Yes, yes. You’ve already seen blurbs about Machinarium all over the friggin’ bloggitysphere. But when a game this scrappy and adorable and smart and just painfully lovely pops up, we can’t not archive it here.
Amanita Design is the Czech indie game studio who brought the ‘wub those delightful point-and-click adventures, Samorost and Samorost 2. Aesthetically, their latest creation follows somewhat in Samorost‘s footsteps, but delves far deeper. For all its gorgeous visuals, ambiance, clever puzzles, and creaking, rusty robot action, what sets Machinarium apart and above other point-and-click games is its surprising depth. Such tenderness and subtlety, humor and intelligence!
This is worldbuilding of the highest caliber, with a compelling narrative that slowly unfolds as you play through, bringing Wall-E, Perdido Street Station and The City of Lost Children to mind in equal measure. No spoilers. Just click here, try out the demo, and you’ll understand why it might just be the best 17 bucks you spend all month.
Via DJ Dead Billy, who says “if only L RON would’ve delved into anime!” Think of the possibilities.
That cute and cuddly bearded fellow you’re watching in the above clip is none other Shoko Asahara, founder of Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth), the infamous Japanese Buddhist/Christian cult obsessed with psychedelics, yoga and apocalypse. They’re now known as Aleph. Guess they felt like they had to change their name after receiving a smidge of bad press back in 1995, when a group of their members released sarin nerve gas into Tokyo’s subway system, killing twelve people and sending thousands more to the hospital.
Yeesh! Asahara with the Dalai Lama, sometime in the late 80s. This was a while before Aum Shinrikyo’s terrorist activities, kidnappings and murders started, mind you. The DL’s inner circle members was initially supportive of the cult’s bid for legal religious organization status, but later severed all ties. More recently, Asahara has been a vocal critic of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism.
It’s worth noting that Aum’s previous deployment of sarin gas on the central city of Matsumoto was officially the world’s first use of chemical weapons in a terrorist attack against civilians. Asahara was convicted of masterminding both attacks in addition to committing several other crimes, and sentenced to death. He’s now awaiting execution.
This has been on the web for a couple of weeks but it bears mention here. “COMBO” is the newest animated graffiti film from Blu, capsule whose previous work “MUTO” became a YouTube sensation. This time he has collaborated with fellow artist David Ellis. There is something really fantastic about these films taking, salve as they do, shop traditional street art and, with the help of some video-assisted time manipulation, using it to create cartoons; treating buildings and courtyards as animation cels.
I realize this video may not be for everyone. For instance Nadya, one of my esteemed editors, hates videogames with an all-consuming passion. She must be forgiven for this, dear reader. It may not be common knowledge but Nadya’s entire village in Russia was destroyed by videogames. It was only by chance that she and her family had been chosen that week to travel the 500 miles to the nearest town to procure the beets on which they so desperately depended. Upon returning and finding the village razed and their neighbors slaughtered, they decided to flee to the United States.
You’ll excuse me, then, if I geek out for a moment. 8-bit Trip is a stop-motion music video that pays tribute to that generation of videogames that dominated my childhood, using the building blocks that has hijacked untold hours of my free time. Created by two crazy Swedes requiring over 1500 hours of work, who knows how many LEGO and a chiptune soundtrack; it is a perfect storm of cloying nostalgia, paralyzing my brain with its sheer awesomeness.
This went up all over the web back in June, but it’s too gorgeous not to be ‘Haused as well:
Directed by Pete Candeland, best known for his Gorillaz music videos. Produced by Passion Pictures. (Via Jhayne, thanks.)
Even if you’re not a fan of the Fab Four, or of Rock Band, you can still appreciate how absolutely breathtaking this animated trailer for the new Xbox game is. (Please, seriously, click that link and watch it high def.)
The Beatles: Rock Band has been in development by Apple Corps for quite a while. Conceived and created by George Harrison’s son, Dhani, in cahoots with MTV prez Van Toffler, and given a stamp of approval by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono, it’s slated for a Sept 9th release.
Dear Chris Cunningham: please come back to us. The commercial you recently created for Gucci Flora is hypnotic, and we’d never dream of calling you a sellout because we know that you need to make rent, just like us. We know that the music industry is not what it used to be, and that the budgets you had to make your legendary music videos (Bjork’s All is Full of Love, Madonna’s Frozen, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker) aren’t easy to come by these days. Still, we implore you: come back to us. Make something new, something weird!
Any Cunningham-inspired tidbit helps the withdrawal. Your incredible shoot with Grace Jones for Dazed and Confused, a Nubian companion to your character Rubber Johnny, certainly helps to ease the longing. More images (NSWF) at Dazed Digital, the original Rubber Johnny below, and some Chris Cunningham classics after the cut.
In 1980, artist and filmmaker Bill Brand installed 228 panels in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn. Lit by fluorescent lights, the panels are viewed through carefully spaced slits cut in a special housing. Based upon the principle of the 19th century zoetrope, passengers looking out the right side of a Manhattan-bound B or Q train would be able to watch a short animation. Brand’s original idea was to change the panels on a regular basis to make one, epic film comprised of 20 second clips, but soon realized that this would be unfeasible.
In the intervening years the display had fallen into disrepair, the lights broken and the panels covered in graffiti, despite Brand himself regularly going down into the station with a key someone had slipped him to clean the panels. However, over the summer of 2008 Mr. Brand, with the help of volunteers and the transportation authority’s Arts for Transit program, restored the installation and in November of that same year restarted it without any announcement or fanfare; another hidden little gem inside the vast metropolis.
Manhattan-based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding-edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio-electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, “we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.”
Since that clip, 1stAveMachine, helmed by Palep and Serge Patzak (the former turned down a job from Industrial Light & Magic to join the startup), has produced short commercials for the likes of MTV Japan, Samsung and HP. But no matter how corporate their clients roster becomes, 1stAvenue keeps it weird, inviting comparisons to Chris Cunningham and Patricia Piccinini. Consider the below ad for Saturn, which 1stAveMachine describes as “a haunting hyper-sexual and stylized vision for the future”:
Shown above is the director’s cut, which features a naked lady. NSFW!
There are many more clips to be seen on 1stAveMachine’s site. Some favorites clips and image stills, after the cut. [via Paul Komoda]
A young boy is trapped in an abusive home. As his parents become increasingly detached, demeaning, and violent he finds sanctuary in the attic. There, he plants magic seeds from which a grandmother grows.
David Lynch made Grandmother in 1970 on a total budget of $7,200. This incredible film [David’s third] was shot in Lynch’s house in Philadelphia, where he painted the walls black and the actors white. The lack of dialogue, with everything conveyed through guttural noises, barking, and a score from a local group, Tractor, compliments the stylized, stripped down atmosphere that’s since become the Lynch standard.
This depiction of childhood escapism yanks us away to that special place where everything is very, very WRONG. No one is better than David at evoking that sense of creeping dread, that beautiful paranoia! But there is love here too, unconditional and pure, as the grandmother provides everything the boy’s parents deny him. A dream, a nightmare and a slow attack on the psyche – watch all 5 parts below when you have a quiet hour to spare.
Young German filmmaker Jeff Desom graduated from the Bournemouth Arts Institute in 2007. His senior project featured the experimental pianist Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauskchka. That partnership has led to this flawless collaboration:
Music video for the song “Morgenrot” off Hauschka’s latest album, Ferndorf. (Via Siege, thanks.)
Painstakingly animated, composited and rendered, “Morgenrot” features a flaming piano falling in slow motion through a series of vintage black and white photographs of NYC. Desom talks about the process:
The finished animation is mostly made from early twentieth century photographs that I found while browsing through the vast collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. I also used old postcards from New York that I purchased at a flea market in Paris. Most of the time I would only zoom into a tiny portion of the picture and utilise that as my frame.
The hardest part was to make it look as if it had been pasted together from a lost reel depicting this curious experiment where they’d [lit] up a piano and thrown it off a building only to see what would happen. The kind of unnecessary crash test executed [for] the sole purpose of drooling over the beauty of slow motion.
Mission accomplished. One can only imagine what Desom is going to come up with next.
