Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m simply in love with this video. Watch through the credits to see a bit of how it’s made.

Tankmen is funny, no doubt, but I wonder what it means when we’re deeply embroiled in two of the longest running armed conflicts of US history that we find it so easy to make comedy about war.

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.

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. The screencast at the top is from the menu on that page. There are, obviously, better uses for these transforms, but it’s easy to see it at work there. Also see this screencast. It shows a rendering error, but it’s a better use of the tech.

Now kick it up a notch with 3d transforms. They only work on the iPhone and iPod touch for now, but they’re quite nifty. See these examples: one, two. Paul Bakaus offers more detail, and Matthew Congrove offers this example of flick navigation.

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 pointed at it as an icon of network-enabled pop culture.

The Candy Mountain video has been circulating for almost a year now and it’s a prime example of how network effects are allowing society to disseminate, in this case, popular culture, and ultimately the bulk of information deemed “important” by our fellow citizens

Indeed, my 17 year old nephew laughed when he learned I’d not seen it, lording it over me in the sort of superior way teenagers do when they discover they’ve just won a game on a walk.

Update Matty thinks he’s all that because he posted the video in January. My nephew would still laugh at him, though, as he claims he saw it a year ago.

Charlie The Unicorn, Jason Steele, animation, candy mountain, candy mountain video, cartoon, charlie, pop culture, unicorn, unicorns, video

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

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 Annihilation in time to turn it in for my Cinema class, but I didn’t… so I had to make a movie about my failure to complete the movie, and turn that in instead.

The full flipbook animation movie will be up soon. Checkout http://www.zacksmovies.com for other movies.

I’m looking forward to the complete movie.

Annihilation, animation, flipbook, flipbook animation, movie, video, zacksmovies.com

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.

The question apparently stems from a story in Slate, but I wonder how long this will remain an issue. Wexelblat notes that the technical limitations to “true-to-life, fool-an-audience reproductions” are high…for now. While flesh and blood talent rule the silver screen today, the time when they may be replaced is near. But once we cross that threshold, what’s to keep the animators from creating their own characters? And how long before animators and modelers like belaljimez, whose rendering appears above, wrest control of the screen from today’s pretty faces?

Alan Wexelblat, animation, character rights, copyfight, copyright, digital actors, digiwood, hollywood, licensing, selling yourself, synthespians

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

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 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 (http://edwardgoreyhouse.org/, phone 781-768-8367). I found out about the house at Odd New England.com.

Tours are lead through the main floor of the house, with thorough explanations by active docents. They’ll leave at the end, and visitors are left to wander the few small rooms on their own.

My visit to the Gorey House was part of my mid-October Weird Travel Tour.

tags: alphabet, animation, cape cod, edward gorey, edward gorey house, elephant house, gashlycrumb tinies, gorey, gorey house, macabre, massachusetts, mystery!, strawberry lane, yarmouth, yarmouth ma

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 is capture, edited, and voice-overs added. Because they remove many of the economic and technical barriers to film production, they hold the promise of emphasizing story and plot, and exposing talent among those who create them.

Good stories gain fans, and this is exactly what Anderson was remarking on:

[C]onsider this: My children’s favorite film was not made by Disney, but by a dozen Dallas teenagers playing a videogame in one of their parents’ basement. By Hollywood standards, the film cost essentially nothing to make and is free to download. It’s had 13m viewers so far. There is now a DVD and a soundtrack CD.

I’m downloading it now.

tags: animation, anti-hollywood, chris anderson, codex, computer animation, film, film production, halo, halo 2, hollywood, long tail, longtail, machinima, puppeteers, the codex, videogame, xbox

A Flash animation about why libraries matter.

tags: animation, tumblebooks, libraries, libraries matter, library, tumblebook, why libraries matter