Fallen Art

Thomasz Baginski wrote and directed a short animated piece titled ‘Fallen Art‘. The piece was created by Platige Image, a Polish visual effects company.

Fallen Art is a story about generals, soldiers, and a very special project (watch the video — I will not ruin the surprise for you!). Baginski uses sound to weave this tale. High atop a make-shift wooden tower you can hear the wind screaming. The ribbit of a frog signals the next step in an on-going tale. Plus the crazy ballet/dance of music of the ‘very special project’.
Background

According to the very short Wikipedia ‘Thomas Baginski’ article: Thomas was born in 1976, is Polish, and received an oscar nomination for his other short animated piece titled The Cathedral.

Boinx iStopMotion

Boinx iStopMotion is a fun piece of software that enables you to create stop motion and time lapse animations using your iSight or DV camera. Creating stop motion animations can be fun for both kids, parents and teachers. The software also comes with a great tool for printing Flipbooks of your animations. iStopMotion retails for $39.95.

Don’t cry, it is just Santa…

Today, Boingboing.net featured a classic link to SouthFlorida.com’s ‘Scared of Santa‘ gallery of photos featuring children crying and fleeing from scary old saint nick. This collage of photos is always good for a laugh.

It is the final countdown: YouTube vs. Google Video vs. Revver

Chris Pirillo posted a fun video experiment to his blog titled YouTube vs. Google Video vs. Revver. Chris recorded three different video testimonals each lauding the benefits of one specific video player while pointing out the defects of other ‘inferior’ web players. The result of playing all three videos at the same time should make just about anyone laugh. I especially like the end of the Revver video where Chris growls and barks like a dog while saying ‘rev, rev, rev revver!’

BlueSky Studios Challenge

Over the past few weeks a new favorite web site has crept into my daily web lurking. BlueSky Studios Challenge is a blog run by staff of BlueSky Studios (the folks who made ‘Ice Age’ and ‘Robots). Each week, the brilliant illustrators and animators from BlueSky challenge each other to draw clever and unique illustrations. Past contests have included Halloween, The Wizard of Oz, Saturday Morning Cartoons. In one contest titled “Superheros” brave new heros such as ‘Mapple Syrup Man’ and ‘The Incredible Close Talking Carl’ were born.

A few years back I induldged in months of fun and humorous ‘photoshoping’ contests hosted at Fark.com. Making unique and creative illustrations seems like a much steeper challenge. Viewing the wonderful creations of the BlueSky staff builds a desire within me to hone my own drawing skills so that I too may one day participate!

From the BlueSky Studios Challenge web site, their mission is described as follows:

Every monday a new challenge is posted. The participants do their “take” on the subject matter and post it. Challenges are open ended, meaning any participant can go back and draw something from a previous week. Email Jake for new challenge suggestions. This is for BlueSky kids only. Though anyone can participate at home. Or if you want to, post a link to your peice in the comments section.

Elephants Dream

On May 18th, 2006 a team of six people released a beautiful animation under a creative commons license titled ‘Elephants Dream‘. By May 29th, over 500,000 visitors had downloaded the animation. Over the months that followed remixes of the animation began to appear online. A ‘making of’ video was released by the creators of ‘Elephants Dream’ and is worth a look.

‘Elephants Dream’ is the result of almost a year of work, a project initiated and coordinated by the Blender Foundation. Six people from the Blender user/development community were selected to come over to Amsterdam to work together on an animated short movie, utilizing Open Source tools only.

The Elephant’s Dream web site features:

• High Definition and standard downloads of the animation
• Background information about the project
• Soundtrack and high resolution image downloads

The animation was created using open source software called Blender.

Blender is [the] open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.

Budding 3D animators, modelers, and texture designers have a unique opportunity: to purchase a DVD containing the original movie, as well as all of the source materials and original files. The DVD also includes the original script and story boards.

What the font?

Myfonts.com has a wonderful font identification ultility named ‘What the font?‘Using this tool you can upload an image containing text, or link to an image online. What the font will then attempt to identify the font faced used. This tool has proven invaluable over the years when I receive an image or logo containing text and the client is unable to provide specific details regarding the font faced used.

Flash Player Detection Kit

An older, yet still useful link…

One of many helpful tools in deploying Flash Player based web media is the Flash Player Detection Kit, which provides a method for checking that visitors to your web site have the Flash Player installed.

The Flash® Player Detection Kit helps developers implement robust player detection for a variety of deployment environments by providing a set of templates and techniques to successfully detect the version of Flash Player installed on a user’s computer, and, if needed, to then install the latest version of Flash Player. The kit also includes a detailed explanation and sample files for implementing the new, player-based Flash Player Express Install experience.