Tag: animation

Super Bowl XL – I Watched All The Ads

How’s this for a shallow life with little purpose – I’ve just watched all the ads from tonight’s Super Bowl!

I wasn’t paying total attention during the game, so I actually went online to find a Super Bowl ad site.

Of course there’s one. There are probably dozens more.

Amazingly, in order to watch the commercials on AOL, you are subjected to additional ‘interstitial’ commercials.

So, here we go with a little summary of what I liked, in no particular order.

FedEx Cavemen – Can an ad be stupid and clever at once? This one was. I especially enjoyed the CG animation at the end where the caveman kicks a prehistoric animal and is then crushed by a giant foot.

Sierra Mist – Kathy Griffin, Michael Ian Black, and some guy I recognize by can’t identify. She’s very funny, and this ad is all about her.

Sprint Crime Deterrent – one guy actually throws his cellphone at the other guy. Priceless. It’s a great payoff to an otherwise ‘laundry list’ spot.

DisneyWorld – If Oscar winners can bring a little piece of paper on-stage listing all the people they want to thank, athletes can practice saying, “I’m going to DisneyWorld.”

Budweiser Clydesdale – I find most beer commercials sophomoric. OK – I don’t drink, so maybe I just don’t get it. The little Clydesdale pushing the wagon, secretly assisted by a larger Clydesdale, was very sweet. A sweet beer commercial!

Poseidon – Does this movie really need to be remade? Where’s Gene Hackman or Shelley Winters? Anyway, as your meteorologist let me be the first to tell you, tidal waves are barely noticeable in open water. They only crest nearshore.

Sprint Ringtones – Is there a more overpriced commodity than cellphone ringtones? Still, this commercial from Sprint took it all with tongue-in-cheek, especially the homage to Benny Hill featuring (what sounded like) Ronnie Aldrich’s original Yakety Sax.

Hummer H3 – I had no idea where this spot was going. When one monster got pregnant, I was really stumped. Giving birth to a Hummer was a reasonably good payoff.

Early this evening, to help fill time, a football game was played between these commercials.

Tsunami Animation

Scientists at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of NOAA, have created an amazing animation which shows how the “Boxing Day Tsunami” transversed the Indian Ocean. Even if you have dial-up (and this will take a while) it’s worth the wait.

Tsunami Damage Photos

DigitalGlobe has posted some amazing before and after images from their hi-resolution Quickbird satellite.

I have taken two and created the before and after animation you see of Banda Aceh, which is in Indonesia. Click here for a larger view.

DigitalGlobe has done an excellent job of analyzing the imagery (which, after all is what they do for a living). It’s worth taking a look.

The New York times has also published a chronology of the events which is quite well done.

The Incredibles Aren’t Quite

It’s been a long time since Helaine and I took in an afternoon movie. Why not? Work doesn’t begin until 3:00 PM. Today we went to see The Incredibles.

Cheap lines first: The Incredibles is not incredible. It’s good – not great.

Some of the animation, especially the backgrounds, is so good as to look real. The character animation was very good too.

About halfway through the movie I turned to Helaine to say it seemed awfully intense for a kid movie. It was only then that I was told it was rated PG. That was a surprise – and if I would have brought a small child, I would have been concerned by some of the intensity and violence.

The acting was excellent. These characters were played as real people using their own unadulterated voices. I was able to place Craig T. Nelson’s voice, but I was stumped on that ID for the first half of the movie. Holly Hunter, a real favorite of mine, was much easier to recognize.

What was missing in this film? My Cousin Michael put his finger on it. The villain just wasn’t well enough fleshed out. I think he’s right.

When the movie ended, I stayed and watched every name in the credits. It was surprising to see just how many there were, and in how many different compartmentalized units. People for hair and cloth, lighting animators, backgrounds. I would guess as many people worked on this animated movie as would work on a live film.

What’s the bottom line? I’m glad I saw it, but it wasn’t as special as I wanted. With as few movies as I see, and as much as they cost, I deserve special. Don’t I?

The Penguin And I Are Speaking Again

With an international crew of geeks at the ready (they were working on video drivers before I got stated) I have finally got my Linux machine up and running while looking and sounding good.

It has been a long and arduous task – and even today it reverted to some of its old habits; losing its Internet connection and sound functions.

The benchmark I had been running, “glxgears”, has gone from 130 fps to over 300 fps. When I switched to fewer colors, though still more than I can discern, the speed went to 600+ fps.

I have run a few screensavers and a ridiculous little game to stress the video system, and the computer has responded perfectly.

Now, what to do with the computer? It sits next to this perfectly competent Windows XP machine which can already do most everything.

I will be looking for some modeling and animation software to run. The Linux machine is the perfect testbed because I can dedicate the processor and not have to worry about bumping other things like mail or web browsing.

Still, the most important thing is, it’s running. I’m just not sure it’s currently, or permanently, stable.

What I’ve Been Up To At Work

The past few weeks have been spent getting ready to use some new equipment at work. Our very dependable, SGI based, Liveline Genesis system has been replaced by Weather Central’s :Live.

Actually, replaced is not a good word, because :Live is really an add-on which extends the system. We’re still producing some graphics in Genesis but it now it doesn’t go on-the-air.

The SGI system we were using has to be at least 10 years old. These systems run slow by today’s standards. Our hard drive was only 4 GB! From time-to-time I had to go in an mercilessly blow out perfectly fine work created by the other guys in the weather department because we just didn’t have enough room.

Computers and homes are very similar in that you can never have too much closet space. And, of course, the hard disk is the closet of computing.

The problems with the SGI system were legion. It never handled the look of fonts correctly. Its interface, developed in he dark ages of computing, was anti-intuitive and often different in different parts of the system. It took long amounts of time to render animated segments, like a satellite loop or fly through, before they could be shown on TV.

On the other hand, it was nearly bulletproof. The system hardly ever crashed or locked up.

Because the SGI system was based on the Irix operating system, from time-to-time you’d have to delve into the **ix environment to attack a problem. It is a bit scary to do, because it is so foreign to most computer users. Over the years, as I have become more conversant in Linux, another **ix language, Irix has become more understandable.

Every time I have a problem, and work with one of Weather Central’s tech support people, I wonder how they do this with computerphobes? Often we can skip the first 5 or 6 steps. Imagine trying to describe this obtuse text oriented operating system over the phone!

The new :Live system allows us to show animations with no rendering time (though files still have to load from the hard drive to memory, which does take some time). It also integrates multiple layers of animation and still images, which makes it much more flexible. The most interesting part is the ability to stand in front of my green chroma key wall and use my finger as a mouse, drawing or placing objects on the TV screen in real time (or :Live, I suppose).

Right out of the box, it looked much sharper, cleaner and modern than what we had been doing. Simple things, like forecast pages, now run with animated backgrounds. Maps and icons look crisp. The satellite imagery is a little blockier and pixelated than what we were using, especially when viewed at a regional or tighter level.

Because the commands to create each graphic element are programmed in quasi plain text, I have started to write some new ‘scenes’ to suit our needs.

The downside is, this is a Windows based system – Windows 2000 to be exact. It has crashed more than once. So far, not while on-the-air, but awfully close. It also seems to have memory leak problems, not a surprise in a Windows environment. That means, if you run a sequence through, to check it out, you may be pushing the car closer to the edge of the cliff with each mouse click.

I already see some changes I’d like added to the system, which is probably a blessing and curse to those who designed it. I will help them make it better, but probably at the cost of being a pain in the ass.

At the same time we added :Live, we’ve also begun running our own, locally produced, high resolution, computer forecast model. I’ll get into that later.