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First Contact with Galactaron

Girl meets synth-rock band from Outer Space; animated weirdness ensues. Well, that’s the elevator pitch, anyway. See for yourself:

Galactaron were dreamt up as an art/music project by Owen Dennis, a recent graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation, and are comprised of Singer (centre right), Bass (bottom left), Guitar (centre left), Synth (right), Drums (top left) and their human friend Emily Wong:

Galactaron Album Cover — Album Cover as featured on iTunes

The virtual band have a presence across Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, SoundCloud and iTunes, with each platform offering new information and imagery to enrich Galactaron’s back story:

Drawn by radio waves, Galactaron focused in on Earth and they traveled a great distance to learn about us. When they finally reached our planet, they landed their massive, red, egg-shaped ship on a frozen lake in the upper Midwest of the America. There they met Emily Wong, a young Chinese-American woman who lives with her father. Emily quickly befriended Galactaron and decided to give them a personalized tour of planet Earth. That’s when they started to discover what earth is, what humans are, and what we have to offer.

tree desert 640x480 — A ‘sighting’ of their ship forms one of several on their website.

It’s an admirable project: the band have a truly unique sound, a strong visual identity, a cool backstory, and they’ve even sold a few albums.

Their creator shows real ingenuity, having formed a small yet growing community around snippets of content such as cosmic ring-tones; science-themed status updates; user-contributed artwork; merchandise and not forgetting the music itself.

But despite being an excellent case study in transmedia storytelling, their single ‘First Contact’ has reached a surprisingly low 20,000 plays on YouTube, and far fewer elsewhere. Mission aborted? Or as I suspect, are their thrusters still warming up?

Matthias Müller’s Particle Art

There’s this guy called Matthias Müller, and he makes beautiful abstractions out of virtual dust on his supercomputer. He’s some kind of motion-art superhero, probably sent to us from the exploding Planet 3DS Max by his scientist parents.

In this post I’ve picked out a few examples of his work, because as well as being simply gorgeous viewing material, they’re great examples of what’s possible with a few gigs of RAM, a graphics card and some imagination.

Probably my favourite due to it’s relative simplicity, this tech demo plays with texture in surprising ways:

This next one is so epic! Like an underwater fireworks show of electric choreographed jellyfish, or something…

Watch as millions of particles merge and blend with infinite complexity in this piece of seemingly generative fludity:

This final clip is almost a love story. Watch as two swirling masses collide, explode and dance in time with the music:

An undoubtedly talented guy, Matthias has done commercial work for Honda and Vodafone (as featured last year). His YouTube channel is certainly worth a look, as are his lovely image renders on CGPortfolio.

I can barely get the most out of MSPaint, however…

Self-Pixellation

In his recent work “Papercraft Self Portrait”, 3D artist Eric Testrole did something really cool for Halloween. He pixellated his own head!

It was kind of inspired by big-head mode seen in videogames. I really wanted to get the faceted geosphere look with wireframe.

He’s been a character designer in the video game industry for nine years, so this is a case of life now mimicking his art, as his skills having now ‘absorbed’ his very being. Very spooky. Here’s how it happened:

: A model was created from a blocky 370 polygons

: Texture was added to match his appearance using PhotoShop

: The ‘polygons’ are printed, cut & glued together

The finished result is the surreal creation you see prowling the streets in the below Flickr photoset. Hit fullscreen for best effect: