#its the definition of uncanny valley and i needed to put it somewhere

[jekyllnahyena]

i have no words

#this. this is what it felt like going here the whole day #i am haunted #pikachu #pikachu man #i guess #i am terrified of it #its the definition of uncanny valley and i needed to put it somewhere #should i stop listening to horror rn? #and maybe make them more than the five men band trope #anyway good morning! #ajekyllsunhingesketch #its a jekyll

[miraculouscontent]

Ask Explo--

...you know what, you’re right. Name change effective immediately.

Askplosion #10:

(unrelated to everything by the way but I DEMAND THE ANON WHO MENTIONED “REMARRIED EMPRESS” A WHILE BACK COME FORTH AND ANSWER FOR THEIR CRIMES. IT’S SO GOOD BUT IT’S UNFINISHED AND I’M HOOKED, HOW DARE YOU)

Asks responding to previous posts:

It’s okay! I figured that was what it was but it’s been so loooong.

Ah, wow.

Um, that’s definitely not a part 2; I think that’s more like a four-parter/five-parter or something.

Sorry! No can do!

That’s totally fair!

I think the reason I so quickly agreed with it is like--

I’ve been watching the Inuyasha sequel and it’s not like I don’t think the narrative’s apparent punching bag Moroha (who is fourteen years old) shouldn’t be punished when she does something wrong/sneaky/manipulative, but they punish her as if she’s Miroku (who was eighteen years old).

Basically, I want the punishment to take the age into account, or at least only affect Marinette on a more personal level and not be “Heart Hunter” where they take totally understandable feelings of heartache (remember, it wouldn’t have mattered which miraculous she took because Hawk Moth got the Miracle Box and Fu regardless; even beyond her emotions, I feel like she chose the best option available to her considering which temps she knew the location of) and then punish her for them by memory wiping Fu and taking away all of her temps and giving Hawk Moth the grimoire translation.

Yes!! I really wanted to respond to this one, thank you! (It’s this one and then there was another one talking about Luka and Adrien, then talked to me about how I refer to Luka as “soft” but not in a bad way; I unfortunately don’t remember the whole thing.)

Ahaha, and yeah, I feel you. Anti-salters are a very strange conundrum I still haven’t figured out; like, I get not liking salt, but...

I mean, when I don’t like certain content, I just blacklist it. If I end up seeing it anyway due to cross-tagging or a lack of tagging, then I just blacklist the person themself. You won’t see me going after people for that very reason; I only see what people send/ask me if it’s content I don’t like.

I’m glad you’ve found some peace in this blog! Hopefully it continues to be that way for you in the future!

(and yay, a fellow INTJ!!)

New Asks:

There are female writers? ;P I just assumed they were all locked in a closet until the male ones were like, “okay, pretend to help us here, we need one female writer to claim girl power.”

As for Ladybug all like, “Cute, isn’t she?” I think it was rhetorical (she could also be messing with him but “Glaciator” tells us that she didn’t know he crushed on her so who knows). The writers do this thing where Marinette is all panic-y and occasionally self-conscious as herself, but then as Ladybug, she suddenly gets a bit of an ego. I think it’s meant to be there in order to make Chat Noir look less... idk, “obnoxious” when he starts boosting his own ego; trying to balance the two by giving them both big heads, so to speak.

Honestly, I feel like Adrien needs less screen time. :|

Even when he’s not on-screen, characters are usually talking about him, or you see his face in Marinette’s room/somewhere in Paris. I’m become so jaded by the guy that I don’t even think it’d matter if they remade the series and gave it a “totally good and interesting Adrien.” That’s how badly the show has made him out for me; “Adrien Agreste” the character is just... sigh, I’m so done with him.

And yeah, this whole idea about, “Marinette is [x], we need more AAAAAADRIEN!” comes off really bad, lol, especially when Adrien has very little going for him.

(this ask ends off like there should be a part 2 but there isn’t one in my inbox, so sorry if there’s meant to be something else!)

The exact lyrics according to the wiki:

My wish for a cat who's in love, with our own Ladybug. Is that he'll get what he's always wanted! She doesn't know she loves him, only sees Adrien, But Christmas miracles always happen!

Yeah, especially nowadays, those lines bothers me. Not only does it imply “true selves,” but that it’s Chat who should be getting what he always wanted and Ladybug is the one with a problem.

Like, excuse me?

Probably Stormy Weather, even in the first episode. Ladybug and Chat Noir couldn’t even touch her until they arrived on top of the TV station.

+ With all those effects and shots, it made it feel more action-y than typical episodes.

Marinette, Aurore, Luka, Anarka, Jagged...

basically any name that I haven’t really heard before (”Luka” makes me think of Vocaloid but the Luka there was female), or a name that relates a lot to the character (like “Aurore” for “aurora” since she loves weather things).

dfjbghfkdgfdgnjfdg this anon really like, “I NEED ANSWERS!!!”

It’s as if these characters hit 18 or something and just grow overnight, I swear. I’m hypothetically fine with some more variety in character height (it’s not like the show tries to be realistic, after all), but maybe don’t give us official heights if they’re gonna be this weird/inaccurate.

Especially when they change it just for the sake of a shot anyway. If you watch “Simon Says” when Ladybug and Adrien stand next to each other while looking at the picture of Adrien’s mother, the very next close-up has an obvious difference in their heights from what you just saw.

They’re 3D models!!! This shouldn’t happen!

I... honestly never thought of the “less threatening” thing! Dang!

And yeah, Marinette isn’t helpless or incompetent, but because of the Adrien crush, it makes her that way at times since she’s always falling on him and--

...ugh, actually, yeah, don’t wanna think about those implications. Hard pass.

Gross.

I’m not familiar with that one, though Astruc deletes his tweets all the time (there was one tweet where he confirmed that Luka was poor and it only exists in screenshots now because it didn’t get archived and he deleted it almost like he realized that he was pointing out the blatant classism in the show, oops).

Yeah though, I haven’t seen anything like what you’re describing. Sorry!

It’s okay! Sorry for having you clarify but him choosing and Marinette deciding to never give it back are very different things.

I don’t recall Chat Noir having much purpose in the final fight (in terms of both contributing and actual fighting; I know Cataclysm broke the object to release the akuma but was it needed?) so Marinette might either go cat-less or get a temp. Plagg could also be helpful in his own right because he’s small and blends in with the night, so he could hypothetically sneak up on the bad guy.

Afterwards, there’d need to be a new cat, but Adrien would also have to reconsider his actions and really think about what happened. I could also see Plagg going to Adrien’s house, half to apologize for giving the idea to Adrien that Adrien leave without telling Ladybug, but also half to call him out for giving up without consulting anyone. Adrien is a lot of conflicting things (see Adrien’s passivity compared to Chat Noir’s recklessness) so he’d have to find a middle ground within himself.

Marinette might carry Plagg around in her purse for a while and let Plagg have a say in who he goes to. Plagg might grieve for a bit over not having Adrien around (even if Adrien was flawed, Plagg didn’t ask for any of this so Marinette is doing her best here).

O-oh.

That’s always the rough patch with “endgame ships.”  Once it’s obvious to the audience that they’re endgame, no more effort needs to be put into them.

The other thing too is how Kagami, for example, is friends with Marinette. Even once Adrimi sinks, she’ll presumably stay friends with her. Luka, meanwhile, is Juleka’s brother.

They have lives outside of their love interests. Adrien is so into Ladybug that he doesn’t have that; I mean, Nino is Adrien’s best friend like once in a blue moon.

The entire class is just watching an episode and then calling on raised hands to answer what was wrong with what they just watched.

“Everything?”

“I mean, yes, but I’m sorry, you have to be more specific to get credit.”

I think Aeon herself is fine. It’s mostly just her transformed and that transformed name that I have a problem with (she doesn’t even look uncanny so I don’t get it). I heard there was something wrong with the name “Aeon” but searching the name doesn’t give me anything I would qualify as such so I have no idea. I just wish she was given a little less “I’m programmed to--” (makes her seem less sentient) and more “[anything that doesn’t have to do with pushing the love square]” because I feel like they might’ve done the latter to make her more “likable”? I think fans of anything usually like the “matchmaker” character provided it’s for a ship they like. Also strange that they make her a robot but Max and Markov don’t extensively interact with her, but that’s a nitpick and not a criticism of her character.

...I’m rambling, my bad lol.

(Ohhh, she was supposed to be a mummy? Like, foreshadowing her “dying”?? That went right over my head but I guess that’d be where the name Uncanny Valley came from? No clue.)

Best case scenario is probably the middle or the end of Season 4.

And yeah, it really doesn’t matter to me what they do with the love square. Marinette had gone through too much suffering and the show goes out of its way to show how much stress Marinette is being put under (and also keeping Luka away during episodes like “Gamer 2.0″ even when it makes sense for them to be there, as if trying to make sure Marinette doesn’t have enough moments with him to forget Adrien).

Like, ah, yes, I totally believe that Marinette is in a position where she can make reasonable decisions about her love life while all circles of her life are on fire.

If the Sonic movie of all things can have an interracial couple, there’s no reason why this show can’t, just saying.

And, even with Marinette, she’s white-passing (according to what basically everyone says, I’m really awful about recognizing race so this isn’t my field; I wasn’t aware that Ondine was Asian, for example).

Does Nadja count? Manon’s dark-skinned (I’m still not over the fact that all the kids in this show are dark-skinned; it’s not like it’s a problem from a representation standpoint - though all the kids are also all generically bratty/whiny so there’s that - but the percentages in this show are weird) while Nadja is really light-skinned, meaning either a dark-skinned husband or Manon is adopted.

Though I guess the problem then is that we don’t know, so there’s no established couple there.

Non-Miraculous Asks:

w-who gave you the right to say such things????

Uhhhh, that might be too broad of a question, I’m sorry!

I know this isn’t satisfactory, but I will say that my favorite genre is Fantasy/Romance (it’s why I adore Red Shoes so much; by the way, an anon asked for my opinion on that a while back and I will get to it! I’d need to watch it again to get screenshots) and my least favorite is probably Tragedy/Horror.

I don’t think I’ve watched enough to really be able to say? I’ve kind of been all over but I’ve never fully gone through any of them outside of Miraculous. I’ve seen bits of Sailor Moon, Tokyo Mew Mew, Star VS the Forces of Evil (don’t know if that counts), and I meant to watch Yuki Yuna is a Hero but never got around to it. I saw the entirety of Puella Magi Madoka Magica but you guys know how I feel about that one.

Maybe Cardcaptor Sakura by default then? It was definitely not perfect but I liked some of the character dynamics (I also have a clipcut of it - basically where I go through a series/movie and cut out parts I don’t like so it’s only good stuff - so I’m cheating a little) and the male love interest was a tsundere type that I actually ended up liking, which is really rare.

!!! That sounds sweet~ I know Sailor Moon is popular so I’ll definitely take your word for it on that one.

I would also accept a “reincarnated”/”destined lovers” trope if maybe the ship themselves are the one who set it up in the first place. I have a Lukanette AU, for example, where they basically got together and then prayed to the shrine of the renewal god that they’d “always be together,” which ended up allowing them to reincarnate over and over (as if they set up their own soulmate AU ;P) and continuously find each other.

Though I guess that’s not technically a “meant to be trope,” but still, it’s a form of it but where it was totally consensual on both sides.

Also, I finally thought of a show that ended with the ship I wanted: Gargoyles. I didn’t see the entire series, mind you, but I saw most of it and Goliath and Elisa were just... quality, I adored them.

+ With Beauty and the Beast being my favorite Disney movie, they fit right in with my tastes.

I forget that AangToph (I think the “official” name for the ship is Taang, but don’t quote me on that) exists sometimes, maybe because I’ve never shipped Aang with anyone; I’ve got no problems with the ship though.

Ugh, and this is what I mean when I talk about people who set up these reasons behind people shipping something based on what they saw a few people do. It’s like, “you only ship Adrimi/Lukanette to spite Adrienette!!”

Meanwhile, me having shipped all three at one point and then dropped off the love square.

Also, me shipping Zutara has nothing to do with it being dark/edgy because I’ve never seen it that way (intriguing, sure but dark and edgy? lol) and also avoid dark/edgy ships like the plague.

I still laugh at people who are like, “you can’t ship it because it’s not endgaaaaame!” as if shows can dictate how and why I enjoy something. Like sure, if you want to let a show/movie spoonfeed you how you’re supposed to feel, then by all means, go ahead.

I suppose people may be theoretically happier that way, but it doesn’t make for an analytic mind.

I legitimately thought that “AssClass” must’ve been the actual name for something until it registered with me what it actually meant.

And eh, I guess it depends on the comparison and how accurate the comparison actually is? Like, comparing Puella Magic Madoka Magica to Miraculous... they’re not really close at all, but comparing... idk, Bunnyx to Homura or the concept behind “backfiring wishes”... maybe?

-

(note that the rest of this post is more Puella Magi Madoka Magica salt so you can stop reading here if you’re not interested in that; I’m not sure if this is all the same anon but I don’t mind letting people vent so I let them go off~)

why can’t we just have nice things

I agree, and I give a little eyeroll every time it’s like, “oh, this person had [miraculous]”

+ even just in general, I feel weird about any show that mentions/implies that real world famous people are [x] or [y] in their show. It breaks my immersion; real world locations are one thing but when it’s specific people (unless they’re made up characters like Santa Claus) or games just--break me.

I also don’t know what to think when there aren’t magical boys but you have these magical girls in this frilly outfits/skirts. The demographic is girls so I presume the reason must be like, “you can look pretty and still beat people up” (;P) but having so many magical girl shows without a hint of a magical boy makes me suspicious that it’s for fanservice. Sailor Moon has Tuxedo Mask but I also don’t know what that guy did outside of the meme of him doing nothing so I’ve got no clue.

(edit: I should correct myself that I’m not talking about Sailor Moon specifically; I don’t know magical girls that well, though I do know there are ones clearly intended for fanservice (you could say that for anything, to be fair, but still). It’s just that I see things like super short skirts or very “questionable” shots and I’m just like, “hm”)

Hmmm, good question. I feel like there has to be a lot but I’m also the type who doesn’t watch a lot of TV lol. I’m just familiar with cliches and tropes and such.

The reason I try not to use “ism”s of any kind is mostly because it’s too broad. Like, you know how the English language only has one way of saying, “I love you,” but other languages like Spanish have multiple?

It’s like that, and sometimes I think it’s too easy to throw those words out there. A “small” (possibly completely unintentional/misunderstood) offense is sexism, and then a “large” offense is called the exact same thing. I’d rather go into why something is sexist than just call it that, y’know? The only exception I make is “classism” because I feel like that’s not as... I dunno, divisive?

Anyway, for that same reason, I can’t answer firmly that, “Madoka Magica is sexist.” I will however say that it makes me uncomfortable with how the show makes out the girls being emotional because they’re young and female and then proceeds to make their life a living hell before they’re old enough to properly answer to it (I know that’s the point but that kind of makes it worse?). It doesn’t help with how all the girls have different personalities, so it’s not like you have only “crybaby girls” who are being taken advantage of; it’s basically like... all girls.

Not helped is the fact that their soul gem not only deteriorates naturally, but it can also do so faster if the girl falls into despair, which then turns them into a monster (and I know it’s kind of like an akuma thing, but the fact that it’s only girls is... I dunno, it comes off wrong?). It seems cheap that the soul gem deteriorates no matter what so it constantly needs fed even if the girl is consistently happy.

I would probably opt for the show being centered more around Kyubey being new to this or something - like, magical girls are a new thing - and then have Kyubey being surprised because they presumed that the soul gem would deteriorate naturally since “emotions are powerful but destructive to the person having them,” but then all the girls team up and help each other work out their problems. Maybe the reason magical girls are usually alone isn’t even because of the grief seed (I think that’s what it’s called?) thing not being able to be shared, but because Kyubey intentionally separates magical girls so they can’t do what the main group is doing, but Madoka is so into the idea that, “We shouldn’t have to be alone,” and so she’s constantly pulling all the girls together, which keeps them healthy.

Maybe Homura’s backstory could be that Madoka originally was more sheepish and more afraid to put herself out there, especially since she was a magical girl (who are encouraged to go it alone), which is why their soul gems were both deteriorating; they were friends but kept more of a distance, or maybe they were a team but that’s all they were. Then Madoka gives Homura the last grief seed to save her and that’s what inspires Homura and makes her see Madoka as something more than a teammate, which is why Homura actively tries to save Madoka specifically (which then encourages Madoka to want to keep everyone together as friends).

In the case that Kyubey doesn’t separate them out of concern of fRiEnDsHiP, but for another reason altogether, and then it’s ultimately their own downfall when they allow the girls to hang out and realize that it’s doing a lot of good for them.

“cute and innocent”

That was exactly it. It’s on Kyubey’s trivia section on the Puella Magi Madoka Magica Wiki.

Before the anime's first dark plot twist aired, head writer Gen Urobuchi said on his Twitter account that the "Kyu" in Kyubey's name comes from the English word "cute". This was a lie meant to further mislead fans into thinking that Madoka Magica is an innocent happy show. In a later episode, it was revealed that "Kyubey" is, in fact, short for "incubator".

In my personal opinion, a spoiled plot can’t be “ruined” if it’s a good plot. If you told me that Kagome was trapped in the Modern era for three years and then decided to stay with Inuyasha at the end of Inuyasha, it wouldn’t/shouldn’t decrease the value when I finally see it for myself because it’s good. That’s not to say that everything should just be spoiled right out of the gate, but it’s saying that maybe your plot isn’t good if you have to rely on shock value to make it work??

I FEEL THAT “ASSIGNING IT TO THE WHOLE GENDER” THING SO BAD. It just adds to my “the girls all have varying personalities so it’s not like Kyubey’s only after emotional crybabies or anything” salt.

I have no idea about any of the stuff about the writers so I can’t confirm or deny them. I will very much agree on the target audience thing though, especially with the whole “keeping the dark plot a secret” because really? Who is this for then? Like, the first two and a half episodes are for one demographic and then the others are--???

I dunno. Me personally, I just like feel good stories. I do like some good conflict and drama (for context, Remarried Empress is basically a webtoon that gives you things to feel salty about and then makes its own salt fic as its plot, allowing for endless streams of feels and catharsis, so I’m definitely not against drama), but there are other times where I just want to feel good watching something.

I feel like the show expects the characters to be selfless/perfect and then punishes them even though it’s their writing that’s causing them to act out. I can’t really talking about “out-of-character” but sometimes it’s just obvious where “we did this because we needed a plot/conflict.”

Like, hello? We don’t need the main characters screwing up; why can’t we just have some feel good thing where they take the day for themselves (seriously, imagine a Miraculous episode where Chat Noir actually tells Ladybug to take a couple days for herself, like maybe someone else gets the earrings for a few days as a temp while Marinette gets to breathe; IMAGINE IT). Not everything needs to be high-stakes to be interesting and you need those calmer moments so that the action-packed ones feel more intense.

SAYAKA DESERVES BETTER.

I feel like the magical girl genre as a whole can be way more complex than it’s made out to be. I think people hear the word “magical girl” and think “cute girls in short skirts talk about girl problems and fight evil with the power of friendship and accessories.”

Ugh, just the mention of Rebellion makes me sigh internally.

Congrats on working on your own magical girl story! I hope it goes well for you!

I know it’s not technically a magical girl show, but there was also Totally Spies that Astruc worked on to some degree (I think there was some characters who were based on/a loose reference to the mains from that show but I don’t remember exactly).

The thing about the female characters suffering is that they could make for good lessons on positively directing one’s emotions (like Usagi from Sailor Moon, for example, maybe having a problem with taking her anger out on her friends, but learns that she can save that rage for the bad guys; “Gamer 2.0″ from Miraculous could’ve done that, honestly, by having Ladybug absolutely WRECK all of her gaming opponents in “violent” (cartoon violence obviously) fashion). It’s just a shame that it’s not taken advantage of.

Sayaka??? Selfish???????

*does not compute*

(Also, I wasn’t tired of them, don’t worry! It was a little overwhelming in my inbox but it’s me who’s allowing all the asks to flow in so the blame isn’t on you lol.)

I’m not sure where this obsession came from with, “you have to be selfless and you’re not allowed to use your powers for yourself.” It’s like the world’s going to end if a character leaves to go Self-Care or something. I think what happened is that shows got this idea that promoting only the giving of others is great and it’s not important to take time for yourself (even with “Gamer 2.0,” it was still Marinette playing games with everyone else, and they treated her dedication and seriousness like a bad thing when she literally did not have time to waste and they didn’t give a reason why it was good for her to take a break, only that she should).

This usually leads to the “demonization” of characters who sport a lot of self-confidence or any sort of ego. It works on both sides; Marinette is a punching bag because of her anxiety and occasional lack of confidence, but if she had an ego as Ladybug, there are parts of the fandom who deem her “obnoxious” (i.e: “Reflekdoll”). There’s a delicate balance between “be confident” and “be humble” and it’s a tightrope act.

#((Yes! This strategy works for not losing asks.)) #((In other news--)) #((I gotta test out this new microphone so I wanna do a ''Voiced Askplosion'' where I record my answers instead of writing them)) #((Anyone who sends me a 🎤 alongside their asks will get a voiced response next time!)) #((I probably can't answer everything but you know how it is~)) #(((i swear that someone is going to do it just to see if they can get me to swear when I read out their asks))) #((or... like--)) #((''ok i don't actually have a question'')) #((''but plz say the words 'adrien and marinette are meant to be' because i want to hear how much u struggle to say it'')) #category: salt #other: non ml talk #category: ramble #character: Marinette Dupain Cheng #category: fandom #episode: Evillustrator #character: Chat Noir #character: Ladybug #character: Adrien Agreste #character: Stormy Weather #category: me myself and i #category: staff #relationship: Adrien Agreste & Marinette Dupain Cheng #character: Aeon #character: Uncanny Valley #relationship: love square #MC's Renders #render: persona

[sealers100]

A (brief) review of every Donald Sutherland movie (so far)

I’m not coping well with quarantine at all and no one else seems to be either (which makes me feel a bit better) So what started out of boredom back over christmas break has turned into a quest to find and watch every Donald Sutherland movie ever. Probably not my best idea since a lot of them are very old and hard to find and would need to be bought online (which isn't an option right now.) Don’t ask me why, this kinda just happened and I’m not gonna fight it. So stick around for an unprofessional review of a very professional actor’s long film career. 

(if anyone has any suggestions or knows where to find more hmu) 

M*A*S*H*

Ah talk about a movie that didn’t age well (but neither did Holiday Inn and we still watch that) I’m not here to bash on it for being problematic because apart from the way they treated Houlihan, I genuinely loved this movie. It had be rolling the whole time just like the show and I still catch myself whistling like Hawkeye all the time. Probably still like the show better and Alan Alda’s Hawkeye (sorry Donald) but its definitely been a go to when I’m having a rough day.

Kelly’s Heroes

I think this was the first movie of his I ever saw as a little girl and I remember being very confused. (since it didn’t match my dad’s military stories at all) so this ended up being the first one I went out of my way to hunt down and watch and sorry to Clint Eastwood but Donald stole this movie from literally everyone. He’s hilarious, he’s sexy, he steals the show and it’s definitely one of his more underrated movies (the movie itself is a bit long) which is a damn shame since he (literally) died filming this one. (if you don’t know the story, look it up its wild)

Alex in Wonderland 

Wow, who knew he could be such a convincing asshole! At least he becomes aware of it by the end of the film but I just felt so lost by the end. Like ,what did I watch, what happens now? Not one of my favorites but definitely interesting and a sure product of the early 70s. Overall, he does have a lot of good scene (a scene with THE Federico Fellini) that are sometimes light-hearted, dumb, cute, irritating, and just...what? The relationship between him, his wife, and children is probably the only redeeming factor since its pretty accurate for how his actions strain his relationships. I am gonna be honest though, I only watched this one to see him as a long haired hippie 😂 (sorry). 

Klute

Leave it to Jane Fonda to remind me why I’m bisexual (I wish she wasn’t always a prostitute) Although there was a lot more of her and a lot less of him, even though he is John Klute. I am an absolute sucker for those old black and white noir movies and this is no different. It leaves some feelings to be desired at times (Donald apparently felt the same way) but you can really tell there’s a fascinating chemistry between him and Jane (because there actually was) Overall the story was entertaining but the character’s themselves seemed somewhat drab. I wish we got to know more about them and had more scenes with more emotion apart from just the sex and love scenes. Oh well, it was still a pretty damn good movie and I’d definitely watch it again if I got the chance.

Lady Ice

Basically Magnum before Magnum was even a thing. Now just because a movie is bad doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining. I love the whole Miami Vice vibe I get from this and again, huge fan of private investigators, detectives and dirty schemes. His acting might not be exemplary but I don’t even care. The movie is fun and not every movie has to be deep and meaningful. Nothing wrong with just watching a movie for the hell of it. And that moustache, it’s my kryptonite. 😆

Don’t Look Now

If you haven’t seen this movie, stop reading my bs and go watch it right now. (its free on crackle) This is such a good movie I could make a whole post on it alone. Donald and Julie Christie (I’m still not over her either) put so much into every scene, giving us such a beautiful relationship that’s been fraught with tragedy. Every scene is beautiful and eerie and enchanting Iloveitsomuch!!! I don’t wanna spoil too much because the ending turns everything on its head. I’m not sure if this is meant to be a horror movie but it really walks that uncanny valley with the whole setting of Venice in it’s off season, the dark corridors, creepy premonitions. I will spoil this, I love how for once, the man is the psychic instead of the woman, which is a trope that waaaaaay over done. AND THE SCANDAL! Okay sex scenes in movie isn't exactly scandalous but this one was surprisingly realistic (no they didn’t actually have sex) so everyone in the 70s pitched a hissy fit over it and I can’t understand why. It’s by far the most realistic and beautiful sex scene I’ve ever watch, hats off to Donald and Julie. God Bless Nicholas Roeg for this masterpiece, aaaaahhh just go watch it its so good!

Fellini’s Casanova 

Alright but bear with me on this. I think I had a religious experience while watching this movie. I was overly exhausted and had my eye on it for a while said ‘fuck it let’s watch something weird.’ This what actually started by quarantine marathon (how appropriate) and I can safely say, I think this is the most beautiful, most grotesque, most enchantingly beautiful and yet dark and bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. Donald makes such a convincing 18t century venetian lover and they really went all out with his appearance, acting and the scenery of the whole movie. Everyone in the film seems to genuinely enjoyed everything they’re doing (which says a lot they do some crazy shit in this one) and the whole time, everything is erriley whimsical, almost like a fever dream (which is what this film might have been I dunno). And the fact it spans the entirety of Casanova’s life, from his highest point to his absolute lowest decent into squalor just proves that Fellini holds nothing back AT ALL. Again, no spoilers (I don’t really think I can spoil this film) but there’s just copious amounts of sex and its just plain strange but if you find it in your heart to give it a try, please do. If you’re not sure about it that’s fine definitely not for everyone. However I highly recommend Fellini’s other works. (go watch La Strada)  

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers 

Hahaha oh man I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this movie. My friends and I in college had a horror movie night and this one seriously freaked out my roommate (i’m so sorry). I love me some sci-fi (I run a star trek blog) and this not only gave me lots of Donald but also Leonard Nimoy, (along with a very young Jeff Goldblum) so yes, this is now one of my favorite sci-fi movies (I did a film analysis on it too). I don’t recommend watching it in quarantine unless you’re into freaking yourself about a global pandemic. I will say, this movie is an anomaly  since I think it might be the only movie that is not only better than its remake, but also better than the book (which I also read) This one gives us Donald (and his moustache) playing of all things, a health inspector (I’m dying) whos put into some creepy scenarios of apocalyptic proportions. This is one of those horror movies that’s fun without being funny. It’s got plenty of drama and awkwardness between to characters while also reaching it’s cult classic status. All the actors in this film manage to give such a convincing performance that you can’t help but feel like you’re right there with the characters, which makes for a fun and terrifying ride. 10/10 would scare my roommate again.

The Great Train Robbery

Donald Sutherland AND Sean Connery? Sounds like a great pair right? Well they are, sort of. Okay this movie looks like a typical british drama, buuuuut I’m not so sure about this one. Donald is pretty great in this one and so is Sean, but I’m just very confused if it’s trying to be serious or funny? The plot itself makes sense and its pretty good but the execution is just...what? Oh well, Donald and Sean make an entertaining pair with their odd “train heist” I felt this movie would have done much better if it went for either one side or the other instead of jumping all over the place, and it played out much more like a soap opera. It’s not bad though but its not a favorite of mine. 

Bear Island

Okay I’ve been pretty nice so far, but this...the only real redeeming part of this movie is Donald and his beard. Which is such a shame because I feel like this could have been SUCH a good movie. The story itself is really good and enthralling but somebody somewhere dropped the ball. No, they didn’t drop it. They threw it off a cliff. Nothing about this movie makes sense, most everyone’s acting is subpar, and I don’t blame them because the script was probably the main offender of this film. Even Donald’s acting is uncharacteristically bad. I know shoot me, criticized his acting.  It’s just so strange to see what could have easily been a fantastic film. Someone send this to Philip Kaufman and ask for a remake because this one needs it. 

Ordinary People

Oh God, this movie. This movie means so much to me. Again, watched it with my roommate, we sobbed like children and its now a must see in our group. The fact that Donald wasn’t even nominated for an oscar for this film is a travesty. A story like this is something that in a way I’ve lived myself. Everyone’s acting in this film is superb and as someone who would know, yes, all of this is very really and very heart wrenching to watch. I don’t mean to get sappy or anything, but I have been Calvin Jarrett, I (and I’m sure others) have been that mediator who eventually is broken by the two fighting forces. Watching his eventual collapse is so surreal and wow this movie really broke me in some spots. Uhg god this movie, I wanna cry just thinking about it. I’d totally watch it but I’ll just spend the whole time wanting to hug him. 

Eye of the Needle 

If any of you know me personally, you’ll know I’m absolutely terrified of needles, so this might not have been the best movie for me to watch, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. This whole movie is actually pretty fantastic. For once, Donald plays a bad guy, but you can almost root for him (if he wasn’t a nazi) I felt so conflicted because while yes I wanted him to take her away from her horrible husband, hes a damn dirty Nazi, and we don’t stan. Of course, Donald’s character is extremely charming but I’m left wondering if his character really did have feelings for Kate Nelligan. I have a feeling that I could really run with this story. This one is a thrilling story with a thick plot that tears its characters apart. I can’t help but love it.

Crackers

Fight me, I thought it was funny. Not really but this is one of those “entertaining but not really good” movies. Donald’s character is...well, he reminds me a lot of most of my exes. He’s just down on his luck, he’s not a bad guy. Yeah that sums up how I feel about his character. However, the movie overall is pretty damn funny. At least it knows it’s a comedy and it even has a sweet(ish) ending. I will say its not great, but there is a good scene with Donald falling flat on his ass which was so worth the whole rest of the movie. This one is still on my quarantine go to for when I just wanna forget about life for a while. 

Rosary Murders

So this little gem I kinda just watched on a whim thinking it would be some campy horror movie that was very pro-catholic and woooweee was I wrong. I loved this movie so much I ended up watching it twice, two nights in a row. It really was a thrilling movie with a plot thicker than pea soup, all while throwing some (slight) shade at the catholic church. This movie goes less for the horror side of things and more for the shock and drama and it does it well. Not to mention he makes one hell of a cute priest. I loved the hell out of this one and I’m glad i decided on this one the other night. I might even watch it again who knows. 

Pride and Prejudice

Everyone in this movie is neurotic as hell except for Donald Sutherland and Keira Knightly. Sorry I was never a huge Jane Austen fan but I admire her ability to write hell of a good slow burn and that exactly what this is. Hell most of you know what this movie is about so I’m not gonna talk about it too much. Its one of those movies everyone else seems to have seen and I haven’t so mom and I sat down and watched it together. She just laughed as I sat there yelling at the TV, waiting for an exasperated Donald to come on. His final scene though, so sweet. I did like how the movie showed a father daughter relationship that wasn’t toxic (not like the last one) but I was kinda over the whole song and dance after a while. I’m sure most people think its a really good movie but I just don’t get it. 

The Hunger Games (All of them) 

As I understand it, this movie actually means a lot to Donald, as it does to a lot of people, and that he really enjoyed working with Jennifer Lawrence, so that’s nice. Yes I’ve seen all three (four) movies, read all the books and I couldn’t think of anyone else to better play Katniss Everdeen’s antithesis than someone like Donald. I feel like this is one of those roles that was just made for him. He was such a scary and venomous villain that played so well off of the main protagonist. Uhg I really do love the Hunger Games Series, it was a huge part of my childhood, I just hate how the fans destroy people who love the main villain, like many fandoms do (looking at you star trek). I wish I could just enjoy these movies in peace without everyone being so polarized on them. 

Oh wow there’s definitely gonna be a part two but as of now, this is all I got. I’ve got a long way to go and (with the way things are looking here in the U.S.) I’ve got plenty of time to do so. I really do enjoy doing these kinds of things so if you want me to watch and ramble about any other movies (no, it doesn’t have to have Donald Sutherland) I’m gonna be in quarantine for a while, so let’s at least do something fun to pass the time. 😊

#Donald Sutherland #this brings me joy #Im gonna laugh if I actually watch all his movies #mash #hunger games #pride and prejudice #ordinary people #I'm not gonna tag every movie wed be here all day

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: Avatar

Hyperbole is a real bitch. No matter what direction it goes in, it can seriously hamper a movie’s reputation. It’s the reason why I always just give a broad recommendation at the end of my reviews rather than a score; I find saying “Hey if you like this genre/subject matter/actor/etc, you might like this film” is a lot better than saying “This is a 10/10 five star masterpiece that all humans who ever shall exist need to see.” All too often the latter is what you get from mainstream publications when they praise a film.

Look what happened to Frozen; it was called one of the better Disney movies in recent memories and was praised to the heavens and back, which led to a bunch of people on the internet vocally disagreeing with said opinion, which then led to an entire anti-fandom of obnoxious basement dwellers who felt the need to constantly remind everyone Frozen sucked on any animation post they could find. All of this for a movie that, in hindsight, is just a solid, standard Disney princess flick.

Tonight we’re talking about a similar case, a film that when it came out was hyped up as a groundbreaking masterpiece of visual effects and a box office smash that grossed insane amounts of money… and was then derided as forgettable and a ripoff of Pocahontas or FernGully or what have you in the years to come. Yes, tonight we are talking about James Cameron’s smash hit, Avatar, and honestly? It’s probably the second best thing named Avatar out there, after Nickelodeon’s series about the last Airbender. After spending years being an obnoxious hipster douchebag and not watching it because it was popular followed by several more years of being an obnoxious douchebag who bashed whatever it was that was popular to bash, I finally sat down and watched James Cameron’s silly blue alien environmental movie… and frankly, it’s a pretty damn good movie. And I don’t just mean “oh it’s better than I expected but not great,” I mean “I can genuinely see to an extent where people were coming from when they were praising this.”

The story goes like this: In the far future, Earth is a polluted pile of fuck, so humans have taken to looking for resources elsewhere. One elsewhere? The moon of the planet Polyphemus, known as Pandora, which is home to a rare mineral that humans ironically dubbed “Unobtanium,” as it is rather hard to obtain due to the richest source being located amongst the native population: the ten-foot-tall blue alien beings known as the Na’vi. Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, is selected to utilize a remote-controlled artificial Na’vi body called an “avatar” so he can gain the native’s trust and maybe convince them to move, though there are tons of problems he has to overcome, not the least being that he starts crushing hard on Neytiri, the daughter of the chief (and seeing how she’s a hot blue alien played by Zoe Saldana, can you really blame him?). Can Sully help the humans and Na’vi reach a peaceful conclusion, or is the warmongering Colonel Miles Quaritch gonna get his way and start routing the natives out by force?

Interestingly, a lot of the movies that people claims this ripped off came out after this movie had been written; Cameron’s been working on this movie since 1994, when he wrote up an 80-page treatment for the film. He wanted to start working on this after Titanic, but the technology of the time just wasn’t right to fulfill his vision. Frankly, it’s a good thing he waited, because as I’m sure you know from all the praise it got, the visuals in this film are simply stunning. The Na’vi, the creatures of Pandora, the forests, all the glorious details of this alien planet and its inhabitants are just incredibly well done. If this had been done earlier, there is no way the Na’vi would have avoided the uncanny valley as well as they did; as it stands, they’re probably one of my favorite alien races in fiction, just from the visual standpoint alone. How good this movie looks compared to the story - which by comparison to the groundbreaking effects is rather basic - would almost make you think this film is just style over substance…

...But I’d argue that’s not exactly the case. While it’s glaringly obvious that the effects are the biggest draw, the story is still enjoyable and solid. It may seem rather derivative, but that’s mostly because in the span of time the film took to get made everyone and their mother cranked out environmental films or films about aboriginal people being joined by an outsider who learns from them and then fights back against people encroaching on their way of life, especially during the 90s. This movie quite frankly has an edge over all of those films; for one, this film looks way better than any of them, even Pocahontas (which is undeniably a beautiful film to look at). It also helps this film avoids the, uh… unfortunate implications that often come with these kinds of stories. I’m not here to get to into this aspect of those kinds of movies, but in the hands of less talented writers and directors there tends to be really nasty undertones. While Jake Sully does help lead this foreign culture to victory over their technologically advanced foes, it’s more due to him having knowledge of how humans work combined with the skills the Na’vi themselves have. Neither would have won without the other’s help. So yeah, the story is pretty simple, but pretty good. Not truly groundbreaking or original, but it really doesn’t have to be.

While I will say the story is the weak point, it IS carried by some truly great characters… just not Sully. While he’s a decent protagonist and all, he’s quite frankly overshadowed by just about everyone around him, with three enormous shadows being cast by Grace, Neytiri, and Quaritch. Grace is played by Sigourney Weaver. That is literally all you need to know to understand why she utterly steals every single scene she’s in, but for the sake of this review, let me explain in a bit more detail: her establishing character moment has her awakening from her avatar pod asking where her cigarette is, she openly is suspicious of Sully being added to the avatar program, she is the most honestly sympathetic and noble character in the entire movie, and her avatar is a stunning work of CGI. There’s really not a bad thing I can say about her; she’s basically Ellen Ripley with a more positive attitude towards aliens. She takes no shit and she does all she can to keep these people from being exploited by the greasy corporate shitweasels, no matter what she has to do. What a fucking hero. Can you see why Sully just seems kinda weak in comparison?

Then we have Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana. She’s gorgeous, she’s badass, and she has quite the likable personality. She almost singlehandedly gives Sully a basic rundown on how not to die and spends most of her early screentime saving his ass. This was one of Saldana’s big roles in 2009 alongside playing Uhura in the Star Trek reboot series, and it brought her tons of praise, fame, and helped get her typecast as “Badass space babe with colorful skin.” Without this, Gamora might have gone to a less impressive actor who wouldn’t have been able to showcase the emotional range required, so at the very least I’m thankful to this movie for that.

And now finally, and perhaps most importantly, we come to Colonel Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen “You wished he was Cable until they cast Josh Brolin” Lang. Quaritch is what seems like such a simple villain: a military man with some serious bloodlust, a guy who just seems to be itching to go to war. But really, there’s a lot more to him than that. One really gets the sense Quaritch really does believe what he’s doing is for the betterment of humanity, and he doesn’t go right to gunning down the Na’vi even when he’s given the word to remove them by force. There are a lot of ways to interpret him, but frankly, no matter what way you cut it he’s at the very least genuinely concerned with the safety of his subordinates (outlined in his establishing scene); this leads him to becoming probably one of the single most badass anti-villains ever conceived. The man frequently steps out into the hostile atmosphere of the moon, holding his breath, to take shots at foes before putting on a breathing apparatus. He jumps out of an exploding plane in a mini-mech, which he uses to get into a knife fight with Sully. And every heinous and violent action he takes is one he takes to protect men from dying, something he has seen far too much of. And while this makes him sympathetic to a degree, his utter disdain of the Na’vi and his bloodthirsty attitude also makes sure you want to see him gets what’s coming to him.

There’s some side characters here and there that are good, but it’s mainly these three carrying the story when it starts seeming a bit too basic for this lofty world Cameron has built. And really, this is a fantastic world he’s created. This is truly a stunning film visually, with some flavorful characters to ensure that the vision doesn’t wear on you throughout the running time. For the most part, it really does work; guess that’s just the magic of James Cameron.

This is a very good film. Not the greatest film of all time, but definitely an enjoyable, ambitious, and groundbreaking one. If I ever make a list of the best sci-fi films (and you know I will eventually), this will most certainly be on there… somewhere. It’s at least top 25 material. While Aliens and the first two Terminator films are definitely the best stuff Cameron has done, this is still quite an impressive piece of pop sci-fi he created; if you like environmental movies, science fiction, creative worldbuilding, awesome visuals, or James Cameron movies, this film is worth a watch. Hell, it’s worth a watch if you’re a fan of Weaver, Lang, or Saldana too, because their performances really drive this film. It’s a good movie, plain and simple.

...Though I don’t think it’s good enough to warrant four sequels. Fuck off, Cameron.

#Michael After Midnight #Review #Movie review #Avatar #James Cameron's Avatar #James Cameron #Sci-fi #Na'vi #Pandora #Neytiri #Zoe Saldana #Sigourney Weaver #Stephen Lang

[highlevelencounters-blog]

Call of Cthulhu: an over long analysis

In trying to give any video game a fair review, one faces difficulties, because games try to be and to do such a varying range of things.  I think this is especially true of Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu.  There are so many metrics by which one could measure the game. Is it engaging?  Is it scary?  Does it do what it does well;?  Is it well made?  Is it true to its Lovecraft source material?  Is it true to its roleplaying game source material?  Is it worth the price?  If you are short of time, and I would not blame you if you were, then very quickly: yes; no; yes; depends what you mean but no; sort of; yeah and that depends but probably not.  If you are not short on time, then let me explain myself (in very great detail) by taking these points in turn.  It is difficult to appraise the game without spoilers, but I will warn you when they are coming.  If you do not want them, skip to the next heading.

Is Call of Cthulhu engaging?

Yes. Not the most engaging game, mind, but its story, characters and general sense of intrigue carry the game.  There are technical problems with the writing that I will deal with below, but those are the video game equivalents of bad grammar and spelling errors (of which, while we are on the subject, I noticed a bit in the subtitles and item descriptions).  Despite the animation problems, also mentioned below, the characters are well fleshed out both through direct speech and context.  The graphics are nothing sensational, but are definitely good enough to create a world you want to explore. One of my favourite things, though, is that the game does not treat you like an idiot, nor does it leave you behind.  My problem with the few investigation-based games I have played before is that they are determined to leave no man behind, so they bash you around the head with everything that they have lying around.  Call of Cthulhu does not do this.  Cut-scenes and mandatory conversations make sure you know what is going on even if you are not paying attention to anything else that is around you, but if you are looking at the details in the world, even the ones that are not in any way highlighted by the big buttons that appear over everything that you can interact with, then you can start to piece together why things are happening, as opposed to just finding out that they are happening.  Intelligence, time and exploration are rewarded with details, but none are essential for understanding the gist of the story.  It is difficult to say much more without spoilers, so here are some SPOILERS:  

While Officer Bradley was clearly the best character, standing out from most modern video game characters you see today by being wonderfully human, but not in a broken, flawed way, I want to prove my point about good characters by pointing to Charles Hawkins.  While this character is never explicitly explained, we know he has been in on everything since the beginning.  He is literally a wife-beating monster and definitely a villain of the piece.  But he is also conflicted and caring.  He genuinely wants what is best for Sarah, even if that means abusing her.  He is a bad, angry man, but he is trying to do right.  And the beauty is that the game never actually tells you this.  It shows you.  No one really ever says anything about Charles’s character, but reading into what he says and watching what he does really gives you a feel for his character. Which is impressive for a character with such little screen time.  

Is Call of Cthulhu scary?

No. I do not play horror games so I am not the person to ask really.  Or maybe I am the perfect person to ask.  Either way, for what it is worth, I was not scared by this game.  I hate being chased and a couple of sequences made me tense up in my chair, but I would not take that as a massive indication of anything.  The same fear of being chased is what made me stop playing Mirror’s Edge and that game is very far from scary.  In the game’s defense, however, jump scares are cheap and I hate them and this game seems to aswell.  I counted exactly two and one of them was mostly just a creepy musical trill and the other one was so obviously coming it did not even startle me.  So Kudos there.

Does Call of Cthulhu do what it does well?

Yes. What I mean by this is, if you boil the game down to what it actually is, it does that well.  What that means, is that it is a very good walking simulator.  If that is not what you want, do not play this game.  This is a walking sim with some very light RPG elements and a few sections where, undoubtedly, someone higher up the chain came in and said “we need a stealth section!” or “we need a combat section!” or “we need a horror section!” or “we need an action section!” and the developers obliged, put in one instance of each and moved on.  These sections, except maybe the fun but very basic stealth section, are by far the weakest parts of the game (oh my, that combat section!).  The exceptions are the many puzzles, which, like the plot in general, do not treat you like an idiot. Except for one part of one, which honestly feels like the developers made a mistake (what is supposed to be the clue for where to look for the answer instead just straight up gives you the answer, despite the fact that all the stuff for actually reasoning out the answer is right there in the game!).  

I only have one problem with the walking simulator nature of the game. There are a few sections which are clearly only there to pad out time.  Most of the game is a pretty tight linear tour through the story, but occasionally you are given an adventure game style ‘puzzle’ that just boils down to, “walk around this area you have already walked around for ages until you find the thing that you have to poke to make the story progress”.  Anyone who has played the game will know what I mean by ‘the bust bit’.  And there is another section which might work as a horror piece, maybe, but just seemed to me to be “run around this same small area 5 or 6 times till we arbitrarily let you out”.  ‘Lamps’ is the clue word for that one, if you’re curious as to what I mean.  But these are nit-picks.  Generally the game is an excellent walking simulator.

Is Call of Cthulhu well made?

That depends on what you mean.  Games are hugely multifaceted, but what often differentiates a good game from a poor one is the ability of its developers to work to its strengths.  It would be an unfair criticism of Indie darling Limbo to say that it had bad facial animations.  It definitely did, but this is not a problem because the characters effectively have no faces.  This seems like a facile point, but I think it is important to remember that Cyanide, the developers of Call of Cthulhu, have previously been known for the Styx games, a few Games Workshop titles, a buttload of cycling games and little else.  Call of Cthulhu is not triple-A, but it’s not Indie either.  The game, at least visually and narratively though, tries to do everything a triple-A title would attempt to do, as opposed to the usual Indie approach of making at least one aspect in some way minimalist.  This is not an excuse, merely something to keep in mind as I say that the animation is some of the worst I have seen in games for a very long time.  It’s not quite as funny as Mass Effect Andromeda’s, there is not quite enough going on for it to be quite as bizarrely broken.  Dialogue lines would come out of characters whose mouths were shut, arms would constantly drift around like they had slightly confused minds of their own and I hope the ‘facial expressions’ were enjoying their trip to the uncanny valley.  

The writing was a bit all over the place as well.  Writing, mind, not story or character construction.  There is a reasonable amount of choice in the game, but an annoyingly large number of the lines of dialogue do not seem to match up with the choices you make.  In the first main scene, you can go straight into a conversation with someone and mention in one conversation branch that you know that a character is a big deal on Darkwater island, and then immediately choose another conversation option where you reveal you have never even heard of Darkwater island before.  In a subsequent scene, a man told me he would meet me somewhere later, but then, when I got there, my character had several lines questioning why the man was there. There are numerous moments like this and it really takes you out of the experience every time it happens.  A similar issue is present whenever you enter an enclosed space and your vision starts distorting.  I only knew that this was a representation of the main character’s claustrophobia because the developers mentioned it in press releases.  I did not notice any mention of it in the actual game.

A bit more nit-picky, but there are a few times when the game simply does not tell you something that would be useful to know.  The most egregious of these is when they give you something which has limited uses but do not tell you either that it has limited uses or how many uses are left until you have used them all up.  It is never a particularly large problem, but it would have been nice to know.

Still, looking at the game as a technical work, I must say that the graphics are nice.  The art style has a Dishonored feel to it, which I personally have lots of time for.  It is not quite as stylised, but the game is generally very pretty, which is a good thing too since you will spend a lot of time shoving your camera into every corner of it.

Is Call of Cthulhu true to its Lovecraftian source material?

Ah, the fun question.  The answer really depends on how much of a deep dive you want to do.  But before I jump in, it is important to note that the developers explicitly said their game was based on the table-top RPG, rather than Lovecraft’s stories.  What follows, then, is a piece of literary critique (read: w**k) and not necessarily a criticism of the game.  It will also be absolutely riddled with SPOILERS:

Call of Cthulhu gets a lot right about the common conception of the Lovecraftian aesthetic: the green tinge that permeates everything gives it a distinctly Cthulhu-y vibe, the rural town is a common motif of Lovecraft’s (the game is very Shadow Over Insmouth here) and Cthulhu as an entity is almost used well.  As I said at the top, SPOILERS!  Cthulhu actually shows up, for about one second, in one of the game’s four endings and is presented as an unstoppable, maddening, world-ending force.  This is doing Cthulhu right.  There is no fighting Cthulhu: once he has been awoken from his fhtagn, the world will crumble around him.  The only hope one has is to prevent that from happening, so it is appropriate that, if it is allowed to happen, the game gives you no chance to resist.  The game also takes a good approach to sanity and curiosity.  Fuller is the character who most explores the concept of curiosity and it is shown to warp and twist him as it opens his mind to new possibilities.  This fear of curiosity is at the heart of Lovecraft’s writings.  The game also plays with sanity, another of Lovecraft’s main themes, although most of the mechanical implications of that are better discussed in relation to the Call of Cthulhu table-top RPG.

However, there is one thing that the game gets seriously wrong about Lovecraft.  In those moments when the game is scary, the story itself is not one of cosmic horror.  Much horror is about holding a mirror up to humanity.  It is about showing and exploring our darker sides.  Werewolves explore our animal nature, vampires (at least traditionally) were an exploration of sexuality, serial killers explore human psychopathy, zombies represent rampant consumerism.  The monster, at the end of the day, is us.  This is not the goal of cosmic horror.  Lovecraft is not writing stories about people.  His horror is metaphysical.  “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents” is how he begins his story The Call of Cthulhu and this one sentence, I think, underpins all of his work.  His protagonists go mad not because they saw something scary, they go mad because they saw something they cannot explain.  Their very understanding of reality is thrown out of whack and they are shown that the safe, pedestrian, societal lives they thought they were living were facades: the ignorance that our subconscious chooses for us to protect us from realisations about the universe and our tiny, utterly insignificant part in it.  His entities are often not even evil, they are simply so alien and disinterested that we matter as much to them as ants matter to us.  This is why Lovecraft was so revolutionary, he moved away from the traditionally biblical kind of horror where the monsters are manifestations of our own sins and turned instead to the secular world of science for his horrors.  “The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little”, he continues in Call of Cthulhu, “but someday the piecing together of previously disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age”.  I say again, Lovecraft is not telling stories about people.  He is telling stories about the universe and our inability to understand or cope with it.  The truth that science will one day unlock, Lovecraft seems to be suggesting, is that we do not matter at all.  This is cosmic horror.  But Call of Cthulhu (the video game, that is) seems to miss this.  Pierce’s sanity (or insanity) progression comes the closest. I say more on this mechanic below, but the final choice that Pierce must make is the most Lovecraftian moment of the game.  

There are four endings to the game, one default and three others unlocked through story actions, which is a system I like.  On a very quick side note, I also really like how there is a save point just before the end, allowing you to go back instantly and replay the endings you did not choose, but only if you unlocked them (I unlocked three of the four endings on my first play-through).  Suicide and accepting the ritual both present “go mad from the revelation” endings, each with a different but totally appropriate flavour of madness, while the ‘it’s over’ ending represents a flight back into a dark age, Pierce sticking fingers in his ears and yelling “la la la it’s all a dream!”  I also like here that you have to unlock all but the ritual ending.  I was annoyed with this ending until I found this out.  The game does not really give you any reason to complete the ritual.  The Leviathan and the cult have all clearly been bad the whole way through the game, there is not ever any good reason for Pierce to surrender at the last moment and perform the ritual. Having it as the default, though, makes this lack of motivation slightly more excusable, as it represents Pierce simply surrendering to what he has been told is his destiny, as opposed to having worked for the will to fight back in some way.  The fourth ending, the counter ritual, is by far the poorest, which is a shame because it could so easily have been fixed.  You know that Drake is planning something, but Pierce, or at least my Pierce, was never told exactly what that was.  My Pierce would not logically even have known that there was a counter ritual, never mind how to do it and certainly never mind what it actually does (a point that I am still completely in the dark about).  This is something, as far as I can tell, that the game never explains, even if you do choose this option.  Just a little bit of exposition, probably delivered by Drake, would have cleared this all up.  

But I digress.  Call of Cthulhu is essentially a game about people.  It is about a group of people who are more or less tricked by some powerful alien being into doing its bidding.  And as I said above, it does this well.  But in being about people and their struggles, it fails to focus on what Lovecraft himself actually focuses on.  Now, a quick disclaimer: I do not know for a fact that Lovecraft was a racist and viewed minorities as ‘less human’ than white people (although there is evidence for this in his work), but I am going to assume this is the case, at least in some way, for what I am going to say.  I think it is telling that most of the cultists in Lovecraft’s work are minorities, because this distances even his human villains from the (I think) exclusively white protagonists of his stories. This separation between the human and the alien is completely ignored in the sequences in which Pierce is visited by the Leviathan in prison.  The fact that the Leviathan would take humanoid form and use human manipulation tactics to get Pierce to do what it wants is totally non-Lovecraftian.  Where is the horror at our utter inconsequentiality here?  Cthulhu is scary because it does not care about us, we matter so little there would be zero point in it or any of its ... associates (for want of a better word) attempting to use tactics to manipulate human kind.  In The Call of Cthullhu (the story now, not the game), Cthullhu pretty much tells people to come and they just do.  No need to take human form, no need to use psychological methods.  Lovecraftian horrors use us like the dumb insects that, compared to them, we are.  

Further the visions that haunt Pierce are visions of people, mostly, and the awful things that they do to each other.  He questions his senses, but he never really questions his position in the universe or what it would actually mean if all the things that he is seeing were true. Lovecraft’s protagonists usually do believe what they see and this is what drives them mad, while Pierce is driven mad by questions about whether or not to believe what he sees.  The biggest crime though, the moment that really made me feel that the developers had missed the point, is in the after-credits half of the ritual ending. Here we see the cultists all engaged in a murderous brawl, screaming with delirious madness as they punch and kick and bite each other while, presumably, Cthulhu gets on with the important job of destroying the world just off camera.  But this is the wrong kind of madness.  Sure, everyone would go mad as their understanding of reality snapped at the vastness and alien-ness (alienitude? alienosity?) of Cthulhu, but for all of them to just go kill-crazy? It doesn’t make sense.  That does not seem to be the madness that comes of having your entire knowledge of reality shattered.  It feels more like a madness that makes a flashy ending to a video game.

Is Call of Cthulhu true to its roleplaying game source material?

Yes, broadly.  Firstly, I am not a CoC (which is what I’ll call the rolepaying Call of Cthulhu, because this is getting stupidly confusing) expert.  I have played and run a few games, but it is not my main game.  That being said, I think I know enough to say that Call of Cthulhu does a good job of translating CoC into a video game. Its plot is a little more big-leagues (bigly) and showy than your average CoC game, but that is fine.  It’s the same thing that happens when a film is made from a TV series.  And in this regard, Call of Cthulhu is hardly a huge offender.  This might just be me, but I really like stories that know how to reign in their scale and Call of Cthulhu does a pretty good job of this.  With the exception of one particular sub-plot (which is by no means overblown just a little elbowed in (the whole painting sub arc, btw)), everything is pretty well contained and not much is thrown in to escalate things to stupid levels as the game progresses.  

Call of Cthulhu continues the well-practiced trend of CoC games of being incredibly linear, but while this is an actual problem for roleplaying games, where the only limitation is imagination, in a video game, which is fenced in by budget and deadline constraints, this linearity is not so much of a problem.  

An area where Call of Cthulhu differs from CoC is in its use of skills. The skill list for 6th edition CoC (which is the edition I know, so don’t pester me about 7th ed) is over 50 skills long.  Call of Cthulhu, on the other hand, has 7 skills.  This means you never have those horrible moments where you absolutely NEED a successful library-use roll or else-you-will-all die-in-the-next-encounter-because-you-did-not-know-the-monster-is-weak-to-salt-but-you-put-all-your-points-into-Fast-Talk-so-I-guess-you-are-all-just-going-to-die-and-no-I-am-not-still-bitter. This, I feel, is an improvement.  It could be argued that it reduces the scope for roleplaying, but with the limited conversation options and the actually quite well written and characterised Pierce, you are never going to be totally in control anyway.  Call of Cthulhu is also paced very much like a CoC game as well, with slow, social information gathering at the beginning, ramping up to more action/horror moments later.  This does make some of the skills more useless later on in the game, but this is not a major problem and a difficult one to avoid (and certainly one that CoC games usually fail to avoid).  Also like CoC, there is, I think, a clearly right thing to do at character creation, but while in CoC it is because some skills (I’m looking at you, operate heavy machinery) are simply pointless, in Call of Cthulhu character gen is the only time you can use experience points to level up Occultism and Medicine, something you are definitely going to want to do and something the game does not do a good job of telling you.

CoC’s main selling point, as a system, is its sanity mechanic, something that Cyanide obviously spent a great deal of time looking at when making Call of Cthulhu.  I have heard that some people did not think it was used well, but I have to disagree.  Sadly though, to explain why I have to make liberal use of SPOILERS!

In CoC, sanity is effectively your character’s long-term health bar. Your sanity level sticks around from adventure to adventure with very little you can do to raise it if it falls.  It is, in many ways, your character’s expiration date.  It goes down whenever you see something Cthulhoid, but there is a random element to it.  Clearly, this would not work for Call of Cthulhu, not in the same way anyway. If Call of Cthulhu were a CoC game, it would take at most three or four sessions, and that is not really fast enough for a character to melt completely into a gibbering puddle of insanity.  So Call of Cthulhu does something very different and I think it does it very well.  

At the beginning of the game, you have some control over your sanity being reduced.  The most clear example of this is when you have the option of whether or not to read the Malleus Monstorum.  But as the game continues, you have less and less choice over whether you get to see sanity-breaking stuff or not.  It basically just happens to you. This means that really, your loss of sanity is almost 100% controlled by the game’s story.  Therefore the moment that you break mechanically is also the moment that weird stuff starts happening, by necessity, in the story.  Pierce starts to have visions, some of them obviously fake, some of them much more plausibly real, and because his sanity has broken we know that we are in a situation where we should be questioning everything, as opposed to earlier in the game when the lines were much more clear cut.  This is a co-opting of mechanics by story, which I have not really seen before in a game. The game gives you something that appears to be in your control but then slowly and subtly takes it back.  You could see this as a reduction in player autonomy, because it really is, but I think this fits very well with the themes of destiny and inevitability in the story.  It also produces an organic way to show the deteriorating mental state of Pierce without it being exposition-y.  If we had felt, right from the beginning, that the sanity bar had nothing to do with our own choices, the moment when Pierce breaks would have felt contrived.  But by giving us that illusion of choice we are engaged with the progression of that sanity bar in a way that we would not be otherwise and when it finally shifts from stable to psychotic, we do not see this as a simple narrative move, we see this as an organic part of the story and the choices we made in it, even if really it is not.  I also love how the sanity manifests itself.  It is subtly done and I think interesting debates could be had about what is real and what is not (I have strong feelings about when the last time we really see Colden is, for example).  A brilliant example of this is how we shoot Fuller in what is obviously a dream-scape and then come back to what we think is reality and find we have shot him there too. But this, itself, is also shown to be an illusion when, in one of the ending sequences, we hear him talking to a nurse.  It is all very Inception-y and I really like it.  It was a nice subversion of expectations, as I was expecting the sanity meter, as a player influenced mechanic, to be able to affect only aesthetic things and maybe minor story elements.  I noticed this exactly once (a painting had blood spatters on it which disappeared when I approached), but the way the game takes control of the mechanic and allows it to have serious narrative impact, while a removal of player autonomy, was very refreshing.

Is Call of Cthulhu worth the price?

At time of writing, Call of Cthulhu is selling for £40.  It is not worth that.  You can go and pick up Divinity Original Sin 2, a game that is basically empirically perfect, for £10 less than that and get at the very least ten times as much play time out of it.  Where the price point of Call of Cthulhu should be for you is something only you can decide.  £15 seems like a more reasonable price point to me.  What I look for is usually a strong enjoyment/hour ratio as opposed to a good hour/money ratio, and Call of Cthulhu has a very good enjoyment/hour ratio, but this is certainly helped by its short length.  At the end of the day, I would say that whatever you would be willing to pay for two engaging, thoughtful, just below Hollywood tier films is probably the right price for Call of Cthulhu.  Especially since the game has basically no replay value.  In many ways it is very average, but if you have a thing for walking simulators or Lovecraftian worlds, then this game is a must buy for you.  But maybe wait until the price has dropped.

#Call of Cthulhu #Cthulhu #Lovecraft #Game Review #Essay #Cosmic horror #Literary analysis #Roleplay #HashtagsHaveNoSpaces

[yahooben]

'Mass Effect: Andromeda' review: A sprawling space drama that struggles to stay on target

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ invites you to strap in for another space opera.

“Space is big,” beloved author and interdimensional traveler Douglass Adams noted in his seminal towel-seller, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” “You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big,” he wrote, hammering home the point that when it comes to bigness, even our new president has nothing on the universe.

That size presents quite a challenge to game makers, but few have hacked away at the quandary with as much gusto as developer Bioware. The team behind the blockbuster “Mass Effect” trilogy managed to capture the epic scope of the big unknown while keeping our eyes trained on the intimate interactions between characters, a space opera in its truest — and, in terms of video games, among its best — form. So when they announced a return to their beautifully realized universe with “Mass Effect: Andromeda” ($60 for Xbox One, PS4, PC), we all got very excited indeed.

But a great deal has happened since 2012’s “Mass Effect 3” simultaneously wowed and enraged gamers; namely, “The Witcher 3,” “Fallout 4,” Bioware’s own “Dragon Age: Inquisition” and a host of other genre-blending RPGs (you could arguably toss recent greats “Horizon: Zero Dawn” and “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” into that mix, too). Big-budget role-playing games have blossomed in the past five years.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ has the makings of a great game, but misses the mark with a number of missteps.

And unfortunately, “Mass Effect: Andromeda” picked up some unwelcome visitors on its long journey to your gaming machine. Though it has some stellar moments, “Andromeda” tries to cram too many ideas into one package, turning its obsession with the bigness of space into a crutch for uncharacteristically shoddy workmanship.

The (next) final frontier

To answer your most obvious question: no, you do not need to have played the prior “Mass Effect” games to understand what the hell is happening here. “Andromeda” tells a self-contained story featuring entirely new characters, planets and star systems, though references to elements from the original trilogy (the Citadel, the Geth, Spectre, etc.) do occasionally pop up.

The game is set roughly 600 years after the events of the original trilogy. Just as things were heating up in the Milky Way (around the “Mass Effect 2” timeframe), several giant Ark ships were launched towards the faraway heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Snuggled in cryo beds and dreaming of a new life, the adventurous souls aboard these vessels were hoping to discover habitable new worlds and plant some flags.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ sees you exploring the Andromeda galaxy for a new home. But – spoiler alert – things go very wrong.

Naturally, things go sideways. You play as either Scott or Sara Ryder, a twin thrust into the role of ‘Pathfinder’ and tasked with guiding a ragtag group of aliens in a quest to find a new home. It’s all pretty standard sci-fi stuff — a bite of “Star Trek,” a nibble of “Battlestar” — but Bioware crafts a well-told tale that rises above its derivative vibe to keep you, um, engaged throughout.

Mostly, that’s done though a tweaked version of the branching narrative structure Bioware is known for. Conversation options have expanded beyond the binary Paragon/Renegade of prior games, adding flexibility and giving you a bit more agency over your particular Ryder. Despite some nasty bad guys and extremely high stakes, it’s also significantly more lighthearted than the trilogy’s dour doomsday scenario. Regardless of how you play Ryder, he (or she) is quick to joke and seems intent on keeping the joy of discovery intact.

The dialogue system isn’t as thrilling as it used to be, however. Other franchises have taken the cue and built branching narratives with greater emotional value. “The Witcher 3,” “Life is Strange” — heck, the entire Telltale Games catalog (whose Season 1 of “The Walking Dead” bested “Mass Effect 3” in most 2012 Game of the Year Awards) have pushed the envelope of branching narrative design, making each choice feel impactful. Though your tone changes based on your responses in “Andromeda,” Ryder’s playful, at time snarky attitude takes some of the gravitas out of the decision-making. You rarely break a sweat.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’s’ dialogue system lacks the kind of gravitas that makes games like ‘The Witcher 3’ so addictive and powerful.

Still, developing relationships, opening/closing paths, trying to get busy with a blue lady — it’s all here, and thanks to an interesting story, likable characters and great voicework by both male and female Ryders, “Andromeda” does a convincing job of turning you into Captain Kirk.

A downright uncanny job, you might say.

Valley of the Dolls

Unless you’ve been avoiding the internet for the last week, you’ve likely caught wind that gamers are, to put it mildly, displeased with the “Andromeda’s” animations, particularly its facial close-ups. And, well, yeah, the facial animations aren’t great. The game doesn’t just glide over the uncanny valley, it builds a big space house and moves right in.

I typically don’t put too much stock in this; plenty of outstanding games are kind of ugly up close (I’m looking into your lifeless eyes, “Fallout 4”). What makes it so rough here is the amount of time you spend staring at close-ups. A good third of the game is spent chatting with people and developing relationships, but when they look like broken robots, it breaks the spell. About halfway through the game, my Ryder inexplicably developed two wicked lazy eyes that lasted for a good 10 hours.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’s’ human characters look like dead-eyed androids.

Perhaps the increased power of modern consoles/PCs (I played on PS4) is the culprit — as the theory goes, the closer you get to reality, the deeper the valley. But as ugly as it gets for humankind, the power leads to some amazing aliens. The brutish, dinosaur-like Krogans have never looked better, and jittery eyes and smooth skin give the amphibious Salerians incredible life. I relished every chance to chat with non-humans, both to bask in Bioware’s great work and as a respite from the mannequin onslaught.

This sort of uneven delivery extends to the rest of the game’s graphics. The art design is triumphant – Issac Asimov would commend the look and feel of the game’s colorful terrain, sweeping interstellar views and massive starships – but technical glitches abound. Flickering textures are common, load times are excessive and occasional pop-in mars the stunning planetside vistas. These sorts of glitches aren’t game-breaking, but they speak to a project struggling to bear its own weight.

Humans might not look good in ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda,’ but the aliens are gorgeous.

Galaxy quest

And make no mistake: “Andromeda’s” scope is massive.

Much of the game takes place on explorable planets that are significantly bigger than the regions found in “Dragon Age: Inquisition.” You can spend hours scouring the nooks and crannies of each location from the comfort of your Nomad rover. And as you find ways to make life more hospitable, the areas open up even further.  

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’s’ worlds are vast and beautiful.

A star map gives you free reign to explore the Heleus cluster of the Andromeda galaxy. You can only land on and explore a handful of planets, but you rarely feel hemmed in, and the desire to build outposts pushes you to approach Andromeda like a real pioneer. It’s a good hook.

But this goal is quickly buried beneath a ridiculous number of less essential Things to Do. Some are classic “Mass Effect” – your shipmates have needs, and if you want to unlock their highest-level abilities or get them into bed (perv), you’ll need to attend to those — but you pick up other, seemingly unwanted side quests with alarming ease.

Checking in on an outpost? Be careful who you talk to, because apparently every single life form in the galaxy is incapable of handling their own business. Even if they don’t have a gigantic exclamation point on their head, they’ll probably ask you to shuttle something somewhere or look into a mild, pointless drama. And you’ll feel pressed to track down every one, because you never know which insignificant-sounding rabbit hole will yield some legit XP or loot.

‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ piles on the quests like every other RPG, but organizes them poorly.

This is fairly common to RPGs, but “Andromeda’s” flood of quests is compounded by terrible quest tracking. A Journal ostensibly keeps tabs on them, but inexplicably lists them based on where you picked them up rather than where they are located in the world. It’s a crazy way to organize quests; land on a planet and you’ll have to either scour dots on the map or rummage through your Journal to figure out what, if anything, you’re supposed to do there.  

This alone drove me nuts. I may be a real-world organizational disaster (I am a writer, after all) but this is definitely a trait I don’t want to carry into my sci-fi power fantasy.

Laser tag

On the other hand, I did get to carry lots of guns. And this is one area where “Andromeda” really fixes something.

The game does a fine job of improving and even amping up “Mass Effect’s” combat. Jump jets and a handy dash make you far more maneuverable, which is a boon since you contend with enemies in open-world locations. Skills and proficiencies can totally alter the way you play. Focus on Combat to be a Rambo, invest in Biotics to be a Jedi, stick with Tech to hurl fire and ice, or spread the wealth and be a bit of each. Deep but approachable, the system serves as a solid backend for the on-the-field action.

If there’s one thing Bioware improved for ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’ it’s the game’s combat.

I forgot exactly how shooty “Mass Effect” was, and once you get used to the fact that you’re not playing a game quite as refined as the “Halos” and “Horizons” it attempts to ape, it falls into a pleasant rhythm. Nice touches abound, like jumping and pausing in the air for a few seconds while aiming down your sights. Experimenting with different abilities is also a snap thanks to a handy respec option, quelling the FOMO that rules most games that force to to stick with one class. It’s flexible and fun.  Bioware upped their game here, for sure.

But it isn’t perfect. The wide-open universe only yields a handful of enemy types, and none of them are particularly exciting. You have little control over your two fellow squadmates, and the weak enemy A.I. means you never need to think strategically when deciding which companions to bring into battle. I mostly stuck with the Krogan warrior because he looks cool. A baffling “auto” cover system claims that you just need to move close to an object with your gun drawn to hide behind it, but it doesn’t work very well. It just ends up getting you shot a lot, even when you think you’re safe.

You want jump jets? You’ve got jump jets.

Systems overload

“Andromeda” just doesn’t know when to quit, layering on screen after screen and system after system to make even the simplest task, like equipping a hot new weapon, painstaking.

Find a gun? You’ll need to head back up to your ship or find a “forward station” to switch your loadout, because, well, who knows. Tiny, uniform iconography turns inventory management into a slog. You know the thrill of finding and ogling a gorgeous, exciting new rifle in “Destiny?” That ain’t here.

Scanning planets for resources takes forever due to pretty but infuriatingly slow pans and zooms. Tracking down a specific resource to, for instance, craft a new helmet, is a total crapshoot. Bioware’s focus on the big picture has left a surprising number of holes in its basic RPG foundation.

They even tossed in co-op multiplayer, because it’s 2017 and I think that’s required by law now. “Mass Effect 3” toyed with this and it returns largely unchanged, as you and some pals clear out waves of increasingly stubborn baddies. It’s got its own progression system and offers a decent break from the RPG slog, though considering the core game could take a good 80 hours to complete, I’m not sure anyone needs it.

So do they need “Mass Effect: Andromeda” at all? That’s a tough call. A cool game is buried beneath “Andromeda’s” issues. When the guns are on point and you’ve exploded a Biotic combo, or when the ramifications of some difficult choice made hours ago comes back to haunt you, “Mass Effect: Andromeda” scratches that old space itch. But getting past the technical gaffes and unfriendly interface requires a great deal of patience. Space is big, indeed, but it’s supposed to be fun, too.

Platform reviewed: PS4

What’s hot: Cool story; outpost settling is a good hook; improved maneuverability; deep combat options

What’s not: Technical issues; aggravating interface; seriously uncanny valley; quest quantity over quality; dated feel

More games coverage:

‘Middle-earth: Shadow of War’ lets you lead orcish armies — and destroy them

Nintendo Switch launch games: The must-haves, the maybes and the probably nots

‘For Honor’ review: You’ll need skill to survive this online fighter

‘Horizon: Zero Dawn’ Review: Combat and storytelling shine in spectacular sci-fi epic

The $450 Analogue Nt mini brings new life to old-school NES games

‘Resident Evil 7’ review: It’s a screaming good time

Ben Silverman is on Twitter at ben_silverman.

#gaming #_revsp:yahoofinance.com #Mass Effect #games reviews #_author:Ben Silverman #Mass Effect: Andromeda #video game reviews #Mass Effect: Andromeda review #_lmsid:a077000000BAh3wAAD #reviews #game reviews #_uuid:c94944b9-14e5-3c4f-83e6-5d5367276538 #video games

[sheminecrafts]

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals that have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube and Instagram stars — and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm Betaworks Ventures. “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-1990s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku, who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality,” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools that enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz, the founder of the alternative social network ello and Budnitz Bicycles. Budnitz is perhaps best known for Kidrobot, a manufacturer of branded collectibles and toys for adults and kids everywhere. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform that initially focused on letting user-generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons… and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90 percent cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content, but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients… One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called Poppy.tv. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fan base for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged?… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon live streams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on Musical.ly come in with a FaceTime… And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding, a round led by Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, of Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouses and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters, it’s so close to the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to 40 years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2QM2vV1 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

[technicalsolutions88]

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals that have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube and Instagram stars — and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm Betaworks Ventures. “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-1990s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku, who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality,” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools that enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz, the founder of the alternative social network ello and Budnitz Bicycles. Budnitz is perhaps best known for Kidrobot, a manufacturer of branded collectibles and toys for adults and kids everywhere. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform that initially focused on letting user-generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons… and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90 percent cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content, but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients… One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called Poppy.tv. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fan base for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged?… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon live streams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on Musical.ly come in with a FaceTime… And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding, a round led by Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, of Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouses and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters, it’s so close to the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to 40 years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2QM2vV1 Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

[toomanysinks]

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic, and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals which have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube, and Instagram stars and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm, Betaworks Ventures.  “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup, and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million (pre-money) led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that the “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-90s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools which enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz the founder of the alternative social network, ello and Budnitz Bicycles. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform which initially focused on letting user generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons.. and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90% cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients.. One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called poppy tv.. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fanbase for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon livestreams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on musically come in with a facetime … And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor, Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding; a round led by Founders Fund partner, Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, fo Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouse’s and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters it’s so close the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to forty years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/14/more-investors-are-betting-on-virtual-influencers-like-lil-miquela/

[fmservers]

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic, and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals which have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube, and Instagram stars and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm, Betaworks Ventures.  “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup, and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million (pre-money) led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that the “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-90s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools which enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz the founder of the alternative social network, ello and Budnitz Bicycles. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform which initially focused on letting user generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons.. and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90% cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients.. One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called poppy tv.. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fanbase for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon livestreams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on musically come in with a facetime … And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor, Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding; a round led by Founders Fund partner, Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, fo Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouse’s and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters it’s so close the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to forty years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

Via Jonathan Shieber https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

[kitsunesbooks]

The Stunning World of Final Fantasy XV

When it comes to story, in any form of media, the world of that story is what always grabs me first with characters at a close second. The setting can make or break a story for me and it often disappoints me when I see worlds that serve only as a backdrop. In my opinion, no world should be put to waste. Worlds need to interact with the characters and vice versa. A world shouldn’t serve the single purpose of providing a locale for the variety of actions that unfold. One of the ways that writers tend to avoid the struggle of world building is by setting their world in a modern era. Final Fantasy XV takes that idea and hurls it into the friggin stratosphere.

Final Fantasy XV is a game I have been playing quite a lot, but wished I had more time to dedicate to. I have spent ten years waiting to play this game, and even though I am aware that the story deviates from the original plot of Versus XIII, the original title of XV, it is still a phenomenal game. And one of the things that makes this game such a grand revival of Final Fantasy is it's absolutely gorgeous open world. The world of Eos is teeming with life and vibrance and has instantly become one of my favorite video game worlds ever since I first laid eyes on the city of Insomnia back in 2006. Its flawless blend of fiction and reality is something to behold as it creates a story steeped in a beautiful depiction of open road Americana.

In most stories that blend fantasy and reality, the real world often shoves the fantasy side in the back seat. This is almost too true for A LOT of Western stories. This is especially true for books and tv where a “fantasy world” is often showcased as just a damn forest. Final Fantasy XV proves that it is possible to seamlessly meld fantasy and reality in a way that balances the two and creates a world that viewers/players can actually believe is real. The city of Insomnia is a sight to behold. The beaches of Galdin Quay remind me of the shores here in Jersey as well as the Caribbean islands. The forests of Duscae are extremely reminiscent of the Appalachians. There is so much beauty in this world and it is definitely the highlight of this game. Not only that, but it demonstrates that it is possible to make an alluring fantasy world set in a modern era. It is easy to take our world and just put some magic in it, but when you take the time to really flesh out the fantasy side of things you get something less generic. The visuals definitely aid in painting the gorgeous landscapes of Eos, but that shouldn’t stop writers from using deep level descriptions to really emphasize the fantasy part of their settings. If anything, the visuals of FFXV should encourage this level of detail in writing. Final Fantasy XV should be an example of how to do a proper modern fantasy.

The towns all feel heavily lived in and well populated. While the roads may feel a little barren at times, traffic always picks up near the variety of towns and settlements. Lestallum is one the prettiest and quaintest little towns I have ever seen, with its quiet and rustic city scape. Insomnia, though we never see much of it, is a sprawling metropolis reminiscent of Tokyo. Hell, even the Hammerhead garage takes design elements akin to those aged rest stops you find on those long midwest highways here in America. I would rant about how gorgeous Altissia is, but I haven’t gotten there yet. All of these places feel so close to reality while still keeping a strong fantasy style that helps to seamlessly meld a world of science and a world of magic. I think one of my favorite parts about the game is all the different foods you can try at rest places. Every hotel/restaurant has a variety of different menu items adding a layer of culture to each place you visit. It is a detail that is completely unnecessary but adds a layer of depth to the world. And the fact that this same small part of the world can actually help you in the game shows a genuine understanding of how open world games should really work, or really any game for that matter. Games that have mechanics that work together with the lore really stand out to me. That is why I am such a fan of the Souls series. Final Fantasy XV nails that harmony between the story and the game.

Another amazing aspect of Final Fantasy XV is the photography. Prompto, one of your party members, has a deep affinity for taking pictures. This adds to the road trip aesthetic that game flawlessly delivers on. Almost every shot is a stunning view of the world as a backdrop to the characters. There are even a few photo op places scattered around the world, such as the Disc of Cauthess in Duscae. The photography really does the world a ton of justice and teeters on the verge of uncanny valley. The photos are almost too true to life. Even my mother, who never plays video games, had to comment on the photo-realism of the game’s amazing graphics, which do an amazing job to add color and vibrance to the world Eos.

Though the world is fantastic there are a few problems. While, one them I don’t necessarily have trouble with, others seem to dislike it. That of course is the large amount of product placement. While it is kind of dumb to have the characters themselves talk about friggin Cup Noodles. I can at least see why a game like this could be such a potent vehicle for product placement. There is so much of it, simply because it works. It doesn’t take your eyes off things when you see it. If anything it brings us much closer to our reality and makes the world of Eos seem like more of an altered version of our Earth. Product placement CAN be used as an effective writing tool to help sell a story as something that could exist. But when it is thrust into the dialogue in a clumsy fashion, like almost all product placements do, it falls flat on its face. But hey, that Audi R8 in Kingsglaive looked pretty damn cool.

On the other hand, the one complaint I have with the world is that despite how interesting it looks, the lore is tucked away. The world amazingly fleshed out and a beautiful sight to behold, but it doesn’t really embody its lore as strongly. That is a problem. But, then again, at least it has lore to begin with. Eos, has a pantheon of gods, it has a creation story, it has lore tied to each of the major kingdoms such as Nifelheim and Lucis. But it falls a bit short for not being put somewhere in the actual game. I would have really enjoyed being able to uncover tidbits of lore throughout the open world, like in Dark Souls for instance. But I will settle for what I have.

I honestly don’t know how long I can gush about this game without sounding too repetitive. I will more than likely be doing some more articles on FFXV as I play through more of it. Future articles will be much more in depth than this one for any of you looking for some juicy research.

Stay Frosty, Adam Schmidt

[sheminecrafts]

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals that have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube and Instagram stars — and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm Betaworks Ventures. “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-1990s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku, who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality,” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools that enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz, the founder of the alternative social network ello and Budnitz Bicycles. Budnitz is perhaps best known for Kidrobot, a manufacturer of branded collectibles and toys for adults and kids everywhere. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform that initially focused on letting user-generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons… and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90 percent cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content, but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients… One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called Poppy.tv. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fan base for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged?… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon live streams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on Musical.ly come in with a FaceTime… And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding, a round led by Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, of Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouses and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters, it’s so close to the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to 40 years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2QM2vV1 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

[sheminecrafts]

More investors are betting on virtual influencers like Lil Miquela

Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.

It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.

The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals that have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube and Instagram stars — and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.

“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm Betaworks Ventures. “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”

Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup and other, undisclosed, investors.

The makers of the virtual influencer, Lil Miquela, snag real money from Silicon Valley

And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.

If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.

Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-1990s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.

And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku, who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo. 

At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality,” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.

“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”

For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools that enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.

“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says. 

Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz, the founder of the alternative social network ello and Budnitz Bicycles. Budnitz is perhaps best known for Kidrobot, a manufacturer of branded collectibles and toys for adults and kids everywhere. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.

“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”

At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.

“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”

So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”

For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform that initially focused on letting user-generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.

Toonstar lets you bring cartoon characters to life thanks to facial recognition

Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons… and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90 percent cheaper than typical animation.”

Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content, but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients… One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”

Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.

“We launched a channel called Poppy.tv. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fan base for Poppy and her cast of characters.”

The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged?… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio. 

Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon live streams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on Musical.ly come in with a FaceTime… And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”

It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”

And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding, a round led by Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.

Lil Miquela and fellow brud avatar Blawko22

Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, of Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.

Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.

Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”

For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouses and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters, it’s so close to the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”

Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.

Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.

Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.

“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to 40 years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”

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