Showing posts with label Beanery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beanery. Show all posts

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Un Dimanche Matin a l'Isle de la Grande Beanery

Had a good Flash session with the 8-bit master, Scott Raedeke last night. I'm inspired to get up to speed with ActionScript so's as to teach it in some form next year. I like the way games give one a very different way of thinking about animation than the old straight-forward narrative film approach. Games feels more true to the "ha ha, these pictures look like they're moving" spirit that I think is the fundamental appeal of animation. Was that something a half-assed Clement Greenberg would say if he were an animator and kept a half-assed blog? If only I had some kind of Quantum Computer, I could arrive at an answer to this question through an elaborate computational model.

Anyhow, here are some good links to "classic" game animation sprite maps that Scott turned me on to. Handy to the game or animation student/enthusiast. If you ever have "animator's block" these could well pry you loose to shake what your mother gave you. Mark them well, my children. Mark them well.

Friday, March 14, 2008

What Ben Franklin


. . .may have looked like, nude and from behind; such is the price of my return to daily drawings.

Just had coffee with Warren Hedges down at the Beanery. Always inspiring to talk to the Ashland Elk of the Year. One of our main characters in The Happiness Hole is loosely based on him. Real Warren has a network-like brain able to take difficult ideas, distill them and make them comprehensible to the layman. Our fake Warren is a Warren gone off the deep end, driven mad by:
1) The cruel stupidity of the world.
2) A sense of the interconnection of all knowledge now made disturbingly literal by the invention of a quantum super computer.
3) A painful love affair with a dakini destined for bigger things.

Real-life Warren knows how to swim and tread water, so the deep end doesn't bother him.