Prince Camaralzaman & the Princess of China

I read a fragment of this myth/fairy tale within Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces"Campbell only covered the story up until the point where the Djin return the Princess to China, I liked this at the time, gave the tale a great deal of mystery, I really enjoyed the conversation between the Djin and the visualisation I had of them. I found the version used in Campbell's book had a slightly more sophisticated writing style, and was more consistent in its description of the Djin, I also feel it was much more detailed in its various descriptions of the characters and the events. I also believe that the princess was bitten on the naval to inspire lust... or something in the version that I first read.
I mention this because I really did like this story. Campbell explains it as an example of how Heroes can refuse the call to adventure, which can often end in tragedy for the characters but in this case only postpones it for a greater call to adventure later on.
I imagined, when I didn't know the ending, that they were either permanently separated from each other, their efforts to find each other would cause a greater incident of fate or that the heavens themselves, the Djin, would have a greater involvement in the tale.

Unreal Article

Hey, I know Unreal 3 has been out for a long time now but here is an article that provides a little bit of insight into its development. Interesting from an artists point of view and lots of pretty pictures to boot.

Resident Evil Production Art

Found what looks like early production art for Resident Evil 5, nice little video montage.

Alma

Alma, a short film by Rodrigo Blass. Find out a little more about him, the animation and the team that made it here.

Make You own Avatat

Ok I might not quite be able to reproduce this yet myself, but most of the techniques he appears to use are recognisable to me and I believe anyone with a competent knowledge of Photoshop.
I came across it on this Avatar obsessed blogg, which is in itself quite interesting.

Birth of an AVATAR from Peter Ammentorp Lund on Vimeo.

Skhizein

I also came across this whilst looking up links for the cat piano this morning. Skhizein by French animator Jeremy Clapin.

Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.

This is an absolutely fantastic premise:

"After being struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to living precisely 91 centimeters from himself."

Very entertaining and brilliantly executed and convincing. I like it when he says he is "beside himself" at the end.

The Cat Piano

Check this out, The Cat Piano. It was created by the Australian team, The Peoples Republic of- Animation. I thoroughly enjoyed watching... and listening to this piece of work. Gotta love Nick Caves voice. I need to look further into this but is Nick Cave a big animation fan, he is working on this but also the last time I came across him was when I heard about a collaboration between him and Mark Craste of Studio AKA?