Hacker Cinema
Tekkonkinkreet
鉄コン筋クリート
2006 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Michael Arias
Two penniless orphans, Black and White, struggle to survive on the mean streets of Treasure Town. When a megacorporation threatens to tear down the town to build an amusement park, Black and White engage in the fight of their life.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Tekkonkinkreet is great! it's surreal and over the top but somehow still very grounded.
Some other awesome experimental animes that I think are worth watching are Redline, which has some amazing animation during car races on alien planets, and Dead Leaves, which is a classic escape from jail plot on steroids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t26m_Q6ENo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvDMzmcbNkE
What I love about these types of Japanese art is how the magic and the surreal become normalised in a way that western films rarely go anywhere near. I'm not a big anime fan by any stretch of the imagination, but films like Spirited Away and my personal favourite: Tekkonkinkreet just blow my mind with the sheer creative breadth of the vision.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfQjc2hs34Y
Games are such a hit and miss market, that it will probably be difficult to find an investor willing to drop a full 30 million into your studio, unless you (or your employees) already have a track record in the industry making games close to that budget.
Hell, I worked as a producer for a small video game publisher, and we didn't spend more than $1 million on any given game, that included development, certification, ESRB rating, and marketing (was 11 years ago now), although granted they were smaller games for Wiiware and Xbox Live Arcade.
And we only hired established development teams to make those games.
We did evaluate pitches submitted to us by other development teams, and it was usually a Powerpoint presentation describing the game idea and the team that would be making it and what experience they had making other games. Sometimes it included a playable demo and we'd play that first.
I remember we ended up passing on a couple of pitches that ended up getting released through other publishers, including BloodBowl for Xbox and Desktop Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS.
We also at one point considered making a game based on the anime Tekkonkinkreet, but that didn't end up going anywhere. I didn't know about that awesome movie beforehand, though, and it was cool to find out that a band I already really liked, Plaid, did an amazing soundtrack for it too. We watched the Japanese version in the office, so my boss was roughly translating it to me as we watched it, since I only knew very basic conversational Japanese.
I'm developing a video game in my spare time right now, and I'm just keeping the scope small enough it won't need a big investment. It won't need any at all unless I want to make it pretty with a proper artist.
Also, could you link to that post you saw? I'm not finding it myself so I can check it out.
Tekkonkinkreet [1] (a truly amazing film), the OST by Plaid [2] is next level too. Here's a nice review that captures some of what it's about [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfQjc2hs34Y
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WixQfMABnFA&list=PLCE193349FF6D00BA
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBtaqdXIVv8
When programming I need music to be something I know already, but it can be any style - just enough to keep my overactive brain in check! I'm a DJ too [1], so I have plenty of long sets of music (no iterruptions, no gaps), that can really help when I need to plough through a difficult chunk of work.
Currently on rotation (and has been for a while) is the Tekkonkinkreet soundtrack [2]. So beautiful, but also hypnotic (the film is amazing too):
[1] https://soundcloud.com/paullouth
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WixQfMABnFA&list=PLCE193349FF6D00BA