animation

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.

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.

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.

A Flash animation about why libraries matter.