I Am Talking To You

After stuffing yourself with too much Thanksgiving dinner and the tryptothan kicks in, there’s some time when all conversations seem to work like this one from Martin Wilson.

CSS Transformations in Safari/WebKit (and Chrome too?)

The cool browsers support radius corners, but Safari supports CSS transformations that allow developers to scale, skew, and rotate objects on the page like we’re used to doing in PostScript. And better than that, we can animate those transformations over time — all without any JavaScript.
Fire up Safari or Chrome and mouse over the examples here. [...]

Charlie The Unicorn

Meg was never shy about asking me what rock I was found under when I stunned her with my complete ignorance of major pop culture touchstones, so I put my mind to it and after significant remedial work I thought I’d caught up. But, no.
I’d not seen this video and only discovered it when Blyberg [...]

Flightplan

Perhaps it’s just because I’m in the air again today, but I’m fascinated by Aaron Koblin’s animation of aircraft activity, illustrating the pulsing, throbbing movements of aircraft over North America. Nah, this is hot. You’ll love it too.
Also worth checking out: Koblin’s other works.
Aaron Koblin, aircraft, animation, aviation, flight, path

Flipbook Animation

I love this flipbook animation on YouTube (jump ahead to about 3:05 for it), even if the live-action preface is somewhat tiresome. And even with that, it still doesn’t rate as bad as some viewers think it is.
This is the “making of” / behind-the-scenes sneak peak at my upcoming movie “Annihilation”.
I had hoped to finish [...]

Can Actors Sell Their Digital Clones?

Alan Wexelblat in Copyfight poses a question from a reader about the future of entertainment:

what rights do you purchase/license/contract for in creating such a reproduction of a real person? Rights to the “likeness?” Performance rights? Do either of these cover things the actor never physically did or said? Is there an exclusivity clause? There are clearly some issues around the ownership of a character, if that character has appeared before (e.g. Connery’s Bond) but usually the character rights reside with the studio. But if you want the Connery Bond instead of a generic James Bond you also have to incude Connery in the deal, as well as whatever studio or estate has the Bond character rights.

Santa vs. Cops

I always get a laugh out of Cops, and an even bigger laugh out parodies of the show. So I have to thank Cliff for finding this animated video of Santa getting pulled over.
cops, santa, christmas, sleigh, parody, satire, tv, tv show, cops tv show, humor, animation

Supamonks Video

Al sent this video along via email, and it seems perfect for Friday afternoon. It’s all about super-monks (supramoine in French?), a kind of European Shaolin, maybe.
alan baker, animation, battle, cartoon, combat, friday, funny, martial arts, monk, rock, supamonks, super monks, supermoine, supermonk, supramonks, video, violence

Edward Gorey’s “Elephant” House

Edward Gorey is known for having created the Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet of ways young children can meet an early end. That, and the bumper animations for public television’s Mystery! (here, have some games).
Gorey is dead now, but his house in Yarmouth is open to the public. Admission is $5 for adults [...]

The Codex Series

This, from Chris Anderson: The Codex is a 20 episode series of machinimas made on Xboxes running Halo 2. The result caught the attention of his six- and eight-year-old children, and then him.
Machinimas are computer animated in real-time, using video games to create the environment, and human “puppeteers” to drive the action. The action [...]