January 2010
2 posts
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“I love the relationship that anyone has with music: because there’s...”
– Nick Hornby, Songbook
November 2009
1 post
Watering the Roots of All Evil
I watched the movie Food, Inc and recommend it to everyone who has even a passing interest in food or health. It was a riveting, and sometimes harrowing, documentary about the corporate involvement in our mass-production food system and arguably impacts everyone in the country. It covers a lot of familiar ground, stories you’ve likely heard bits and pieces of. But when the threads are...
March 2009
8 posts
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What He Saw Is What He Became. Beat Frequency And...
So I’m sick, which basically sucks. However, sometimes there’s an upside. Maybe it’s the fever, maybe it’s boredom, but I have the strangest dreams when I’m ill.
So, in this dream I’m taking a test. It’s a specialized test, called a Change Blindness test. Normally, humans are pretty awesome at spotting small changes; we’re good with patterns and...
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The First Wealth Is Health
I’m sick with the flu, so work is at a standstill.
I recommend you watch the live action short film Signs. 12 minutes, but worth it.
Scientific American has an interesting article on their site about the evolution of primate color vision. It sheds some fascinating light on the how we ended up with trichromatic vision, its rarity, some genetic issues associated with it (including genetic...
“Sometimes standing on the shoulders of giants is the only way to keep them from...”
– Pat
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I Wonder What They'll Call The World Wide Web When...
People ask me about cloud computing sometimes and I’m usually ambivalent. Ok, distributed computing is useful, but it’s really just an efficient use of existing resources -a networking optimization. I don’t necessarily buy it as revolutionary concept. People try to democratize the system, but essentially the most-discussed paradigm is informationally asymmetric (the work of the...
A Good Thing™ Or Two
This week has been devoted to rewriting/updating another book about digital coloring in Photoshop. It’s about 150 oversized pages, but it’s relatively simple work, so I expect to be done by Tuesday. Which is a Good Thing™ because orders have already been placed for it and everyone needs it done yesterday.
Research indicates what artists already knew: Doodling aids in memory recall. I...
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Art Is Dead And Humanism Killed It. Criticism In...
People sometimes say “Art is dead. You can’t do anything new, it’s all been done before.” Whenever someone tells me this I know I’m looking at an idiot. For one, it’s easy to parrot the cliché in favor of an original thought. But also, given the popular perception of what we call art these days it’s the safe bet; and worse, a difficult argument for a...
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This Is The Way The World Ends
I’ve been drafting the story for my shadow puppet animation in my head over the past week and yesterday I sat down and set up an experimental project in After Effects, only to be severely disappointed. Even though I’m current through AECS4, I’m running v6.5 because my processor doesn’t support SS2 instructions. I’d forgotten how parenting, in this version, is...
February 2009
25 posts
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Dōmo Arigatō, Mr. Roboto
Congratulations to Wall*E for winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year! Also, La Maison en Petits Cubes by Kunio “Mr. Roboto” Kato for taking the Best Animated Short!
My Dreamweaver/CSS studies were making me claw my eyes out so I switched to After Effects and studiously knocked off 16 chapters today, completing the whole course. I guess that means I’m back to...
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One Bad Idea After Another
Intellect is an admirable quality. But being smart is like being right; even if you’re right all the time you’re still trumped by someone who’s lucky all the time. So it goes with intellect: no matter how intelligent you are, you can always be bested by an idiot with greater insight. This is the value of perspective and why creativity is the hallmark of genius.
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Songs From The End Of Everything
Last night’s art opening was a lot of fun. It was well-attended, well-received and well, pretty interesting. The show was smaller than I initially expected; the gallery space was tight, but the pieces were expertly presented and visually arresting. Kudos to Joe Bravo and his curating prowess; he unified two disparate artists magnificently and the whole show felt both relevant and timely....
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It's The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel...
Attending the “Apocalyptic Visions, the paintings of Alex Rubio and Graham Toms” which is being curated by my friend Joe, who coincidentally drafted the show synopsis. Haven’t been to an art opening in a while, so I’m looking forward to it. It’s at the Semmes Gallery in the Fine Art Building at the University of the Incarnate Word from 5:00pm - 8:00pm.
Still...
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Thinking Like A Jellyfish
Humans, like most animals, are bilaterally symmetrical. For the most part, if you divide us down the middle, one side looks pretty much like the other side -just flipped. I heard an interesting notion that humans developed a base ten counting system because we had ten fingers. That makes a certain sense; we start with the truth of our bodies and naturally relate that to the world. I wonder if...
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Facebook, Flexagons And Schadenfreude
The past few days I’ve covered 10 chapters of Dreamweaver and CSS training. I have a lot of web-related development I want to tackle here shortly, so I’m being meticulous.
I located an error in my Tumblr theme regarding listing displays and I fixed it. I post a lot of topics under one title sometimes and I prefer to use an ordered list to display them, instead of a <hr> tag...
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Links
IBM has filed a patent on a computerized system which “would continuously scan the area for incoming projectiles. If one is detected, the system would deliver a shock to the muscles causing a swift, reflexive action away from the bullet.” Gizmodo [This story is pretty funny since it was released at the same time as the next story.]
The Army has developed “A giant flower beetle...
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More Training
My After Effects training was a lot more dense than I expected. It’s going to take a few days longer to cover all the material, but that’s a really good thing in disguise. I’ve picked up some phenomenal tips and I’m genuinely excited to try some of them out.
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“Dear Hollywood, Stop remaking our favorite childhood films. Signed, Humanity”
– Pat
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Time To Take My Medicine
Been enjoying This is Why You’re Fat, a brilliant Tumblr blog.
Installing After Effects CS4. Looks like small changes overall, so the upgrade should be effortless and cause minimal headaches. Fingers crossed. However, I’m not up to speed on some of the upgrades in the CS series, so rather than put it off I’m powering through an advanced refresher course. It’s about 10...
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The Biology Of Bigotry, Viral Influence On Human...
Notes to myself. Flee in terror unless you need reading material to put yourself to sleep, or you have an interest in genetics, retroviruses or human evolution.
Been reading a lot about diseases lately and it occurs to me there might be an evolutionary argument to explain discrimination. The biology of bigotry, if you will. I don’t, in any way, condone discrimination or racial intolerance...
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TV Before TV
Finished up my pages for the Obama comic that were shovelled in front of me. I think the pages were drawn by Chris Allen, which means it will probably come out from Antarctic Press.
Realized I forgot to re-install After Effects. Wow, how did I miss that? Found out because I was seized by a sudden desire to make a looping animated gif of that cute/creepy stop-motion kid in the new Pop Tart...
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For Meika
The reason you can’t find it is because the expression engine was revamped in subsequent versions. It’s handled in Java script now and it’s much more powerful. I had to pull this out from my notes. You’ll have to input this directly from the timeline: a=5; //decay b=25; //frequency k=75; //amplitude y=position [1]-k*(Math.exp(-a*time)*( Math.cos(b*time)+1)); [position...
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Hey Kids, Comics!
Today I’m living the glamorous life of a comic book colorist. If you missed the Discovery channel special, this mostly involves partying, booze and lots of casual sex because You’re A Comic Rock Star! Actually, it mostly involves abandoning your dignity, hissing at the sun in your underwear and good old American bleary-eyed-caffeine-powered Photoshoppery. A good chair and a bad...
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A Fable of Earlymaclandia
Another boring software rant, skip if you value your sanity. Adobe has this nasty habit of buying programs I like, giving them a quick make-over and re-branding them into their massive software suites. And, after a version or two, they abandon the program entirely for something they’ve developed in-house, or they buy another program that they think is even better. Oh, we’re...
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Meeting Day
Went to the business meeting but skipped the scheduling discussions. I was mostly there to speak with Joe. I did pick up my check and cover some areas I wanted to focus on more. Fred Perry showed me his interesting new game idea, which is still in the rough planning stages. It’s pretty innovative, but I thought the overall concept was too encumbered with rules. Fred intentionally designed it...
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My Tag Cloud Has A Silver Lining
Added a tag cloud to my blog using some custom code from Tumblrtags. The code took all of 15 seconds to install and I even adjusted the font size to match the rest of my sidebar. Pretty slick. I’ve left the tag size calculation logarithmic for the time being, but I will probably adjust some those features when my list of tags grows.
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These Are Not My Grandmother's Comics
Today I volunteered to do inventory at the comic store. From about 9:00 to 4:00 I counted hundreds and hundreds of trade paperbacks and hardcovers. It was boring, tedious and surprisingly irritating. If all you care about is what I did today, stop reading now; the rest of this entry is a mild but targeted rant that will bore you. Suffice to say, some companies really have their act together when...
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The Secret Language of Dreams
For the last two weeks I’ve been having these dreams in which I have conversations with people and I recall myself using words that do not exist. I have no way of explaining exactly how bizarre and frustrating this is. In these dreams the words are amazingly real and my dream-self seems to understand what they mean. However, during the dream, the lucid part of me realizes this word is...
January 2009
12 posts
2 tags
WatchThis was the first shot I animated for the Spook. I initially wanted it to be the opening scene but pushed it back for a stronger establishing shot. This cut was nearly finished, it just lacked a few foreground elements (A lot of electical wires) and some polish.
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WatchMore test footage from Spook. This one was properly labled as c007, so it was the 7th shot. This footage was nearly complete, but even at the time I was never pleased with it. All it needed was some additional pulsing light effects added to the mechanical bits. Had I had enough footage to edit together, I’m guessing I’d have recomposited this shot to make it less static. Maybe some eye...
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Spook
Right before I left for Austin to work for Warner Brothers Independent as an animator on Scanner Darkly, I was preparing some test footage for an short film I was working on which I had dubbed “Spook”. It was a science fiction short which I was working on in my spare time just for kicks. After a year at the WB it just didn’t seem all that relevant so I put it on the back burner....
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Talk is Cheap Because Supply Exceeds Demand
Comment system installed. Remarkably painless; kudos to DISQUS, the service looks robust and has straightforward Tumblr instructions. Bonus: I tested it and it seems to be working properly. On to more productive things!
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No Comment
Stayed up late modifying the CSS in my blog theme and I’m pretty happy with the design now. I still need to implement the comment system but I don’t feel any pressing need. I’ll probably do that at some future point, just to learn how.
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Welcome to the Monkey House
I’ve been enjoying my Twitter account quite a bit lately, but limiting myself to 140 characters for everything can be inconvenient when I’m trying to jot some notes down, make some observations or record work-related thoughts. So, as an artist, I’m doing what comes naturally and starting a new sketchbook, a place to archive whatever non-sequitur notions I have. Only this...