So, a post on Photoshop Distasters struck me. Not the photo itself, but the responses.

Sandwiched between people valiantly defending home-schooling, I was surprised how many people were commenting, "Oh, you wouldn't want a distorted and foreshortened reflection of here, it wouldn't be as good," or "you wouldn't be able to see her face if they put a realistic reflection in the puddle." When it seems quite obvious to me that a realistic reflection in a puddle wouldn't show her at all.

Man, this stuff is crazy cool and weird:
http://www.artofthetitle.com/2009/06/01/freaked/
This guy creates animations in clay and then slices the clay open and photographs them. Like, since he just needs to produce a 2D image, he then replicated time through the extra dimension of space. So it's a kind of unusual way of approaching animation or moving pictures.

Another animation test for myself. I just wanted to try out different ways of moving this guy's arms.

So I did a short animation test, with one of those Mr. Mans. I know by normal standards, they'd never hire me to work on their show, and there's no point in me submitting it. But it was a fun thing to try out. here.

Some of the motions I quite like, except you can barely see them, since I didn't take the time to put in more tweening frames. Like the bit where his tongue stretches out and then springs into his mouth.

Just a quick note. If you are using the Regal Breadmaker, my current hypothesis is that the water goes in first, then you add the flour. Confirmation will have to wait until next time I make bread.

For my last post, I had to search to find the title of the book I had read.

For my own future reference, I'm going to get in the habit of blogging a little about books I read.

First, About Face 2.0: the essentials of interaction design. It's the best book on interaction design I've yet read. It gets into some nice theory, about pliancy and excise and goal-oriented design. It mostly focuses on applications, rather than on web sites. I would be interested in finding a book more focused on web sites some time.

I recently took a course on directing actors with Jeff Erbach.

Tangentially related to this, I need to recommend the book Playing to the Camera. It's a collection of interviews with and essays by actors, on the subject of film acting. And it's nice in the sense that it covers almost a century, interviews European and Russian actors, so you've got a fairly broad spectrum of approaches.

So, Don La Fontaine, the primary movie trailer voice-over guy, died this last year. I've heard people suggest that they officially retire the phrase, "In a world" in his honour.

I think I recognized his voice in the trailer for Delgo. To me, that kind of exemplified what went wrong with Delgo. The studios turn ideas down because they don't think they can market them. So if you're billing yourself as the most expensive non-Hollywood animation in America, then you can't market exactly the same way the studios would.

So I got this flier in the mail courtesy of the Conservative party:
Now, I guess I'm supposed to be shocked that Anita Neville hates women or wants them to stay in the kitchen with babies or something, but I'm more interested in another Bizarro-world implication of this pamphlet.

To quote: "The proposed federal model would see these matters dealt with during the collective bargaining process, where they should be." (My emphasis.)

I just read a BoingBoing post The Case Against Candy Land and I mentally joined it with some stuff I had been reading about the history of Sesame Street, thanks to this guy's blog.