Archives for the month of: March, 2005

Odd Thoughts

March 31, 05 //
28

Odd ToddSome­times strange phrases, thoughts and ques­tions lurk around in my head, to the point where I have to either write them down or tell them to some­one in order to pre­vent myself from for­get­ting them.

At which point I either receive a stiffle of laugh­ter or in most cases the typ­i­cal “roll eyes and shakes head” response. I guess you just have to get my humor, it’s not always off the wall, but it’s cer­tainly not of this world, as peo­ple have told me. It just proves a point that odd peo­ple are either accepted or shrugged off in this soci­ety even­tu­ally hud­dled into var­i­ous clas­si­fi­ca­tions like come­di­ans, “cre­ative types”, odd todds and loonies.

These strange phrases and thoughts that hud­dle in my brain, wait­ing to pounce and dig their fin­gers into an unsus­pect­ing per­son involved in a con­ver­sa­tion with me are dif­fi­cult to shake off. Instead of ignor­ing them I typ­i­cally just blurt them out and see if it might add any­thing to the con­ver­sa­tion. For instance, right now here are a few thoughts I’m having:

I’ve often won­dered if squir­rels have mini laser beams built into their heads?

If I were Super­man what would I pur­chase at Target?

What would I do if I were face-to-face with a sea ser­pent? Make a dash for it? Have a star­ing contest?

If I could make any draw­ing come to life, what would it be?

Shaggy car­pet con­ceals a lot of secrets. Reg­u­lar car­pet isn’t as secre­tive as it’s shaggy cousin.

What do you call two farm­ers on acid? A field trip.

What would Big Bird look like with­out his feath­ers? Also, was Big Bird male or female?

I’d imag­ine that I’m not the only per­son in this world that has these kinds of unusual thoughts, so if you could please share some odd thoughts of your own, or maybe some­one might even pro­vide an answer to your questions. 

The State of Animation

March 28, 05 //
12

Oliver and Company [1988]My wife and I were watch­ing the mak­ing of Disney’s Oliver and Com­pany on DVD. Unlike today’s exten­sively (and some­times exhaus­tively) researched “making-of” fea­turettes, you could tell this one was used more so as a mar­ket­ing tool. Halfway through the fea­ture, the announcer men­tions that Dis­ney used “state of the art” com­puter tech­nol­ogy as an aid to tra­di­tional 2-D animation.

The next scene shows an inter­view with Roy E. Dis­ney who seems excited about the adap­ta­tion of com­puter tech­nol­ogy and sug­gests that it’ll be a use­ful tool for future Dis­ney films. Now here’s the kicker — towards the end of the com­puter ani­ma­tion bit the announcer reminds the view­ers that while com­puter ani­ma­tion is a fan­tas­tic tool to aide in 2-D ani­ma­tion, fear not, for it will never replace tra­di­tional animation.

15 years later we’ve seen the imme­di­ate clo­sure of Disney’s Florida Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio in 2004 which “put approx­i­mately 250 ani­ma­tors, tech­ni­cians and other per­son­nel out of work.” — a move that many say ended the era of tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion and the rumor that Dis­ney will redo many of their clas­sic films using CGI (or Com­puter Gen­er­ated Imagery).

Like many I’ve been extremely impressed with Pixar’s films, but also feel a bit sad­dened by the fact that tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion is viewed as some­thing arbi­trary and stone aged. To me there are tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated films that impress me more so than computer-animated movies. Put it this way, to this day I’m still moved and in awe of many 2-D ani­mated films (like The Jun­gle Book and Bambi) and mostly because of the flu­id­ity and beauty that res­onates via a few pen­cil strokes.

The secret to Pixar’s suc­cess, at least from what I’ve gath­ered from watch­ing “making-of” fea­turettes and books, is their abil­ity to dig deep into their sub­ject, into the core of their film and its mes­sage and then flesh it out with CGI, some­thing that is lack­ing in other ani­mated films.

Start learn­ing graphic design in Philadel­phia and look for­ward to cre­at­ing the next famous ani­mated char­ac­ter in movies.

Related: The State of Ani­ma­tion Fea­tures by Michael Heilemann 

Oxymorons

March 23, 05 //
17

In George Carlin’s book, Brain Drop­pings, Car­lin lists his favorite oxy­morons, includ­ing but not lim­ited to:

  • Assis­tant Supervisor
  • Orig­i­nal Copy
  • Lim­ited Life­time Guarantee
  • For­ward Lateral
  • Par­tial Cease-Fire
  • Unin­vited Guest
  • Full-time Day Care
  • Busi­ness Ethics

Just in case you didn’t know, accord­ing to Hyper­dic­tionary an oxy­moron (pro­nounced: ‘âksi’mowrân) means “con­join­ing con­tra­dic­tory terms”.

Do you have any favorite oxy­morons to share? Leave a com­ment and maybe this will turn into a repos­i­tory of oxy­morons to use in daily conversation. 

Curveballs

March 15, 05 //
11

Life is a com­pli­cated and yet beau­ti­ful entan­gle­ment of thorns and roses. Just when you feel com­fort­able sud­denly a mul­ti­tude of paths open up before you and then you’re left decid­ing which is the right one to fol­low. Which one will lead to suc­cess and which one will lead to strug­gle? There is no doubt that life throws us curve­balls and many times it’s when we are least expect­ing it. The key to under­stand­ing life is know­ing whether you are in con­trol of your life or if your life is in con­trol of you.

When curve­balls are thrown at us, no mat­ter the amount or force, the ini­tial reac­tion is one of dis­or­der, an abrupt change in our lifestyle. How does one main­tain a sense of con­trol or sta­bil­ity, or even cheer and moti­va­tion when we feel as if we’re caught in a whirl­wind of dis­il­lu­sion­ment? There is no sim­ple answer or solu­tion but it’s impor­tant to remain focused on your goals and aspi­ra­tions because the light at the end of the tun­nel or the car­rot dan­gling from a string is the only thing that will keep you going.

You might never actu­ally reach a com­fort zone because it’s dif­fi­cult to aser­tain cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, but keep­ing focused on what’s truly impor­tant in your life will not only save your san­ity but keep you on track. In the scope of things, our lives are dri­ven by the belief in our­selves and the sup­port from our fam­ily and friends. A typ­i­cal obsta­cle that stands inbe­tween our goals is our fear of fail­ing. The fear that no mat­ter what we attempt to obtain that we’ll lose grasp of it or never truly receive it. Being con­fi­dent in your­self will elim­i­nate any fear of fail­ure because those who are con­fi­dent real­ize that their fail­ures are also their strengths.

As Bill Cosby once said:

In order to suc­ceed, your desire for suc­cess should be greater than your fear of failure.

When life throws you curve­balls, take our your trusty glove and catch them midair. 

The Crest of Visualization

March 11, 05 //
24

Crest of VisualizationOne of the most impor­tant pieces of the kar­tooner redesign is the addi­tion of a medievil crest. A few peo­ple have emailed me about the crest image which serves as part of the kartooner.com logo and instead of email­ing every­one indi­vid­u­ally with the same answer I’ve decided to explain how the crest came to be and what it means to me as an artist and visionary.

For starters, Wikipedia defines a crest as being:

[…] a com­po­nent of a coat of arms. It is a fig­ure (or group of fig­ures), often but not always a beast of some kind, depicted atop the hel­met placed above the shield. The crest has been tra­di­tion­ally used by men only, with the excep­tion of queens of Eng­land or Britain, who have been treated heraldically as men. Some armigers used their crest as a per­sonal badge, which led to the erro­neous use of the word “crest” to describe a shield or full coat of arms.

The crest adorn­ing the header of this site was inspired in part by a crest I had seen on a cover of an old book. The orig­i­nal images on the cover were sim­ple pic­tographs resem­bling medieval scenery, includ­ing an image of a joust and a plate full of grapes. When I began the ini­tial sketch, I decided to use four com­po­nents that make up the core of my cre­ativ­ity and these include:

Crest Components

Truth­fully I could have gone a lot deeper as far as the imagery is con­cerned, but my goal was to keep it sim­ple and allow the image to con­vey itself with­out com­pli­cated expla­na­tion. Fur­ther­more, my imag­i­na­tion com­bined with pen­cils, paper and ink allow for unlim­ited explo­ration and cre­ation. Inspi­ra­tion is every­where you look and for me, no mat­ter where I am or what I’m focus­ing on it’s just a mat­ter of pulling out my sketch­pad and cap­tur­ing that moment on paper. 

The Great Conjunction

March 10, 05 //
11

dk-dog.jpgJim Henson’s The Dark Crys­tal was an epic under­tak­ing for Hen­son and com­pany in the early 80’s. It also remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Despite the high pro­duc­tion qual­ity of the film the dif­fi­culty in cre­at­ing The Dark Crys­tal was partly due to the mechan­ics of mim­ic­k­ing real­is­tic move­ment with intri­cate hand pup­pets, some­thing that had never been con­veyed suc­cess­fully despite prior attempts and experimentation.

Pre-production

Before pro­duc­tion was to begin, Hen­son part­nered with Gary Kurtz, who served as pro­ducer on Star Wars and Brian Froud, con­cep­tual artist, to bring the story to life. The next step was brain­storm­ing and out­lin­ing how The Dark Crys­tal was going to be cre­ated within their pro­jected bud­get. Accord­ing to Froud in an inter­view about the Mak­ing of Dark Crystal;

There were so many dif­fer­ences of opin­ion and so many com­pro­mises had to be made to accom­mo­date the char­ac­ters to the phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of the human body. But every­thing did turn out all right in the end.

Recog­ni­tion

The film opened on Decem­ber 17th, 1982 with a final bud­get of $15 mil­lion, funded and dis­trib­uted by Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. Crit­ics either hailed it as a “bit­ter­sweet spec­ta­cle” or noth­ing more than an “overblown pup­pet show”. Through my eyes it was some­thing that broke the mold and pushed the bound­aries beyond con­ven­tional Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions. It’s some­what unset­tling that movies that sel­dom break any molds gar­ner critic appraisal and yet “unique” films with a sense of vision — espe­cially inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tions — rarely receive wide­spread recog­ni­tion. Henson’s The Dark Crys­tal, while fan­tasy in nature, was also an explo­sion of col­ors, tex­tures and cul­ture. As you watch the film you appre­ci­ate the amount of work that went into research­ing the char­ac­ters, his­tory and spe­cial effects.

Spe­cial Effects

In an age before CGI (or Com­puter Gen­er­ated Imagery), The Dark Crys­tal uti­lized extremely detailed and yet com­pli­cated pup­petry. In some scenes, peo­ple small in stature were used for the Gelflings and full-sized actors for many of the sup­port­ing char­ac­ters. Like any Hen­son pro­duc­tion this was needed to envoke a sense of real­ism and yet, with the addi­tion of lay­ered pup­petry, it gives the illu­sion that the crea­ture on screen is liv­ing and breath­ing. These meth­ods, if used prop­erly, can be very suc­cess­ful in film­mak­ing, but it’s also noth­ing new. Since the advent of film, peo­ple have dressed up in cos­tumes to rep­re­sent crea­tures plucked from their creator’s imag­i­na­tions. How­ever, in recent times, film­mak­ers have added more real­ism by cou­pling the cos­tume with noth­ing more than gad­getry (for the eyes, limbs or other pro­tru­sions) cov­ered in mate­r­ial such as latex, foam or fur which is usu­ally con­trolled by radio receivers or computers.

The Dark Crys­tal will for­ever remain in my mind as one of the movies which influ­enced by own inter­ests in pup­petry and spe­cial effects. As a kid I must have sat down and watched it a few hun­dred times and never, even to this day, have I grown tired of repeated view­ings. It’s a clas­sic in my opin­ion as far as Hen­son and fan­tasy films are con­cerned and should be a part of anyone’s movie col­lec­tion, whether you be a die-hard fan­tasy or science-fiction film aficionado. 

CSS Refresh

March 8, 05 //
10

Two years ago, after read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards by Jef­frey Zeld­man, I made an oath to myself that I would kick my old web devel­op­ment habits and take my Jedi train­ing in CSS-based design.

I can remem­ber the exact moment when the prover­bial light­bulb appeared above my head because it was around the same time my daugh­ter was born. In a short span of time two pin­na­cle moments (albeit with seper­ate mean­ings) changed my per­spec­tive on life; the birth of my daugh­ter and becom­ing a bet­ter web designer.

Chang­ing my Habits

It hap­pened as I was sit­ting there in the hos­pi­tal cafe­te­ria, care­fully read­ing Design­ing with Web Stan­dards while I munched on over­cooked scram­bled eggs. Comb­ing through the text I felt the need to change my habits, dance to a dif­fer­ent drum and work towards bet­ter­ing my skill in web design. Prior to this, I only used Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG edi­tor because I couldn’t get a grasp of the mean­ing of HTML code. To me, if Dreamweaver han­dled the code, there was no rea­son to muck around and poten­tially cause dam­age to the code. It’s amaz­ing how wrong I was.

The most impor­tant step towards becom­ing a good web designer is first learn­ing how var­i­ous tags work in your code. Oth­er­wise there’s no rea­son to even take that plunge let alone con­sider it as a viable career option. I’ve seen sev­eral good design­ers feel the need to rely on WYSIWYG edi­tors rather than under­stand how HTML (or XHTML) func­tions. I know because I was one of them at one point but after invest­ing in a library of web devel­op­ment books I’ve scram­bled out of the hole I had dug myself into.

CSS is a Tricky Beast

After re-learning how to code prop­erly I hit the books as far as edu­cat­ing myself about Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets. I had used CSS pre­vi­ously, in a lim­ited fash­ion, to style text. I remem­ber think­ing it was a huge deal to change the color of a word or sen­tence using inline CSS but at that point I really didn’t see the value in using it for lay­out, nei­ther did I real­ize that it could be used to con­trol an entire lay­out. Cut to a few years later and I’m sur­prised I didn’t catch on ear­lier but just as well since ear­lier browser ver­sions had lim­ited CSS support.

While CSS is an amaz­ing tool it’s also a tricky beast and that’s due to Inter­net Explorer’s poor CSS sup­port. I know many design­ers who’ve given up sup­port­ing IE all together and while that’s a per­sonal and comend­able choice on dif­fer­ent lev­els I feel the need to con­tinue sup­port­ing IE because it’s still used by a major­ity of the Inter­net audi­ence and mostly because it comes pre-installed on most PC systems.

Also, as Molly and I have dis­cussed, design­ers that have tran­si­tioned from print to CSS-based lay­out have dif­fi­cul­ties mainly because of their inabil­ity to make their lay­outs pixel per­fect. Speak­ing from expe­ri­ence, I come from a print back­ground and quite hon­estly using CSS came quite nat­u­rally for me and a lot of this had to do with my atti­tude towards it. Let’s face it, the web and print world are on oppo­site sides of the spec­trum of design. One can eas­ily fire up a copy of Adobe InDe­sign, choose a two or three col­umn tem­plate and using the Shift + Arrow key method align cer­tain com­po­nents to the pixel. CSS, on the other hand, isn’t as easy to manip­u­late and mainly that’s due to browser sup­port and cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions with the tech­nol­ogy. Instead of cre­at­ing a pixel per­fect lay­out you have to be in the mind­set that you’ll get close to align­ing cer­tain aspects the way you want them to, but cer­taintly not perfectly.

The Road Ahead

Even though I have a good work­ing knowl­edge of CSS and apply that knowl­edge on a daily basis I’ve decided to make a per­sonal goal; to refresh my expe­ri­ence with CSS and web devel­op­ment in gen­eral by hit­ting the books and relearn­ing every­thing from the ground up. To do this I’ve added a few notable books to my library and to date my library of web devel­op­ment and CSS books is com­prised of the following:

Wish me luck. 

A Clone of Several People

March 2, 05 //
7

ClonesIn the past 10 or 12 years ran­dom strangers have men­tioned to me in pass­ing con­ver­sa­tion, “You remind me of my boss or my friend who lives in such and such town, down by the river.” The first few times this hap­pened, whether it be at a local Block­buster or in a super­mar­ket aisle, I would sim­ply shrug it off as mere coin­ci­dence. How­ever, after sev­eral encoun­ters with peo­ple men­tion­ing that I look like some­one they know I’ve come to real­ize that I’m either a clone of sev­eral peo­ple or they are clones of me.

Just the other day a co-worker shared with me that I looked strik­ingly sim­il­iar to her pre­vi­ous boss and then she added, “That’s a good thing.” What could I do but smile and breath a sigh of relief that even though I some­how resem­ble her ex-boss, fear not, for it’s a “good thing”. A few years ago, after return­ing a late rental to Block­buster, the guy behind the counter stops me from walk­ing out the door say­ing, “Hey man, long time no see. Did you ever rent that movie? What was it called? The Game? Yeah man, The Game.”

Like­wise, a sim­il­iar sit­u­a­tion occurred when I was using the esca­la­tor at Barnes & Nobles. As I was mak­ing my way up to the non-fiction aisle a guy behind me pokes me in the side and says, “Dude, did you ever get your muf­fler replaced?”. I turned around and he smiled and said “Oh wow, you look just like my brother’s friend. Sorry dude, I thought you were some­one else. My bad.”

Whether I’m shuf­fling through my lug­gage at the air­port or buy­ing an ice cream cone at Baskin & Rob­bins this “You remind me of..” occurence hap­pens about 70–80% of the time and it’s at no fault to the stranger or casual aquain­tance. After­all, I’m a clone of sev­eral peo­ple or they are clones of me.