Space Unicorn and Space Cat going on an adventure!!!!!!

Sora ga Suki by Keiko Takemiya

I think it’s safe to say that this interactive website header by French animator David Besnier is the most fun you’ll ever have with someone’s interactive website header.

(h/t, @dannyanimator)

Is Niko and the Sword of Light an animated comic book or an animated film inside of an app? This was the question that I continued to ask myself as I read/watched the story unfold before me on my iPad.

An interactive comic book app created by Imaginism’s Bobby Chiu and Kei Acedera, and StudioNX’s Jim Bryson and Adam Jeffcoat, Niko and the Sword of Light is about a young boy who picks up his blade made of luminescent energy and goes on a quest to save the world from darkness.

The animation is great and the story is fun, but the most compelling element of Niko is its delivery system. “From growing up with comic books to working in the animation and movie industries, it was a natural progression for us to unite our biggest passions into one interactive experience,” explained the Niko team on their Kickstarter campaign page from earlier this year.

While it has all the familiar trappings of a comic book, including paneled artwork, word bubbles, and pages that need to be turned manually, Niko is, at its core, a piece of narrative animation with some basic reader interactivity. Ultimately, I could not decide whether I wanted to relinquish control and simply let the story progress on its own power or sit back and be inspired by the creative possibilities of a comic book that has panels spring to life.

Chiu and Acedera’s design work paired with StudioNX’s animation comes together seamlessly, and they are clearly confident in their top notch production values as the first three chapters of Niko are presented free of charge on Itunes, Google play and Kindle Fire.

Once they have you hooked, you can unlock the rest of the story for $3.99. We can spend time debating about whether the project would be more effective as an interactive comic book or a straight-ahead animated short, but however you choose to see it, Niko is an attention-grabbing animation app.

"Hey, what, like a good action sequence don't belong in Christmas?"

Read more...

House of 64 Crest by Cory Freeman is available at Design By Humans

It's always fun to see an accomplished manga author demonstrate some fan impulses. Ahead of bringing related doujinshi to the end of year's Comiket 85, Arina Tanemura (The Gentlemen's Alliance Cross,Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, Full Moon wo Sagashite) has posted tributed sketches of Attack on Titan and Uta no Prince-sama.

Comiket 85 doujinshi

Some of her previous fan art posts include

The Island of Misfit Sweaters by Tom Kurzanski is $11 today only (12/5) at TeeFury

17 year-old Blake Baer and 18 year-old Jack Bittner have built an incredibly-detailed recreation of Erebor, the home of Tolkien's dwarves in The Hobbit. Using nearly 80,000 bricks and taking around 400 hours to build, this Lego kingdom is simply mind-blowing. It's 200-lbs and 56" of awesomeness. Just like a dwarf!

Read more...

Appetite for Mystery by Doodle Dojo is available at Redbubble

Loki Charms by AcidFree (Taíno Rex and Bamboota) is available at TeeTurtle

Thorrio’s by AcidFree (Taíno Rex and Bamboota) is $10 today only (12/4) at Shirt Punch

Mononoke Time by RebelArt is available at Redbubble

This week, singer Eir Aoi's Kill la Kill the opening theme song “sirius” and insert song “Sanbika” has been released digitally in twenty countries including the US. The “sirius-EP” also “Kuroiuta”, the theme song for PS3 game Drankenguard 3.

【amazon】

【iTunes】

via Yatter Japan

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

Kenji Itoso, a unit director on Satoshi Kon's unfinished Dream Machine, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Christmas anime Santa Company. After attempting to finance it on his own, Itoso hopes to get at least $50,000 in crowd funding to complete the 30 minute anime and present it in a special special for children and their families in Fukushima,the affected areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Incentives start at $5, with $59 contributors receiving a DVD.

The creator describes the project:

Hello everyone. I’m Kenji Itoso, living in Japan.

I have a career learned under Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon.
Currently, I produce and direct live action films, music videos and commercials, mainly working on animation projects.
Also as a University professor, I do research on film techniques and teach my specialty.

I believe that Christmas day is the best day of the year. And I’ve always wanted to produce an animation film that is about Santa Clauses. After 12 years of planning, the time has finally come for me to get down to it.

There were two questions I had about Santa Clauses: How do they deliver gifts to the whole world in only one night? What do they do for a living except during Christmas season?

Without having had my own answers to them, I could not make the story move forward. And my answer is that Santa Clauses own their corporation to make their living. Yes, it’s kind of sad to imagine them working for the company!

Santa Company is an international large company that consists of three departments: Santa Dept., Reindeer Dept. and Gift department.

Except during Christmas season, Santa Dept. protects the safety of residences as the largest home-security organization in the world. It might be easier for you to imagine Santa Dept. is like ADT. Its workers, Santa Clauses, normally secure the safety of each home, so they can sneak into houses and know the shortest routes to the children’s rooms. Of course, they do that only when they receive requests from parents.

Reindeer Dept. usually breeds and educates reindeers. Also it provides navigation services. It’s like Garmin, I guess. It navigates on a daily basis so that it can take Santa Clauses to their destination for without any trouble.

Gift Dept. is in charge of product sales and delivery business. More simply put, it’s like Amazon. It has giant warehouses and sells various toys, so it can easily prepare, pack, and deliver gifts during Christmas season. It provides delivery of Christmas gifts only when it receives the requests from parents.

And only once a year, these three departments work together and use their expertise to safely deliver Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve!

Being set in Santa Company, the story focuses on the growth of 12-year-old girl named Noel, who gets lost in the secret company, and her friends. It’s told with a touch of romance and action. It also tells how ordinary people with no particular special powers systemize the job of Santa Clauses to make it fitted in the real world, adding some factors such as relationship between workers and this Christmas gifts delivery business’s power of influence and the economic effects.

This project may be a little bit too ambitious as an independent film. So far, I’ve paid all the expenses of production including overhead costs by myself.
It might sound cool if I say like "If there’s something I want to create, I should take the risk on my own." To be honest, it’s very tough to make the film in this way. 
But then, I came across Kickstarter!

I hope this amazing encounter will help me create a better and longer film.
With your support, I'd like to complete the film by Christmas and deliver it to the children all over the world.

 Film information

• • Color / Stereo / 30min / 16:9 / English subtitles

Crew

• • Producer / Executive Director: Kenji Itoso (Transformers Animated, Dreaming Machine)
  • Director: Yumi Kamakura (Pokémon,Eureka seveN)
• Screenplay: Naohiro Fukushima (009 RE:CYBORG,Eden of The East)
  • Original Character Design: Hidari (VOCALOID, Atelier Ayesha)
• Animation Character Design: Hiroki Harada (Romeo×Juliet, Yu-Gi-Oh!)
  • Background Art: Takashi Aoi (Xam'd: Lost Memories, Eureka seveN)
• Produced: KENJI STUDIO

Project schedule

Our film is scheduled for completion by Christmas 2014.

Where your funding goes

Funding will be used to create our film and English subtitles.

Our goal is raise a minimum of $50,000 for this project. 
Anything raised above our minimum goal will go directly into the production of "Santa Company".

If we exceed our funding goal, we’ll increase the quality of animation and increase the variety of language for subtitles depending on how much the excess amount we’ll have.

Plan of deployment

• A special screening for children and their families in Fukushima,the affected areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
• Screening"Santa Company" for children by using projection-mapping.
• Screening at film festivals around the world!
• We will create a curriculum to learn how to make animation by using the anime material that shows the production process of "Santa Company." Then we will expand the curriculum to students who want to study animation!

"Santa Company" official HP
(Please press the "ENGLISH" button!)

FOLLOW US on twitter @Santa Company!

"LIKE" US and join the fun on our official Facebook page!

via @ikari_gendo

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

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1. 1.New Jersey
2. 2.Maine
3. 3.California
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5. 5.North Carolina
6. 6.West Virgina
7. 7.Indiana
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Photographer Jeff Friesen has put together a delightful project called “50 States of LEGO.” It’s fairly descriptive, he’s created scenarios out of LEGO meant to illustrate each of America’s states. Some are more literal than others but I’ll let him explain the thinking behind it.

Every summer I look after my daughter for half the day and we do all kinds of projects, including making dioramas of her toys and photographing them in a little studio set-up. It’s always hard work to get nice pictures, even of toys, but it’s also a lot of fun. That part of my life is known as “Ernie.” The Brick Fantastic brings “Bert” and “Ernie” together with a big pile of Lego bricks.

New Jersey natives Susana and myself are just happy the cast of The Jersey Shore weren’t depicted for our state. See all 50, or buy prints, at his website. Oh, and for the record, Friesen is from Canada.

(via Laughing Squid)

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 Hi everyone. Oh no, I have left my blog for too long. I even forgot to write in English! Does anyone help me with my terrible English? My blog has been 終わコン[owacon], you know. So many nice comments from the viewers! What am I doing! I’ve got to do something!

 Let’s get going, anyway. I swear myself that I could post one or two more topics to introduce a new word. Today I gotta introduce…let’s see…

 What about てへぺろ[tehepero]? I know most of you guys are frowning because this term has been already in the mainstream. Well, let me explain even that. If you can type てへぺろ, please do that. Maybe you would see some emoticons like (๑≧౪≦) or (｡･ ω<)ゞ. てへぺろ itself has no point, but this is to express how shyly you are smiling at yourself. Especially this is mostly used when you goof up or make a tiny mistake. When you spill water, what would you do? When you accidentally put the papers through the shredder, how are you going to remove your blush? Let’s smile shyly and stick out your tongue.

 てへっ[tehe] is to describe such a shy smile in order to cover your mistake. I think you can see this in shoujo manga or something like that. A pretty girl is smiling with てへっ. Also, please watch out. If she sticked out her tongue, you could see ぺろ[pero] written next to her. Both are onomatopoetic words. てへぺろ is a hybrid of these two words. So if you cover your mistake, let’s say (｡･ ω<)ゞてへぺろ♡. Don’t be shy.

 So who started this term? Yes, her name is Youko Higasa[日笠 陽子], who voices Mio in K-ON! In the radio program she featured, she used to say てへぺろ. The other seiyus started to copy that, and then most K-ON fans followed that…eventually, てへぺろ got in to the mainstream. Today, even non-anime fans are using てへぺろ. In 2009, てへぺろ was at the top of the current words among anime fans, but this has been common among general people 2011 onwards.

 What? Only young and cute girls can use it? Don’t say that. Once again, don’t be shy! If you softly knock your forahead with てへぺろ, that would be much better.

Bounty Hunted by iwilding is available at Redbubble

Techforce by David Bear is available at Redbubble

Today, Bleeding Cool premieres Aquaman: The Teen Drama, a parody project airing every day this week, from Patrick Willems and the Afterwards They Will Explode team.

But it looks as if DC Entertainment have been paying attention to the hype.

Bleeding Cool has been led to believe by a recently-reliable source that the CW is developing another live action teen drama/romance series with a superhero twist, based on the Young Justice cartoon, games and comics, being prepped for 2015.

And yes, with Superboy and Miss Martian as the leads of The Team…

Any casting suggestions?

Young Justice, A Real Teen Drama TV Series For The CW

Grab $6 random tees today only (12/2) at TeeFury

Save 20% on t-shirts at Redbubble with coupon code CYBERRB and this link: http://shirtoid.com/r/redbubble

Or browse our selection of Redbubble tees: http://shirtoid.com/merchant/redbubble/

Cyber Monday only! (12/2)

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15. 15. Saved the most disturbing for last. Check out the stomach.

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And the phrase “coloring book pages with skeletons drawn in” sounds like it would be creepy anyway! But not this creepy. No. Never this creepy. You can thank French illustrator Chris Panda‘s X-Ray series for the awesomeness and the nightmares.

(via: Tumblr, Facebook)

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— by Kate Beaton (x)

so much love for credited postings! xoxo

having a grumpy day, so I took a break.