Massive Online Collection of Canadian Videos

NFB.ca is a Web site where you can watch films produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Their mission is to make these films accessible to all Canadians (and the whole world) via the web.

It is an amazing collection of over 13,000 productions from the last 70 years including animation, documentaries, experimental films and alternative dramas.

For example, check out "The Cat Came Back" (above) by Cordell Barker from 1988. "This hilarious Oscar-nominated animation is based on the century-old folk song of the same name. Old Mr. Johnson makes increasingly manic attempts to rid himself of a little yellow cat that just won't stay away... Also won the 1989 Genie Award for best animated short film."

Video Fun in the Public Domain

Fun with the public domain. Goodnight Irene is a 20th century American folk standard popularized by such musicians as The Weavers and Lead Belly. The video clips are from Archive.org which provides free, public domain video footage such as school filmstrips, government training films and vintage TV advertising. Performed here by Ray Taylor and Todd Tibbetts. Edited by PixelFarmer.com.

3D Animation Gets Gooder and Gooder

A host of new 3D animators are cranking up the quality bar. Check out these examples of cutting edge technical and creative wizardry.

Emily: She's not real
Image Metrics (the production company that created the animations for Grand Theft Auto) made a splash this week with Emily, created using their new 3D modeling technology. It captures the movements and expressions of real actors and re-creates it all in the computer in a creepy way.

Oktapodi
A student film about amorous octopi from Gobelins, the French school of visual design that has produced tons of amazing animators.

Also, don't miss the "making of" video.

Big Buck Bunny
Big Buck Bunny is an open source movie made with open source software from The Blender Foundation. They created this movie under a software development type model, all to promote the use of their tools.

Check out the "making of" video.

My Morning Jacket Music Video
For their song, Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt. 2, My Morning Jacket had the creative team at Mixtape Club create an amazing 3D animation.

Microsoft Silverlight and Expression Studio Training

I am here live at the Microsoft Conference Center at a full-day training seminar for Silverlight and Expression Studio. We have 70 people from our company getting trained by Arturo Toledo who will also be speaking at our Cre8 Summit conference in Florida in April. I'll be there blogging live from Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort.

One of the coolest new features in version 2 of Silverlight is the Seadragon image technology which aims to "change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network." Check out the amazing demo below.