Showcase: afterworld

I just discovered this site and am almost done watching all 14 of their episodes available online.  It’s an internet series made with what looks like a combination of heavily retouched photographs, 3D modeling and animation and a sort of stop animation/frame-by-frame-ish type technique.  It’s like a slideshow of images, with some animation thrown in and sometimes even more to give it more interest.  It’s an awesome show, and even though the style at first is a little odd, (the non-moving characters is very different from “normal” motion we see in movies these days), it’s a really cool series.  I really liked the beginning the most, with the lonliness in the post-apocalyptic world.  It reminds me of a movie coming out soon called I Am Legend with Will Smith.  That aside, though, this is a really cool work with some impressive narration and an interesting style that really just sucked me right in.  It’s a very cool idea, something I wouldn’t expect to see on TV, especially in the manner in which they went about making the series, from the style in which it’s presented to the mindset of the main character.  I think it’s a great break from the typical American sitcom or CSI-based melodrama.  Awesome link, I’m glad to showcase this, and I think this is going to mark the beginning of a series of Showcase items, that maybe I’ll do one major one once a week or something, and otherwise I’ll post regularly, as much as possible.  Anyway, that’ll develop on its own.  Enjoy this for now.

Link: http://www.afterworld.tv/

Send in your films!

The good guys over at Microfilmmaker.com have made an offer you can’t refuse! Hah, how’d ya like that movie quote? However, this one isn’t “Send in your films or we’ll put a gun to your head,” this is a generous offer from the guys at the very helpful e-zine to watch, review, and fully critique your films in depth and then put them on the magazine. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Videomaker does this too,” well that’s what I thought. And you’d be right. But… they don’t feature full-length films, and if they critiqued them they wouldn’t feature them on their vidcast because of time constraints. This e-zine can link to your site, review your film, and feature it in their magazine, because they don’t have a vidcast with a time cap. So you get all the coverage you want with plugs galore, all because you made the deal. So, get to it, filmmakers! The submitting page is here and it’s open to anyone. What are you waiting for!?

Here’s what Jeremy Hanke of Microfilmmaer says: it’s “a free, in-depth critique to help you become a better filmmaker that’s written by actual filmmakers! *smile*” Gotta love the smile! “Yes indeed. Incidentally, we do both feature length films and shorts.”

Also, if you come back later on with a film but can’t find the link to the site, it’s in the Blogroll on the right.

Link: http://www.microfilmmaker.com/film_sub.html

A/V > RF > A/V… there’ll be a quiz!

Well here’s a little gadget I found today that looked quite cool.  I wouldn’t really use it in the small, one-room studio setup I have now… in my bedroom… but in a larger setup with multiple rooms all making up a studio or something, or if you just have better satellite reception in one room than another (of which I don’t know the technical possibility, since I thought satellites were supposed to reach most anything and everything… except sometimes in bad weather… heh), then this tool might be useful for you.  You plug it into your workstation (editing, effects, whatever), it converts your audio/visual signal into a radio signal which gets sent to the receiving end of the gadget (presumably in a different room), and that converts it back into an audio/visual signal and is plugged into your TV console or monitor for previewing purposes and what have you.  I thought it sounded cool and possibly useful in a studio where maybe you want to preview your final or even rough cuts of your films on a big screen to get more of a feel for it, but can’t buy another monitor and don’t want to waste a DVD – plus you want to see it in full quality – that would mean lengthy exporting and authoring to watch the DVD (depending on your system).  This would potentially solve that, since you could, I imagine, just set it up to preview just the comp window of your editing app, render out all the preview files in the Timeline and then go into the other room and hit play.  Oh yea, and don’t forget to add a couple of seconds of black first so you don’t miss anything while running from room to room.  You could even trick your hot date and tell her your new movie’s on TV at 8, check it out at your place in your home theater.  Aww… romantic.

Link: http://www.geeks.com/…