Category Archives: uncategorized
Books
For my last post, I had to search to find the title of the book I had read.
For my own future reference, I’m going to get in the habit of blogging a little about books I read.
First, About Face 2.0: the essentials of interaction design. It’s the best book on interaction design I’ve yet read. It gets into some nice theory, about pliancy and excise and goal-oriented design. It mostly focuses on applications, rather than on web sites. I would be interested in finding a book more focused on web sites some time.
Actors
I recently took a course on directing actors with Jeff Erbach.
Tangentially related to this, I need to recommend the book Playing to the Camera. It’s a collection of interviews with and essays by actors, on the subject of film acting. And it’s nice in the sense that it covers almost a century, interviews European and Russian actors, so you’ve got a fairly broad spectrum of approaches. Continue reading
The movie trailer voice-over post-LaFontaine
So, Don La Fontaine, the primary movie trailer voice-over guy, died this last year. I’ve heard people suggest that they officially retire the phrase, “In a world” in his honour.
I think I recognized his voice in the trailer for Delgo. To me, that kind of exemplified what went wrong with Delgo. The studios turn ideas down because they don’t think they can market them. So if you’re billing yourself as the most expensive non-Hollywood animation in America, then you can’t market exactly the same way the studios would.
Shocking Conservative Pamphlet
So I got this flier in the mail courtesy of the Conservative party: 
Now, I guess I’m supposed to be shocked that Anita Neville hates women or wants them to stay in the kitchen with babies or something, but I’m more interested in another Bizarro-world implication of this pamphlet.
To quote: “The proposed federal model would see these matters dealt with during the collective bargaining process, where they should be.” (My emphasis.)
You know, for kids
I just read a BoingBoing post The Case Against Candy Land and I mentally joined it with some stuff I had been reading about the history of Sesame Street, thanks to this guy’s blog.
Walking cycle
I just made a simple animated walking cycle, employing something I learned from the Bouncing Ball Lecture. Putting that little bounce in the step, and figuring out the speed of the foot motion has made it look a little better than the walk cycles I used in the No Budget Show.
Animated Episode
So, the animated episode is online.
Four of us did animation on this episode. Myself, plus Dan, Roman and Dave, all from the TVFC. Dan had the most experience doing animation, and I ended up being the head illustrator. Dave and Roman had no experience using Flash, and very little experience with animation, but it helped to have the extra hands working on this.
Animation
So the animation project I was working on for four months is animated. It’s an episode of the No Budget Show. I said I’d post something about what I learned once it was done.
First, some links that you might find nice:
This explanation of the bouncing ball is pretty great. It gets into variations on the bounce, and use of the bounce in a walking animation. I only found this once this project was pretty much done, so it had no real influence.
