The New York Times Magazine illustrates the Year in Ideas as it wraps up some of the more interesting and amazing developments of 2007.

Labels: 2007, Innovation

Labels: Cisco, Hacking, Password Decryption

1. Sony Bravia - Play Doh


2. Blockbuster


3. Vodafone - Mayfly


4. Snikers - Dont Stop


5. Airtel - Express yourself


6. Smirnoff - Sea


7. EPURON - Mr.Wind


8. Zune Intergalistic Swap meet


9. Visa


10. Motorola - Moto Razr

Labels: Animation, Clay Animation, Commercial, Motion Capture, Stop Motion, TOP 10

The Making of new Sony Bravia ad

2.5 tonnes of plasticine on set
40 animators
3 weeks
189 2ft bunnies
150 1ft cubes
10ft x 20ft purple wave
30ft giant rabbit.
6 cameras.
40 animators working through 4 hours generated 4 seconds of footage.
40 animators working on the same scene had never been attempted before.
The 60 second spot will be constructed of approximately 100,000 stills.

music : "Saeglopur" by Sigur Ros

Labels: Animation, Clay Animation, Commercial, Stop Motion

Hans Loosman, VFX Supervisor

"Ever since I read the storyboard I knew this would be the ideal opportunity to use 'motion capture'. A technique that can accurately record the movement and behaviour of actors, and store it in a digital format so the 3D department can use it to animate their characters.

Our lead animator Rolf van Slooten started testing some animation data we received from the motion capture studio. Importing that data turned out to couse no problems at all, even handling and adjusting the data went very smooth!

Because the life-action shoot would be shot with available light during magic hour and beyond, we started some 35mm tests to check if we still had enough focal depth and if our tracking software could still handle the low detail to extract an accurate camera track.

After showing the first tests to director Joeri Holsheimer, he was very impressed, not only because of the perfectly natural animations, but especially about the endless possibilities this would give him. Once the action was recorded it could be applied in every position and angle we could think of, without limitations!

The client was even more impressed and sent us off to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where we shot all the backplates, HDRI spheres, and took accurate mesurements of the surroundings. We used stand alone motion-trackers we specially developped for this project, which where made out of little LED lights, which lasted for over two weeks!

Back in Amsterdam the 3D team started designing the trafficlight man and motion-track the life-footage to extract the camera movement, while the director was editing the 90 second version next door. Performing the offline edit in-house was essential to the success of the commercial.

After the trafficlight man was final we headed over to Motek's motion capture studio, and spend two days recording the action with a team of 6 stunt coordinators, which gave us over 200 individual takes. Four of our animators started building over 3 minutes of animatics for the offline edit, and 4 of our compositors started cleaning up the backplates and removing all the motion trackers.

When all the shots were done we started adding in all the character animations and several traffic-lights. We decided to replace complete traffic-lights with new ones was easier than replacing parts of it. In the parking garage we needed to rebuild the bottoms of several cars to get the proper lighting of the men hiding underneath it.

On december 22 the job was done and the tape was send to Saudi Arabia. The commercial will be broadcasted for about one year.

Although the final commercial was always meant to be PAL (720-576) we did the whole post in HD (1920-1080) to get the best possible results in motion-tracking and compositing."

Labels: Animation, Commercial, Motion Capture

A preliminary investigation has linked the cuts to a ship's anchor that dragged and ripped into the two cables while the ship was anchored in an unusual location because of bad weather, officials said.

Repairs could take 10 - 15 days. Because two cables were cut, the normal rerouting of Internet traffic is more complex than if only one cable had been damaged.
Much of the Internet traffic between the U.S. and India and nearby nations that was normally traveling through the Mediterranean is now being passed the other way around the world,
crossing the Pacific Ocean, resulting in milliseconds of delay.

A Roadmap of Undersea SEA-ME-WE-4 Cable System



Impact to India

India's Internet service was disrupted by up to 60 percent on Wednesday because of a breakdown in an international undersea cable network, the Internet Service Providers' Association of India said.
"There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Chharia, the president of the association, told Reuters. He said companies, including among India's many outsourcing businesses, had been affected.
Another Middle East undersea Internet cable has been damaged, adding to disruption in Indian online services caused when several lines were cut earlier this week, a cable operating firm said Saturday.

Internet Backbone undersea





FLAG Outages

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner FLAG Telecom, part of India's Reliance Communications.
The company said on its website that a repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days.
The cause of the latest cable damage was not immediately known.
Flag Telecom owns another undersea cable which was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday in the Mediterranean. Indian media reports have attributed that damage to a ship's anchor which dropped on the cable.
On the same day in Kuwait, the government reported two cables damaged by "weather conditions and maritime traffic."
The cable damage has left India's vital outsourcing industry grappling with major communications disruptions and businesses saying they could take up to two weeks to return to normal.
It has also disrupted Internet service across the Middle East and other parts of South Asia.
A repair ship was expected to arrive by next Tuesday to restore the FLAG Telecom cable that was damaged off Egypt, the company said.
Smaller Indian firms will be harder hit as they depend on a single service provider, said R.S Perhar, secretary of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI).
But traffic has already started moving after being re-routed.
Around 90 percent of the services were expected to be restored by Sunday, the ISPAI said.

India's 11-billion-dollar outsourcing industry is made up of 1,250 firms that deliver services ranging from answering customer queries to processing credit card and mortgage applications.
The industry employs 700,000 people, serving clients mainly in the United States and Europe that sought to cut costs by farming out work to the country.

FLAG Cable System

Labels: Internet, Technology