…carrying this 3-in-1 Paranormal Research Instrument you’re going to get laughed at. EMF is fine, but a thermometer and a flashlight?
You want to be taken seriously, shell out for an IR thermal imaging camera,
and maybe throw in a bat detector while you’re at it.
This is a nice interview that talks a about scene transitions, which is something I’ve been thinking about.
http://filmsound.org/murch/interview-with-walter-murch.htm
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1023552/in-gallery/37872/inside-the-secret-service
In a series of photos in Life about the American secret service, they show a picture of the Presidential limo.
I’m sort of intrigued by this:
“Today, they [the Secret Service] expect a prolonged attack…”
I’m so used to presidents getting killed by lone gunmen, but now I’m imagining the president under siege within his limo.
http://www.octopuspie.com/
http://gunshowcomic.com/
http://www.scarygoround.com/
http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/
Look at them! Just look!
Grandma’s Cheese
http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/Grandma%27s+Cheese/
I’m fascinated by the liquidy squeeze cheese. It moves in such a liquidy fashion and I have no idea how to pull that off, it’s remarkable. I must discern its secrets.
I made an animated short called Sticks to the Wall. It played at the 90 second quickies:
http://vimeo.com/8019775
While screening it, I heard someone shout, “Haha! Stink lines!” Which is a sentiment I approve of. Stink lines are weird if you think about it. It’s like a shared synesthesia; we’ve established that wavy lines represent stink. I’ve been getting really interested lately in tropes,* that can represent something in a non-literal fashion. You get a lot more of that out of comics than movies, since even basic things like showing someone speaking rely on weird little things like speech bubbles. But you have a few in movies, too. Thought is usually portrayed as a voice-over. Using animation gives you a lot more freedom to use tropes that you couldn’t use in live-action.
So what I kind of like with this cartoon is getting to combine the cartoon tropes with the Spaghetti western motifs.
*Tropes in the real meaning of the word. (IE: Non-literal representations.) Not to be confused with cliches, or common motifs, or archetypes.
I’m reading The Visual Story by Bruce Block.
One thing that’s really nice is he always uses diagrams and pictures to illustrate his points. In contrast, I’ve also been reading The Horse Who Drank the Sky lately, and that’s been a hard slog, since the author seems very much in love with words, which doesn’t appeal to me the same.
On the other hand, 75% of The Visual Story just basic colour theory, line and form, etc. So I’ve heard most of this before, in art theory or graphic design. Near the end, it gets interesting to me again, when it starts applying the same attitude towards movement and editing which are more unique to movies.
http://adtech.panthercustomer.com/apps/32/Ad2587680St3Sz16Sq3321638V1Id1/iheartnsUS.swf
So I saw this “unscramble the secret code” on New Scientist. It has a simple mistake in it, whereby each letter can only go in one position. So, there’s three identically-seeming Is, two Ts, two Ns, etc. Despite looking exactly the same, they aren’t interchangeable.
It’s still a really simple puzzle, and it’s in the same genre of adverts that try to latch onto some psychological assumption that accomplishing a simple task will always lead to some reward, thus making the advertisement seem more valuable than it is.
This is pretty sweet. It’s behind the scenes when making The Mighty Atom (AKA Astro Boy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxZ5H-GqouM
It is pretty good about showing the entire process from start to finish. Plus a huge retro element, since it’s all painted cells, plus the smoking animators and the clear division between the men’s jobs and the women’s jobs. But it’s a testament to how factory-like their process is that the narrator says, “it usually takes days for them to produce an episode.”
Also, this is the best picture ever:
It came from here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa3bX2GXAzg