Speccy Nation

Back in the 1980s I was an enthusiastic owner/programmer of the ZX Spectrum, my games "Bod and the Vampires" (jointly written with Richard Notman) and "King Penguin in London" were never published but there were many good games released from both big and small publishers.





Speccy Nation looks at the best of these such as Sabre Wulf, Skool Daze and my favourite the super fast Death Race 2000. It also looks at some of the less popular titles that had unique UI elements or otherwise pushed the boundaries of what computer games were at the time. It's a great book for reminissing or for study. Dan Whitehead's observations and comments reflect some of the humour of the time and it's clear that he's done a lot of research. The book finishes off with some links to popular emulator sites and archives. Definately worth getting hold of.

Carrara 8.5

Not been active in the animation field for sometime now but I was taken by the statement "CMS Integration" on the promo for Carrara 8.5 and thought I'd have a quick look on their website.

http://www.daz3d.com/carrara-8-5-pro

There was not much there so I searched the DAZ forums.

Jon: "Does this allow me to go through my content and ‘tag’ each of my items with various keywords, so I can search by keyword and bring up all those items at once? If so, how do you ‘tag’ older content."

Admin: You’d need to use the Content Database Editor in DAZ Studio to tag your items

The general description of the content manager is as follows:

The DAZ Studio Content Manager provides the ability to place items into categories so that they can be more easily located. This database allows you to categorize all Poser and DAZ Studio content into one content listing and do a search for a particular item.

I also tracked down a couple of tutorial about adding Meta Data to your creations and a more general tutorial on content manager.

As far as I can tell this is not a colaborative style CMS. It does help you avoid duplicated content just to be able to categorise it with multiple tags so it should help with managing assets.

Redbull Canimation

Redbull are looking for animators to do fun (or serious) things with their cans, as long as it's animated then they could be interested



Five renowned industry experts judge your work across three animation categories: Stop-motion, CGI or Drawn. There are some amazing prizes to win.

http://canimation.redbull.co.uk/

Leprechaun

Latest animation news from Trailer Trash

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, on this week’s episode of the wacky animated Web series, “Trailer Trash,” characters Billy Bob and Cooter are inspired to hunt down their pint-size neighbor for his gold after seeing “Leprechaun 2” on TV.

Available exclusively on Hulu, “Trailer Trash” is Lionsgate’s first-ever Web series and was created by artist and entrepreneur Todd Goldman and produced by Hud:sun Media’s Max Benator, who also brought you the popular Web show, “Genuine Ken.”

The other Oscar Winners

Obviously there's been a lot of press about the Kings Speach and Colin Firth, but what about the Animation categories. Toy Story 3 got the animated feature award and again I'm sure there will be loads on that too. So what about the little films?

Short animated film winner goes to "The Lost Thing" a film about a boy who finds a steampunk style octopus and tries to find out where it's come from, unfortunately everyone else is disinterested.



It was for many an unexpected win with some big names such as Pixar with Night and Day and the Grufallo also being nominated. The film has previously won second place for best animated short at the Palm Springs Festival, however William Barton who saw the film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival was unimpressed.



The Australian Animator Shaun Tan and British producer Andrew Ruhemann have created a wonderful film that brings life to Tan's story and illustrations.



Read more in the Brisbane Times

More about the men behind the Lost Thing.