February 2010
18 posts
6 tags
January 2010
29 posts
7 tags
6 tags
“Finally, the one thing the four contending films listed above [Alvin and the...”
– From a post by Brad Brevet on Rope of SIlicon on the graying divide between animation and visual effects, and the Academy Awards’ “animation ghetto”. Arbitrary definitions aside (the Oscar qualifications stipulate that a film must be “75% animated” to run in the...
5 tags
“It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action...”
– Advice from Ollie Johnston, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men”. Excerpted from a longer list of more animation-specific advice, I think this one stands nicely on its own.
(Via Drawn)
11 tags
6 tags
Artifical Auroras
There’s lots of conspiracy theory nutjobs talking about the HAARP research project lately (even Hugo Chavez is throwing his hat in), so the allegations of death-ray and mind control weapons tinges this science news a bit, but there’s something kind of beautiful about being able to generate your own version of the aurora borealis:
Artificial auroras can be created using an array of...
5 tags
“The vast majority of Americans already believe that money buys results in...”
– From Lawrence Lessig’s Huffington Post article on this week’s SCOTUS decision. I don’t entirely agree with his view that money didn’t buy this outcome (it could easily be argued that money bought the folks who appointed the current crop of justices, an indirect effect that...
6 tags
Scribble Junkies →
Animators of note Bill Plympton and Patrick Smith have started a new blog where they can argue about animation, story telling, illustration, and whatever. An immediate add to my news reader!
4 tags
7 tags
7 tags
NASA Titan moon-balloons to run on cloud fuel →
NASA plans to send a hot-air-balloon type probe to Saturn’s moon, the only other known body in our solar system to have liquid “seas” on the surface. In order to keep the balloon from crashing into any rocky outcroppings, the team at the JPL has designed an oxygen-burning “rapid buoyancy modulation system” that’s pretty clever:
The lack of any free oxygen in...
4 tags
6 tags
6 tags
WatchThe GML RoboTagger. Automated calligraphy via the Graffiti Markup Language and an industrial robot arm gripping a giant Sharpie or Montana Hardcore magic marker. Tele-tag.
There’s a bit more about the project on Golan Levin’s blog.
(Via fffff.at)
7 tags
4 tags
WatchMichael Vorfeld’s Glühlampenmusik, creating music through the sound of incandescent filaments popping on and off. The percussion of light and electric resistance.
(Via Make)
5 tags
5 tags
“This presents an interesting problem. Caricature has never been taken as...”
– From Mark Mayerson’s thoughtful post on Avatar’s use of mocap versus keyframe animation, why James Cameron and Peter Jackson can do it successfully (and artfully) but Robert Zemeckis fails at it (the zombie-eyed children of Polar Express, A Christmas Carol), and whether the rift between...
5 tags
3 tags
7 tags
5 tags
Salon: The Aesthetic Gulf Between Miyazaki and...
In place of the conventional, reductive versions of morality and psychology shown in Pixar’s films, Miyazaki gives us something closer to actual experience, treating good and evil not as a binary equation but as a sliding scale and presenting people (and characters) that often don’t know why they do what they do and latch on to reductive explanations at their peril. Characters can be...
4 tags
6 tags
5 tags
Face Detection →
My camera switches over to portrait-mode whenever it sees a painting or a drawing with a face in it. It stays in AUTO mode otherwise. According to Popular Mechanics: “a chip inside the camera constantly scans the image in its viewfinder for two eyes, a nose, ears and a chin, making out up to 10 faces at a time before you’ve hit the shutter.” I decided to test my camera—it’s a Canon...
8 tags
8 tags
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
[I]t raises the question of how this particular nonsense word came into wide use at MIT. It seems reasonable to pursue this question, and reasonable that there would be some discernable answer. After all, there’s a whole official document, RFC 3092, explaining the etymology of “foobar.” It could be interesting to know what sort of nonsense word “zork” is, since it’s quite a different thing, with...
7 tags
