Michael VanPutten

This morning I was listening to the NPR FreshAir podcast from Feb. 22, 2008. One of the segments on the show, titled “An Oscar with your ‘Ratatouille’?”, presented an interview with writer/director Brad Bird and comedian/actor Patton Oswalt. During the segment Bird describes why he wanted Oswalt to play the role of rat/chef in Pixar’s […]

My wife had knee surgery today. As she was resting in the recovery room, I sat next to her, hunched over a laptop in my lap. I was ‘catching up’ on my RSS feeds which I have not read avidly for four to eight weeks now. As I tapped my way through categories and posts […]

A friend shared a really neat video with me today: an intro to the 7th annual helpmann awards 2007, where Raymond Crowe, a talented shadow puppeteer, did a fun presentation over Louis Armstrong’s “What a wonderful world”.

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. […]

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 […]

Flashninjaclan.com has a very creative game titled Asteroid’s Revenge.
In this version of Asteroids you pilot an asteroid and must avoid a field of starships that fire at you. When your asteroid is hit, it shrinks in size.
From Wikipedia, re: Asteroids:
Asteroids was inspired, in a roundabout way, by the seminal Spacewar!, the first computer-based video game. […]