pjorge.com

Homoludicus parece decidida a sacar en España los juegos que no se atreve a sacar nadie más. Tras Agrícola ahora le toca a Galaxy Trucker, juego que tengo en la lista de los deseos desde hace un tiempo.

Hello, WALL•E!: Pixar Reaches for the Stars. Un interesante artículo sobre cómo se logró el aspecto visual de la última película de Pixar.

Jeremy Lasky, DP camera, who worked in close collaboration with Danielle Feinberg, DP lighting, was eager to break new ground at Pixar. “At the very beginning of preproduction, when I came on, Andrew had a lot of preconceptions of what he wanted for a film without traditional dialogue. All of the staging, all of the shots have to be really clear for the audience to understand the backstory in addition to the main plot of the film. The planet’s covered in trash: What happened? So we had to convey it visually. As always, the first pressure is just telling the story right. Only in this case, there’s no dialogue crutch.

“So the question became: How can we make this work? Shots have to be so specific that you’re always following what’s going on. On top of that, Andrew said, ‘I want it to feel real.’ He wasn’t talking about photoreal, but that you believe you’re watching a little robot doing what he’s doing. To me, that triggered the notion that we have to raise our game a little.

“We have this virtual camera that we’ve used with variations of the same camera package for years, but we’ve never pushed it to be more like a live-action camera. So we took it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up to emulate the way a 35mm anamorphic camera would move: how it pivots, where it tilts from, how it works on a dolly. We based it on the concept of how you would shoot a sci-fi movie today with anamorphic lenses.

El otro día leía sobre la confianza en Pixar y cómo se demuestra. Mi conclusión fue: tengo tanta fe en Pixar que ahora mismo compraría los DVD de sus próximas 5 películas sin ni siquiera saber el título.

(vía Eduo en Twitter)

The Art Inquirer: Hand Painting by Guido Daniele

I doubt that I will have time to get into a theater very often for the next month or so?summer vacation is an oxymoron when you?re working on deadline?but if anything can drive me back into theaters, it is the right-wing apoplexy over a little Pixar movie called WALL-E. Apparently a film whose primary purpose is to engender any number of commercial tie-ins is, in fact, a piece of anti-consumerist propaganda lecturing the public on the evils of environmental degradation and other forms of liberal ?non-sense.? Oh, and it?s filled with ?Malthusian fear-mongering, too.? I might just have to get out to theaters so that I can receive my regular dose of political indoctrination.

The Chutry Experiment » Robots in Love

Se trata de documentos Power Point compuestos por un conjunto de imágenes y breves comentarios que son portadores de un contenido unitario: los hay humorísticos, poéticos, narrativos, nostálgicos, de denuncia y de otros géneros que ahora no recuerdo. Algunos tienen incluso música. Unos vienen como un ejecutable que lanza el slide show, y otros deben ser hojeados, diapositiva a diapositiva, por el receptor. Tienen desde una decena de páginas hasta cuarenta, cincuenta o más. En su mayor parte son anónimos, y su vía de difusión, ya lo hemos dicho, es el correo electrónico.

El blog del futuro del libro: Las obras Power Point

Bruno Faidutti presenta su lista de mejores juegos del 2008. El próxima día 10 anunciará el mejor de ellos.

OK, I’m just cheating, since I already know the winner. Anyway, my Game of the Year is a success, and is now much awaited. I’ve therefore decided to foster the buzz with giving, like with all such prizes, a nominated list. So, here’s the list of the 12 nominated games. The winner, and the detailed gaming year report, will be published around July 10th.

Bruno Faidutti

Hace ya casi un año se me ocurrió la soberana chorrada de hacer un video similar al mensaje que sale en YouTube cuando un video ha sido retirado We?re sorry, This video is no longer available. Lo que no esperaba al publicarlo, es que sea el video que mas se ha visto de todos los que he subido

Una historia con bastante gracia.

enGeneral | Reacciones a ?This video is no longer available?

If you?re looking for content for your site but don?t want to create it yourself or pay money for it, there are a lot of options available to you. Whether you are looking for images, articles or multimedia, there are many sites on the Web that make available a library of work available for you to use.

Seven Great Sites for Legal, Free Content : The Blog Herald

Webapp Bomomo is a drawing application that’s slick enough to make random squiggles seem elegant, but also lets you fine-tune your design. Whether you’re looking for a change of desktop wallpaper, wrapping paper that’s really unique, or just an intriguing background, Bomomo’s results almost always look pretty decent. And while the colors are randomly generated, they tend to come in complementary waves. Bomomo is a free to sign up for and use.

Art: Bomomo Makes Abstract-ish Art Simple

But stories are more interesting when they can manipulate the mode, break into new territory and redefine previously understood ideas. The Oceanic 6 have certainly returned home, but they’re not quite the O6. They’re more like the O62, and they couldn’t tell the homefolk what they’ve been through even if they wanted to. (Who would believe them, and how would they explain the lack of an island?) In most monomythic stories, the person returns somewhat more than she or he was before leaving; the O62 are both more and less, in some ways exaggerations of their strengths and weaknesses. What’s more, those strengths and weaknesses seem to be the reverse of what they were on the island: Sayid, the man who walked away from torture, is now Ben’s hired assassin. Jack, the social leader and healer, is verging on a heavy case of delirium tremens and can barely manage himself, let alone a scalpel. Hurley (with the help of Libby) went from finding an inner strength and confidence in his own mental stability to playing chess with dead Nigerian warlords in the Santa Rosa mental hospital. Sun has gone from a near-shrinking violet who was looking for a back door out of her marriage to a corporate titan living for the memory of her husband. Kate, always on the run and making just the wrong choice at the right time, has become a pillar of stability in her role as surrogate mother. Ben has gone from a kind of island shaman-king to a permanent state of exile, stuck in a cycle of vengeance and samsara out in his own private Land of Nod. We don’t yet know about Desmond or Lapidus, but we do know something about another islander, Locke. The news isn’t good.

Atención, contiene spoiler de la cuarta temporada de Lost.

Powell’s Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - Of Myths and Pisteutics (or when the waves of faith crash against the rocks of reason)

En cualquier caso, es una de esas pequeñas joyas que necesita el cine español, una película original y diferente de lo que se hace habitualmente en estos lares, con un guión cuidado al milímetro en el que encajan todos los detalles (incluso aquellos que apenas te habías fijado que estaban allí) y con una de las imágenes icónicas más impactantes del cine español reciente, una Momia Rosa armada con unas tijeras, que construyen una de las mejores películas posibles sobre viajes en el tiempo, en una línea muy diferente a la de las referenciales Regreso al futuro o Primer, que más parece remitir a los Límites de la Realidad o a Robert A. Heinlein. Una pena que la dirección de actores no esté demasiado inspirada, porque la película se queda en notable cuando podría haber optado a matrícula.

LA PÁGINA 36

Openatownrisk.com

(vía Symbian Freak)

Cross-platform media player VLC is often referred to as the “Swiss Army knife of media applications” for good reason: Not only does VLC play nearly any file you throw at it (you even voted it the best desktop media player), but it can do so much more. From ripping DVDs to converting files to iPod-friendly formats, let’s take a look at the four coolest things you can do with VLC and start you on your way to becoming a VLC ninja.

Vlc: Master Your Digital Media with VLC

Hace días tratábamos el tema de las mentiras en la naturaleza y curiosamente el próximo día 10 de Julio se proyectará en Madrid un documental que nos puede dar una ligera idea de ello.

El cerebro de Darwin: Tramposos de cine.

Más de cien años después del nacimiento del cine y con una montaña de películas vistas no deja de ser un acontecimiento poder ver una película como Los Cronocrímenes ( Nacho Vigalondo, 2007 ), tan poco parecida a casi nada que haya visto antes, al menos estructuralmente. No es que el director cántabro haya descubierto una nueva forma de filmar ni tampoco es que trate temas que nadie más ha osado abordar, no. La auténtica virtud de esta película es la de saber contar con muy pocos elementos una historia de ciencia ficción pura, algo inaudito en el cine español. Dicho de otro modo, Nacho Vigalondo consigue crear una película casi minimalista dentro de un género, la CF, que es casi por definición ampuloso y recargado.

Libro de Notas: No parecerse a casi nada

En algunos medios, el periodismo hace tiempo que abandonó el barco y cuando llega esta época se nota más aún la falta de criterio y selección. Como ejemplo, una selección divertida de no-noticias de portada de algunos medios:

Caspa.tv: Ya llegó el verano a los medios

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Story: Stimpy’s Invention Storyboard

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Rescatamos ‘El viaje a ninguna parte’, una obra maestra de la radionovela - rtve.es

Lo malo de leer entrevistas con gente como Kenji Murakami es descubrir que te interesa ver lo que hacen pero su obra parece imposible de encontrar. Les dejo con este párrafo que me ha resultado muy interesante:

By the way, do you know how I make a living? It’s impossible to live off making independent documentaries, so I mostly work as a director on TV series, mostly on idol shows. Right now I’m doing Keitai Deka at TBS for producer Andrew Tamon Niwa. Together with Takashi Shimizu, Yudai Yamaguchi and a few others I did Kaiki Daikazoku, The Big Horror Family, which is a kind of horror comedy series. The producer for that was Yo Umezaki at TV Tokyo. That’s how I make a living. Oh, there’s another thing I do too: I make these factory videos. There are people who are factory otaku, these people actually exist. Like trainspotters, except they are factory spotters. So I make videos that feature only shots of factories. These DVDs sell really well. Also, my latest work was shot in a sex museum. The museum was going to close its doors, so I went there and filmed every single object in their collection. The final package is a three-hour DVD. That’s how I make money. Most documentary filmmakers can’t make a living off their work, which is why a lot of us become teachers or work in television. The TV work is totally opposite from what I do in my own films, because it’s meant for a mass audience. But if you look at the whole thing, I think it’s really well balanced, with the public stuff on one side and the personal things on the other.