out so far, and the new spinoff series BAD GUYS, which just debuted its first issue and has the second due in February.

Lily Allison assembled this excellent teaser trailer for the GARGOYLES: CLAN BUILDING VOLUME ONE graphic novel, which collects the first six issues of the Gargoyles comic in one trade paperback.





Here are a couple more trailers, while we're at it. A general GARGOYLES comic teaser by Greg "Xanatos" Bishansky:





And a BAD GUYS comic teaser (in B&W, like the comic itself) by TricksterPuck:





I made a handy Listmania list gathering all the comics and dvds available from Amazon.com in one spot. (Buena Vista has so far released all of Season 1 and Volume 1 of Season 2 on dvd -- we're still waiting for the release of Season 2, Volume 2 to complete the series!)

Check here for a schedule of past and upcoming release dates for the comics.

Your one-stop shop is the Gargoyles Comic Website, where you can find out how to order issues of the comic, join the mailing list to be notified when new issues are released, read up on the Gargoyles backstory, and more.

A little sample of the art from #5, "Bash". And lest you worry it's some peculiar pan-Disney Aladdin crossover, be at ease -- it's just Halloween. Always an exciting night for the gargoyles.

The fan community is still active over at Station 8, where fans congregate in the old Comment Room, and Greg Weisman still regularly answers questions, posts ramblings, and shares an ongoing "This Day in Gargoyles Universe History" feature at Ask Greg.

So, there's plenty to see. Good times for a Gargoyles fan.

Performance drawing

These days, anything can be made into a performance -- even the simple act of putting [implement] to [surface].

Field Music - In Context. A music video featuring an illustration drawn in a single, unbroken line. A very long, intricate one. Impressive.
Via 30gms.





The Graffiti Machine. This bizarre contraption, a spray can suspended between two computer-controlled ribbons, can produce a painted scene to rival the work of any street punk.
Via blanketfort.





Ambidextrous Drawing. Pretty self explanatory. The artwork is not my favorite, but you can't quibble with the technique. Ever feel like you're wasting half your life -- or body?





Drawing The Perfect Circle By Hand. This guy really knows how to play up a freak talent. (Hint: There's not really a world championship.)

Eighteen great animated music videos

Amanita Design (creator of Samorost) does it all -- I haven't yet had the opportunity to link to the absolutely beautiful music video they created for Under Byen - "Plantage". The visual style will feel very familiar to fans of Samorost.







I adore this video. The song is "Remind Me/So Easy" by Norwegian duo Röyksopp, and the animation is a strange and wonderful video by French design studio H5 showing a day in the life of a London office worker as told entirely through infographics, from the features of the alarm clock that wakes her up and where her sewage goes after she flushes to dancing pie charts and stock quotes at the office to stats on pints of beer consumed across the country at the end of the workday. Though the style is deceptively simple, the system is bogglingly complex, revealing the amazingly intricate workings of modern life as we move through it in almost total oblivion.
Via Le territoire des sens.






"The Child" by Alex Gopher is another video created by H5 in 1999. In this one, the entire story is acted out by animated blocks of typography. Very cool.





Like those? More music videos by H5:
Darkel - At the End of the Sky (2006)
Étienne Daho - "Retour à toi" (2003)
Goldfrapp - "Twist" (2003)
Massive Attack - "Special Cases" (2003)
Sinema - "In My Eyes" (2002)
Wuz (Alex Gopher and Demon) - "Use Me" (2002)
Playgroup - "Number One" (2001)
Super Furry Animals - "Juxtaposed With U" (2001)

Steampunk Daedalus and Icarus is a steampunk reimagining of the Greek myth in a sleek woodcut-slideshow style by David Brunell Brutman, creator of the also steampunk-themed illustrated tale The Æthereal Adventures of Emma Verne. The song used in the video is Michael Andrews - "Mad World".
Via Brass Goggles.





Illustrator and animator Clemens Habicht has a very nice portfolio of music videos, most done in a loose, freewheeling collage style. Try the freaky, funny Motor - "Din10", the dreamier, equally expressive Sia - "Numb", or the more minimalist, delicate Lucine ICL - "Seemingly".





In illustrator and animator Joel Trussell's high-energy cartoon world, femme fatales pull off daring heists in spaceborne manta rays with robot owls, scary nurses chase furry woodland animals on railcars, and viking ships do battle by electric guitar. Wild, wacky stuff. The music videos in question are Atomic Swindlers - "Float (my electric stargirl)", Kid 606 - "The Illness", and Jason Forrest - "War Photographer".