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Message taken from the Dangerbird Records Site
We first heard tale that Dangerbird would be signing a Seattle band last night when the label tweeted: “Spoke too soon. We’ll be announcing our new signing from Seattle in the LA morning.” For the whole night SOTS headquarters was a buzz about who the signee would be. Dangerbird [...]
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What will Steven Spilerberg’s Tintin look like? The motion-capture work for his adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic character was shot last year, with Peter Jackson and WETA now working on post-production. We have yet to see a single design that shows off what the character will look like when the film appears in theaters next year.
But we can get a few ideas of what we’re likely to see based on comments Spielberg has now made about the tech used to make the film. It sounds as if his Tintin, played by Jamie Bell, won’t be a rubbery 3D CGI humanoid, but a much more direct recreation of the art style of Hergé.
The LA Times has comments from the director, who says he wanted to get as close to the series’ original art style as possible, and that working with digital recreations should allow audiences a better window into the world than live-action would provide. “Hergé wrote about fictional people in a real world, not in a fantasy universe,” Spielberg says. “It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”
The article doesn’t have a direct quote from Spielberg on this point, but says “Jamie Bell will be digitally made to look exactly like Hergé’s classic renderings of Tintin.” That’s heartening. And yet the film doesn’t sound like it will look like a traditional 2D picture, as Spielberg mentions seeing his actors and characters running through a three-dimensional world.
And based on his experience with motion capture, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Spielberg do more mocap in the future. Of working with actors on the digital ’stage’, he says:
I just adored it. It made me more like a painter than ever before. I got a chance to do so many jobs that I don’t often do as a director. You get to paint with this device that puts you into a virtual world, and allows you to make your shots and block all the actors with a small hand-held device only three times as large as an Xbox game controller.
Glass font sculpture by Colin Reid
Liverpool Cathedral hosts V & A sculpture
11th February – 31st May 2010
An optical glass font from the V&A, which incorporates the early Christian symbol of a fish, is now on display in the Lady Chapel of Liverpool Cathedral.
The work is by the contemporary sculptor Colin Reid, and is on loan to the Cathedral from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is at the Cathedral as part of the prize awarded to the Cathedral by ACE (Art and Christianity Enquiry) for the Tracey Emin neon, For You, above the Great West Doors, and was commissioned by ACE in 2004. It is supported on a wooden plinth designed by Jim Partridge.
The design of the font recalls the Greek word for fish, icthys, whose letters represent the words for ‘Jesus Christ God’s Son Saviour.’ The early Christians used the fish image to communicate their baptismal creed. It appears in the 1st century catacombs in Rome and still has a special significance for many Christians today.
Colin Reid wrote in 2004: “If I were to identify a single thread that runs through my work it would be the influence of nature. My current interest is in natural materials that have been worked by craftsmen’s hands in the past and are eroding and reverting to nature. The medieval stone carving high on Gloucester Cathedral is being restored and the stone-masons have erected scaffolding giving access to normally inaccessible stonework. This I have cast and used as the starting point for new works.”
The sculpture will join the Icons in Transformation exhibition, which features around 180 pieces of art and runs until March 18th.
Canon Anthony Hawley said, “Liverpool Cathedral is delighted to show this work, on its first visit to the North West, as part of the Cathedral’s mission to use the building to inform visitors and to encourage them to understand and learn about the challenge of the Christian faith.”
All today's stories on newscientist.com at a glance, including: how bugs could help us build sustainable cities, the quest to wipe out HIV for good, and an unexpected use for latex
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We’re really excited to announce that Idealab founder and CEO Bill Gross will be speaking at our Green:Net 2010 conference, which will be held on April 29 in San Francisco. Green:Net will be focused on how information technology — software, computing, communication networks — will fight climate change and Gross has been a pioneer of innovation and entrepreneurship for both IT and greentech.
In particular Idealab company eSolar, which makes solar thermal hardware and builds solar power plants, leverages smart algorithms and computing to reduce the cost of solar. Gross, who is chairman of eSolar and former CEO, explained to MIT Tech Review (which awarded eSolar with a Top 50 innovators award) that eSolar’s software, which can track the exiting beam of sunlight and tightly control the mirrors, is the company’s differentiation. Gross says:
Processing power is cheap, and in energy, it’s the only thing that’s getting cheaper. All other commodities, long term, are going to go up in price. That’s how we’re going to compete with fossil fuels: just pour software at the problem.
Gross’ Idealab has incubated more than 75 companies and we’re really excited to hear him speak about the future of computing and greentech. Buy tickets here for Green:Net on April 29 in San Francisco — hurry, last year we sold out.
Image courtesy of Idealab.
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Han Han Video Of Chongqing Police Subduing A Kidnapper
