Technology at its rise

Follows independent articles about: NPR, Dreamfall, Neo1973

NPR Based Entertainment:

I was really glad to see the young NPR (non-photo realistic rendering) in action in some of the new movies. The movies I was really impressed with were these:

A Scanner Darkly
'A Scanner darkly' features a wonderful conversion of real video into hand drawn rendering. Colors are selected really well and final output is polished with extra animations like hairs, clothes etc. (Well when actually I think that thats how the movie may have been done, theres a great possibility that thousands of artists were hired to manually do each frame. Just a thought)

Renaissance
This movie is a simple animation movie but with its lighting model as toon shading. Adding ease, it features toon shading between only 2 colors, black and white. Its not as easy as it sounds though, since they have done this with as much adaptivity as that the whole scene has good visibility, not too black, nor too white.

Earlier NPR has surely been used, but only as a helping hand. Eg. Most Disney hand drawn Animation movies featured rich environment. When main characters were drawn by really talented artists, most of the elements in the environment were computer generated, and were made with NPR algorithms so that they get merged with artists' figures and dont blob out as artificially rendered objects.

Possibly Linkin Park's Video "Breaking the Habit" from album Meteora, features similar NPR animations.

Apart from these, MTV's Spiderman features some wonderful work of NPR over computer graphics. MTV's Spiderman looks totally hand-drawn and half of the times you will confuse it with Justice League or something. Though I still think their character animation is not that good and it repeatedly gives the feel that its computer generated.

Games run ahead of movie industry by the way. So of course games also have started featuring NPR animations where necessary. Eg. Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtles emerged as a cartoon in the 90s and the game needed to give the feel. Teenage Mutant Ninga Turtles (XBOX) serves.

I would really like to know more such creations based on NPR. Please comment if you know more such movies/games/shows.


DreamFall
I have been playing this game called "Dreamfall, the longest journey", its fantasy adventure game which I first thought will be as gay as Harry Potter or something. But while playing the first 10 minutes I was totally engulfed in it and turned out to be wonderful.

What I like most in Dreamfall is the main character. Her name is "Zoe", she is beautiful and really hot. But she talks too much and is really weak. Half of the time when I am playing as her, I die easily and I am flaming at the enemy like "Dammit, she is a girl, how can you hit her?"
April is another character, she is 10 yrs older, not that good looking, but she is tough and its comfortable to fight as her. She talks less as well.

The games main focus is story telling, not much game play. There are just too many characters to interact and too many dialogs. In such a setting, the use of half life 2 engine is the best since it masters in showing facial expressions and smooth character animations. Though this would be just an addition, but HL2 engine would have served Dreamfall much better.


Neo1973
What Iphone offers versus what is its cost I think it is worthed and is a really good deal in front of Nokia N99 or whatever crap is going to come out. Apart from this, there is an internal news that iphone in India will arrive one year later and will cost 20K... fair enough i think.

However my concern is neither iphone nor nokia. I am looking forward to Neo1973. This is an open source phone over a Linux kernel. It (will) feature most of the things which iphone offers + 3G internet connection instead of edge which gives it an edge over iphone. But i believe the best part is that it is open source. There will be complete freedom to choose your service provider and accessories. With tones of softwares and drivers available for that phone it will be possible to connect it to monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, wireless network and what not. It will be like a complete computer in your pocket. Where Iphone will be like a Macbook in which you will be stuck with apple only hardware & software, Neo1973 will be like an x86 arch machine on which you can install whatever OS you want. Eagerly waiting for Neo1973.