The 36th Annual Annie Awards ceremony will be held on January 30th, 2009, presenting honors to in the classifications of feature film, commercial, and home video productions for writing, character design, visual effects, and many others.
Other than the television categories, Kung Fu Panda is pretty much nominated in all the rest of the categories. Seems like the panda is going to be the big winner of the Annie Awards.
Check out the Annie Awards web site here for nominations by category.
The long due WordPress 2.7 launches today.
WordPress 2.7 represents a huge shift away from earlier versions of WordPress – at least in the dashboard. Most of the changes will be visible to bloggers, but not blog readers. The changes in the dashboard are huge. First, the navigation menus have all been moved to the left side of the screen, giving you more room at the top of the page. The sub-menus are also all collapsible, allowing you to navigate the dashboard without reloading the page as often.
You can customize the dashboard by dragging, dropping, adding, or deleting widgets like the Right Now screen that gives you an overview of your blog stats, or the QuickPress widget that allows you to create a post using a stripped down WYSIWYG editor right from the start page.
WordPress 2.7 also allows you to search and install plugins without leaving the dashboard. And for the first time, an automatic upgrade tool is included in WordPress so you can upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 or 2.8 or whatever new versions are on the horizon without having to fire up an FTP client.
Another big focus of this new release was making everything faster. It loads faster for you to navigate. And nearly every possible task in WordPress now takes fewer clicks than it used to.
For new features list, please visit http://support.wordpress.com/wordpress-27-changes.
bodw (Business of Design Week) referred to as “one of the most significant annual events on the international design calendar,” bodw, Asia’s leading design event on innovation, design and brand, attracts the best of the global design world to Hong Kong.
More than 50,000 participants and over 100 of the world’s most iconic designers, business leaders and educators attend bodw to share their success stories, exchange ideas, and network in an event nobody can afford to miss. The goal of bodw is to encourage businesses to unleash the power of design by focusing on the vital relationship and complex interplay between design and business.
This year’s bodw will take place on 8-13 December at the Hong Kong
Convention and Exhibition Centre. For further information and registration details, please visit http://www.bodw.com.hk.
This is the TV Ad that Dream Cortex made for Empire Interactive‘s latest NDS game – Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams. The TV Ad has been airing on North American TV channels and is now available on YouTube.
When the game becomes available in Europe next year there will be European versions of the TV Ad in French, Italian, German and Spanish.
Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams is a fun, exciting and cute adventure for the Nintendo DS, featuring the hugely popular Hello Kitty characters and several mini-games. Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams is distributed by Atari, Inc. in North America under an exclusive multi-year distribution deal between Atari and Empire Interactive.
Here at Dream Cortex we are busy developing more Flash mini-games for Hello Kitty Online, the forth-coming MMORPG to be released in 2009. Players will have access to several mini-games during their adventure in SanrioTown, and will be able to play against each other or solo. Mini-games are an important part of Hello Kitty’s MMORPG.
Four mini-games are nearly complete and in the testing phase: “Keroppi’s Goal Shootout”, “Purin’s Coffeehouse Challenge”, “Landry’s Laundromat” and “Kurousa’s Circus Challenge”. The mini-games are a blend of colourful 2D graphics and 3D animation, and all have great background music by composer Greg Chun, who provided the score to the award-winning animated series The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends. Here are a few teaser title screen shots. Sanrio fans out there: make sure you watch for the release of Hello Kitty Online!
“The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends” trailer has the most popular video in the “Film & Animation – Hong Kong” category on YouTube Hong Kong. As of November 25, 2008, the clip was ranked number 1 on both “Most Viewed (All Time)” and “Most Favorited (All Time)” in its category.
The clip also came in 4th place for “Most Discussed (All Time)”, 5th place for “Top Rated (All Time)”, and 9th place for “Most Responded (All Time)”.
With funding from Intel and Dell, former Sony Pictures digital chief Yair Landau is launching Mass Animation, a web site on Facebook that allows animators to contribute scenes to five-minute shorts on Facebook. It is the first collaborative, worldwide effort to produce a computer-generated animated short film for theatrical release.
The collaboration, through an unique application built on the Facebook Platform, including a limited duration version of Autodesk Maya, already started on 17th Nov and will run through 30th Jan 2009. Facebook users will be given the opportunities to vote for their favorite animations, starting on 24th Nov. A compelling short could eventually be turned into a full-length movie.
For more details, check out the Mass Animation page at http://www.facebook.com/massanimation.
Silverstar’s Empire Interactive releases Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams for Nintendo DS in US on November 11.
Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams is a fun, exciting and cute mini game based adventure for the Nintendo DS, featuring the hugely popular Hello Kitty characters.
The story finds our heroine, Hello Kitty leaving her home in Sanrio Town to try to make her mark in The Big City. Kitty moves into a simple apartment downtown adjacent to The Big City. Although she lives on the bottom floor now, she dreams of the day she can move up to the luxurious penthouse. Help Hello Kitty explore her new home and find all sorts of people to make friends with! Perhaps by helping others and working hard, Hello Kitty will finally say Hello to her dream suite in the sky!
Dream Cortex worked closely with Empire Interactive for the 2D game art creation for Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams. The resulting artworks are lovable, that bring additional excitement and enjoyment to the players, especially to the Sanrio fans.
Hello Kitty: Big City Dreams is distributed by Atari, Inc. in North America under the terms of an exclusive, multi-year distribution deal between Atari and Empire Interactive.
Visit Empire Interactive’s brand-new North American website for more information about the game, including screenshots and the official game play trailer at http://www.us.empireinteractive.com.
Dream Cortex is now in development for a free-to-play 3D game soon to be available at Sanriotown.com. The game is based on Unity game engine (http://www.unity3d.com), an advanced technology that allows to develop and deploy 3D games supporting by many modern web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and most Mozilla-based browsers. Unity is highly optimized with its real-time 3D rendering, which means players with old computer hardware and drivers would still be able to enjoy the 3D game without the compromise of performance and quality.
This very first Unity 3D game for Sanriotown.com will be featuring with Badtz Maru. Players are required to control Badtz Maru and to catch all the running penguins as quickly as possible. Challenges and enjoyments enhanced as players advance from stage to stage.
Game release date to be announced.
We are proud to announce the release of The Adventures of Hello Kitty & Friends DVD in Singapore. A total of 13 volumns with 52 episodes will be released consecutively from now to December 2008. Volumn 1 – 4 are now available for sales at retails. No information yet for online sales but stay close with us for any future updates.
Available in English language and subtitles.
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