From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears on screen before Scott Pilgrim vs. the World begins, you know you’re in for a visual treat. I’m not going to spoil the story, but I wanted to comment on how well the graphic novel style has been incorporated into the film.

While previous movies like Sin City have done a great job borrowing static elements of graphic novel design, this is the first film I’ve seen that makes such fine use of dynamic elements. Speed and impact lines are used to convey energy in many of the battle scenes, sound effects are enhanced with fleeting text and graphic representations to give them more impact, and intangible forces are stunningly visualized as they become devastatingly tangible for the characters involved.

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Filed under: Film

After being impressed by the computer graphics in Avatar this weekend, I thought that this would be a great time to bring up the concept of the uncanny valley in 3D character animation and discuss some examples from recent films.

Photo by Listen Missy! on Flickr

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Filed under: Film, Technology

Have you ever visualized a song while listening? On my drive in this morning, I heard “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” by Styx, and was inspired to write about this topic today. In “Fooling Yourself”, there are two punchy synthesizer solos that dance up and down the scale with a rather unique rhythm. It’s the sort of melody that my mind can’t help playing with visually on the projector in the back of my brain (luckily the screen doesn’t obscure my view of the road).

The iTunes visualizer

I’m pretty sure that how one visualizes a song varies from person to person and song to song. My best evidence for this comes from my experience as part of Sounds and Visions, a computer music and graphics concert put on by the UIUC chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Unfortunately, the web was young back then and we didn’t put much material online. But you can think of it as a zanily creative iTunes visualizer. My contribution was a dancing solar system with a sun that pulsed to the beat and planets excited by notes of various frequencies. Others showcased flocks of birds, a carpet of tiles bouncing little cubes into the air, only to be eaten by alligator-like creatures, and quivering leaf-like fractals.

I just realized that I have no idea where I’m going with this post… maybe I’ll just end it with a question… what other visual expressions of music have you seen?

Filed under: Musings, Technology

Are video games art?

Some of our readers may still have some Superbowl adrenaline left in their system, but today I want to talk about another kind of game… video games. Like contact sports, these games sometimes get a bad rap, but having grown up in the 80′s with my trusty Atari, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis, the games I played served as creative inspiration. In fact, without those games, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now. Inspired by Noelle’s post last week, I thought I would explore the various ways that creativity can be expressed in a video game. I’ll take the framework that has been used by game reviewers in the past and break it down into the facets of graphics, audio, gameplay, and story. I’m also going to focus mostly on console games.

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Filed under: Art, Technology