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When Jace Cooke and Alex Chung founded Giphy, they simply wanted a convenient platform for sharing and searching GIFs. But now, Giphy, which launched in Febrary, is reaching beyond its search engine origins and aims to serve as a tool to empower artists and animators.
The first round of features to roll out on Giphy over the coming month are built to serve GIF makers rather than consumers. Artists will have dedicated URLs, making their work easily accessible for fans. When embedded on another blog, each GIF will include a coded block that shows the creator’s name. That’s right, no more stumbling onto a great GIF on Tumblr and wondering who created it. “I want Giphy to be what Vimeo is for videographers or Soundcloud is for musicians,” co-founder Jace Cooke told Cartoon Brew.
Cooke invited several notable GIF makers to launch artist pages, including animator Frank Macchia (see GIF below) and wildly popular Tumblr GIF artist Matthew DiVito (aka mr. div). The next step will be providing GIF makers with uncapped uploads—Tumblr, for example, has a maximum upload of 1 MB per GIF. Eventually, artists will have personalized dashboard with analytics for tracking where their GIFs are being shared. “I want to lend more credence to GIFs, give them a wider audience and open up the possibility of monetization for artists,” adds Cooke.
For Cooke there are two major questions going forward: For GIF makers, how can Giphy adapt to best serve their needs? For everyone else, how can Giphy encourage more people to try creating GIFs? Cook is turning to the animation community to find answers to these questions, particularly the latter. Many creative people who work in CGI are interested in GIFs, but they haven’t yet given it a shot. “There’s a learning curve,” Cooke says . “They understand the value and they’re excited about it, but they’re a little apprehensive.” Ultimately, Cooke hopes to see more animators embrace GIFs, which he describes as “animated trading cards.”
Even though there are many GIF repositories and search engines like GIFSoup, Tumblr, and Google’s new animated image search, Giphy is the first coherent attempt to elevate GIFs as an artform. “There is something really powerful about an art that is halfway between a photo and a video,” says Cooke. “GIFs are a legit medium, a form of expression that’s only going to grow.”
0 Comments on How Giphy Plans to Transform Animated GIFs Into An Artform as of 5/24/2013 11:43:00 AM
My iPad and I are getting along effortlessly and now to make it even better our Texas library listserve has been touting the advantages of using Reflection to connect and use the iPad with a projector in our libraries. What? Did I need more reasons to love my iPad? We all know we can buy a VGA adapter (limited to a roving range of the length of cable) or use a product like Apple TV (wireless but expensive), but we want to be free and untethered and we want something inexpensive. Reflection and AirServer seem to both hit the mark. They are still fine tuning some bugs, but I have high hopes for both of these products.
Ricardo “Mr. Doob” Cabello is an innovator in using WebGL technology in modern web browsers to create advanced interactivity and real-time animation.
WebGL is described on the technology page of one of the projects that he worked on as a technical director:
WebGL is a context of the HTML5 canvas element that enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the web browser without a plug-in. In other words, it enables your browser to show some really beautiful visuals.
That particular project (stills shown above) is an interactive music video for “Black” from the album ROME by Danger Mouse and Daniel Luppi, with Norah Jones on vocals. You can see a talk he gave about the creation of this video here. Notably this video also includes 2D animation from Anthony F. Schepperd, previously featured on Cartoon Brew here and here.
Ricardo has a blog here where he shares things such as this valuable advice that applies to all creative freelancers. His Mr. Doob interactive portfolio is here which you should access with a modern browser such as Google Chrome to best enjoy all of his strange and cheeky web experiments.
0 Comments on Artist of the Day: Mr. Doob as of 4/22/2013 6:20:00 AM
Video gameplay is about to get a lot more realistic. Game producer Activision unveiled this new demo yesterday at the Game Developers Conference. Uncanny or not, the progresss in computer animation has been remarkable. Real-time rendering techniques today look far more impressive than any rendering from a decade ago:
This animated character is being rendered in real-time on current video card hardware, using standard bone animation. The rendering techniques, as well as the animation pipeline are being presented at GDC 2013, “Next Generation Character Rendering” on March 27. The original high resolution data was acquired from Light Stage Facial Scanning and Performance Capture by USC Institute for Creative Technologies, then converted to a 70 bones rig, while preserving the high frequency detail in diffuse, normal and displacement composite maps. It is being rendered in a DirectX11 environment, using advanced techniques to faithfully represent the character’s skin and eyes.
We may not be living in the Diamond Age quite yet, but Neal Stephenson’s Primer is here. My friend Andy Diggle (who’s the reason I read The Diamond Age in the first place) sent me this link about a learn-as-you-go software project influenced by (and named in honor of) The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, that amazing smart-book device from Stephenson’s nanotech masterwork:
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
“OLPC” stands for One Laptop Per Child:
The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
OLPC created special learning software for the tablets in this project, specifically modeled on the Primer.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it’s not a coincidence: Nell’s Primer in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here’s an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods…
Neo-Victorians, nanotech, and education: this novel had me at hello. Top-notch world-building; there’s a little dose of cyberpunk in the opening, with a ruffian named Bud getting himself fitted up with a skull gun that fires explosive bullets upon his mental command; and then we’re whisked off to New Atlantis/Shanghai, the home base of a thriving Neo-Victorian community, where the upper crust are Equity Lords (aristocrats by dint of their corporate ties) and the birthday entertainments involve creating fairylands that rise out of the sea for a day, thanks to the limitless possibilities of molecular manipulation. There is something delightful about this melding of Dickensian characters and futuristic tech.
One of the upper-crustiest of the Equity Lords is an elderly gent who, for all he esteems his phyle and works to protect and promote it, rues the loss of opportunity for young Neo-Victorians to experience character-building adversity. His adult children missed out on something important, he believes—after all, he himself grew up on an Idaho farm, was homeschooled until age fourteen, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and all that. He determines to offer his granddaughter an alternative to the soft Vicky upbringing, in which status and comforts are often taken for granted by those born and raised in the phyle. To this end, he hires a gifted techno-engineer, one John Hackworth, to create a sophisticated, interactive book-slash-computer, the Primer, which will provide his granddaughter with personalized instruction in academic subjects, ethics and morals, handcrafts, self-defense, computer programming—pretty much everything under the sun.
Hackworth rises to the challenge…Hackworth, who, as it happens, has a young daughter of his own. He attempts to procure a bootleg copy for four-year-old Fiona, and therein lies the tale. The illicit copy of the Primer goes astray and winds up in the hands of a young thete child—thetes belong to no phyle at all—named Nell. As in “little Nell”—a Dickensian waif full of pluck, growing up in dreadful circumstances in a cold, cruel world. If ever a child needed a Magic Book, it’s Nell. Well, and Pip, and David Copperfield, and Oliver Twist…but no, really, Nell’s in worse straits than all those lads (her mother, Tequila, has worse taste in men than David Copperfield’s mum), and we’re thrilled to see the Primer offer her some tools for digging her way out of the squalor.
Ptch is a new iPad/iPhone app that allows users to remix photos, videos, songs and text into 60-second music video-style shorts called Ptches. Sort of like an Instagram for videos (with “styles” instead of filters), Ptch aims to make video editing as intuitive and reflexive for the masses as taking a photograph with a smartphone. The app also allows users to remix ptches made by their friends so that each person can share their own version of an event. The software is available on Apple’s iTunes Store for free, though add-on songs and film “styles” will cost money in the future.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Ptch is headed by Ed Leonard, the Chief Technology Officer of DreamWorks Animation and the former director of R&D at Disney Animation. He convinced DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg to launch a new company called DWA Investments. The company, which is funded entirely by its parent DreamWorks Animation, has 15 employees, a third of whom are former DreamWorks staffers who took paycuts (in exchange for stock) to join Ptch.
Sites like Fast Company and BetaBeat have been debating what Ptch means for the future of DreamWorks. For example, does it signal the company’s transition from being a content producer into a technology company? Ptch helmer Ed Leonard hinted at that possibility while speaking with BetaBeat:
“There’s a lot of ambition at DreamWorks, they’re thinking about how to leverage ambition on the film side and how to reinvent themselves as more of a technology company than a movie company and really leverage all that value. If you get close to what Jeffrey is thinking about in terms of the DreamWorks brand … Jeffrey really believes in the intersection that’s happening between technology and entertainment.”
It’s hard to know what to make of all this just yet, but Leonard’s quote reveals that DreamWorks Animation is evolving in different and unexpected directions.
Brazilian artist Jomário Murta used multiple Microsoft Kinects to generate a sequence of point clouds (a set of points in 3D space) as reference for creating animation. The process is akin to motion capture, but not the same:
This is something like animating over the videos. Just like we usually do as reference for timing and more complex movements. The difference is that I can animate three-dimensionally “inside” the video; the advantage instead of mocap is that the animation process is more free, where I can easily exaggerate the movements and play a lot with the poses without compromising my style of animation.
Murta admits that he is still in a research phase and hasn’t figured out any practical applications for the technique, but that’s to be expected of any exploration of a new technology. The results are promising thus far, and it’ll be interesting to see how he and others build on the process.
Let’s talk for a moment about why I misfiled my tax extension. Melty Jello brain aside, bad software design almost cost my little family $2,500.
Background:
When I’m not wrestling a one-year-old into tiny shoes, I’m a User Experience Designer. This means I work with software companies to create easy-to-understand interfaces.
It also means that when I screw up my tax extension, I look very carefully at the software path that got me there.
Dramatic Reenactment:
It was April. I needed to file an extension. Like most Bay Area tech nerds, I hate mail. I consider it a personal affront if I have to print out a form, write an address, locate stamps, and put a letter in the whatsit…mailbox…thing. Naturally, my first step was to search irs.gov for “file extension online“.
Problem one: Too many results
The IRS site is too damned helpful. There were 948 results for my search. Many results were press release or blog type articles hinting at the existence of online extension filing, but containing no direct links. I wanted to find one or two good matches. Instead, I found a sea of irrelevance.
Problem two: Too many names
I hopped down a bunny trail for about ten minutes, searching for a feature alternately referred to as “E-file an extension”, “Free file”, “Freefile”, “Free Fillable Forms”, “Free File Fillable Forms”, “Free Federal Extension”, “Form 4868″, “Traditional Free File”, and “IRS e-file”.
Problem three: Inconsistent design
I eventually landed on a modern-looking site that seemed likely. I clicked “Get Started” and wandered through four increasingly less-well-designed pages which jumped from site to site, forcing me to read and parse options despite having already told the system what I wanted.
Problem three: Asshole account requirement
The eventual winner was a page called “Free File Fillable Forms” which required me to create an account and update my Flash plugin. I was already logged in to irs.gov, but that didn’t count. I created “a password that is different than my User ID, between 8 and 32 characters, and contains at least 1 number and 1 symbol”. All the eye-rolling gave me a headache.
Problem four: Misleading email
I received a spammy looking ALL CAPS email telling me my account had been created. I filled out the IRS extension form, which was the easiest part of the process. I submitted, and received another spammy ALL CAPS email saying “Your federal return was successfully transmitted”.
At this point, I fell on the bed and whined to my husband for several minutes about information architecture. Then I fell asleep, secure in the certainty that I had filed an automatic extension. Taxes wouldn’t be bothering us for a few more months, by which time we would certainly be getting more sleep.
Mon
0 Comments on How FreeFile Almost Cost Me Plenty as of 1/1/1900
As someone who lives in a Cintiq household, I know well how highly this is anticipated. Wacom made the official announcement today for their Cintiq 24HD. The first thing one notices is the sexy new counterweighted stand that allows for adjustable height and angling of the screen. Here are some of the key under-the-hood specs:
* 1920 x 1200 HD display
* 178° viewing angle
* 16:10 aspect ratio
* 550:1 contrast ratio
* 2048 levels of pen pressure and 40° of tilt
* Featuring Wacom’s new Tip Sensor
* DVI-I and DisplayPort connectors
* Weight: 63.8 pounds
* Price: $2,499
And here’s a video of a sophisticated and serious artist (clearly not an animator) using the beast:
Publishing isn’t dying, it’s just becoming more animated. Los Angeles-based JibJab sees an opportunity to benefit from the emergence of digital children’s books on tablets like the iPad. They recently launched a new product line called JibJab Jr. Books. Powered by their “Starring You” technology, it allows kids to insert themselves into their storybooks. The app is free to download on the iTunes store, and comes with a starter book. Additional titles can be purchased for $7.99 individually or $3.99 as part of a monthly subscription plan.
This USA Today article discusses JibJab’s new strategy for children’s books, while this app review on Pad Gadget offers a pretty good overview of how JibJab Jr. works.
The JibJab titles don’t offer the hyper-clickable interactivity or audio narration/sound effects of other recent iPad children’s book efforts like Bill Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, but they have an equally compelling feature in content personalization. Right now, that’s enough to stand out from the pack, although they’ll likely need to add interactivity and sound at some point to stay competitive. Another unique aspect of the books is that JibJab is commissioning a lot of fresh voices, including many from the animation industry, to illustrate their book titles. Among the artists they’ve enlisted so far are Nate Wragg, John Martz, Brigette Barrager and Kai Wu.
(Disclosure: JibJab is a sponsor of Cartoon Brew’s 2011 Student Animation Festival.)
Cartoon Brew readers might have seen this coming a mile away, but not Wall Street. The business world is finally realizing that 3-D may not be the revolution that Hollywood’s snake oil salesmen promised it would be. Yesterday, shares in 3-D technology licensor provider RealD sank nearly 16% to $15.48. It’s significant because this is the first time the stock is trading below its 2010 IPO price of $16 a share. The stock was trading at over $35 just two months ago.
The stock plunged following the company’s first quarter report which topped analysts’ expectations but fell short of estimates on Wall Street. Analysts have already begun asking whether it’s game over for 3-D.
Another big loser in the film technology arena this week was IMAX. Its shares slipped 6% yesterday to under $19. IMAX’s stock is down a whopping 41% in the month of July, though some analysts are still bullish on the company’s future.
The problem with RealD’s approach (as well as IMAX’s to some extent) is that it up-sells movies without adding significant value to the experience. I’ve seen 3-D films only a handful of times and I’d be hard-pressed to recall which films they were, much less point out a moment where the 3-D made the film richer or more fulfilling.
So I need some tech help from those of you out there who use Blogger. Pretty much everything I do with my blog is self-taught so I could use your help on this one.
For those of you who blog on Blogger, I have a question about using longstanding graphics. I'm thinking of those who use graphics for the review ratings, or if you have a picture for a regular feature like In My Mailbox or Waiting on Wednesday. How do you insert the graphic into your posts?
In the past in these situations I've just copy and pasted from another post with the same graphic. But it's a little clunky since I have to have 2 or 3 tabs open to do the new post. Is there an easier way to set it up, a shortcut of some kind? Or is that pretty much it? I don't want to upload it every single time I do a new post, since it takes up room in my blog storage, but is that the way I should go?
If you have any suggestions, tips, tricks, explanations, etc. for me, it would be very much appreciated!
Thanks!
6 Comments on Tech Help Please!, last added: 3/4/2011
I'm assuming since you just copy and pasted in the past you didn't mess with the html mode for drafting posts, just did the visual (meaning you click 'bold' and the word is bolded, not surrounded by coding).
On the line where the bold/italics/etc is you should see a little blue and white rectangle, kind of like a picture frame. Click on that and it will give you SEVERAL options.
If you've uploaded before to the blog the second option will list out the pictures you've uploaded and you can load directly from that. If not the first option is the option to load from your computer. There's also the options to load from a webpage or from Picasa...but that's more trouble then its worth in my opinion.
Once you upload it if you hover over the picture options to align it will pop up, to re-size it, or add a caption.
Once you upload it once, it will always appear in that second choice on the insert picture screen.
For my reviews, I have set graphics, but they're pretty small. For all the other stuff, like book covers, etc., I don't upload the picture -- I go to the website where I found the pic, and just copy the link to it. :)
A lot of people have signatures that show up at the bottom of every post, and that is coded in to the layout some how (ask me not how), and so it doesn't have to be added.
Honestly, I do upload EVERY time I post a graphic. It's been something I've been meaning to (maybe) change as I probably should worry about space. I do plan on removing graphics - such as book covers - from reviews and such once they are 2 years old.
If it's a graphic you have posted to your blog once before you can use the Add Images "From This Blog" option. I sometimes have a hard time finding the image I'm looking for since there isn't much order to the images but it's worth it if you are worried about space.
Also, you can check your Blogger Picasa account and weed out any graphics you 'uploaded' but never used or have since deleted. Might help with space issues.
I just did a check and even with uploading every graphic every time I post it, I'm still only using 5% of my Picasa account. Been blogging since July 2009 so I'm not too worried (yet!)
Be forewarned: Unless you are interested in nitty gritty web crap stuff, this post is NOT for you. In fact, if you don’t like it, I suggest skipping down to the section called “So what have we learned here?”
Although this is going to be as nerdy as shit, in the hopes that others who find themselves faced with the same challenges as I have met may google this and find some guidance. For those who don’t want to wade through it, there are two lessons to be learned:
1) OWN AS MUCH OF YOUR CONTENT AS YOU CAN.
2) DON’T BE AFRAID TO LEARN
So…
A Seven Year Journey
The Beat started, if I remember correctly, in July of 2004. (Aside: Jesus Christ — six and a half years of daily blogging.) It was hosted at Comicon.com and, after a very brief struggle with a CMS called Greymatter
, mainly used Movable Type as the blogging platform. Seven years ago, MT and WordPress were competitors for the blogging crown; MT at the time was a bit wonky and unstable. Several crashes slowed things down and I even lost about two months of blogging at one point. I was a web neophyte at that time and Comicon’s mastermind Steve Conley had wisely given me extremely limited access to the backend — The Beat was hosted at a massive ginormous site that housed many other subsites and tinkering was out of the question.
Eventually I got a fantastic offer from Publishers Weekly to move The Beat and actually get PAID to blog, so I moved over, and switched to WordPress which I was very happy with — I was already using the blogging client Ecto
, which I found super useful, and WP had even more functionality. That was Spring, 2006. Reed Business International, PW’s parent company, was going headlong into this “web” thing, and they were adding blogs, and it all made a lot of sense for everyone involved.
As time went on, of course, problems arose — because no popular website is ever static, and amazingly, it turned out that the “Web operations” department at Reed Business “did not support WordPress.” As in they wouldn’t do ANYTHING to fix or upgrade the site. That’s because most of their site and some of their blogs were run on a ghastly Web 0.9 software called eLogic
, which RBI owned, along with Variety, Library Journal, School Library Journal, and many other B2B magazines. In some ways, I could understand sticking with the home product. But it made no sense for contemporary content management, especially something as dynamic as a daily blog. Even with no support, this was the Golden Age of blogging and The Beat’s traffic soared — to the point where it was soon nearly
15 Comments on The History of The Beat, WordPress, and Media Temple, last added: 1/3/2011
As for the slow loading time and massive memory drain — this was all due to a script in theme, Daily Edition, specifically the one that automatically resizes the front page image to create a thumbnail.
I ran into a similar issue with my WordPress blog. I’d upload an image, then link the image as a thumbnail, and even though the image was already the right size, a WordPress plugin insisted on resizing the thing.
What I settled on doing…
1) I scrapped the plugin entirely, and instead recoded the thumbnail line of code in my index.php file to call the image directly, at the proper (hardcoded) size.
2) I also stopped using WordPress’ media upload routine. It’s quicker for me, honestly, to just open an FTP client, stick the image where I want, and then handcode the URL to the image.
These two things, taken together, have speeded up the load on the front page of my blog.
Another thing you may want to do, if you’re got nasty overhead, is to turn off Post Revisions — assuming you don’t need to roll back a post (a la Wikipedia), that is. Post Revisions can really clog up your WordPress database; every little punctuation change results in a new record in the database. If you turn off post revisions and delete the revision records from the SQL database, you’ll have a leaner, meaner database.
Mike Everleth said, on 1/2/2011 2:57:00 PM
This is an amazing post! I think it’s great when masters of their own domain (ahem) reveal their personal battles, defeats and wins.
As a fellow webmaster — although my site gets waaaaayyy less traffic than yours — there’s one overall theme to this post that is incredibly true:
When things go to hell on your own website, it’s painfully devastating. BUT, the best thing about experiencing a catastrophic disaster, it teaches you so much more about how your own system runs! And by being tenacious enough to recover, it gives you so much more confidence in your own abilities to be your own boss.
So, I enthusiastically endorse your position that one should own what one creates. The Beat is one of my favorite websites — and I don’t even really read that many comics anymore! — and I’m glad to hear that all these negative experiences have added up to one big positive one for you.
The Beat rules.
Mike Everleth said, on 1/2/2011 3:09:00 PM
Also, in addition to what Allyn says:
I second his image management and revision control tips. But, I also recommend using a database management plugin that lets you frequently optimize.
And you might want to look into a “Mobile Edition” plugin, so that your full site doesn’t load on iPhones, etc.
The Beat said, on 1/2/2011 3:27:00 PM
Mike, that’s a great idea for the mobile version. I didn’t know that was just a plugin. We’ll look into it.
Allyn: rewriting code is where I get hopelessly lost. But hopefully my webguys will know how to do it.
david brothers said, on 1/2/2011 4:30:00 PM
This was a really good read. I got a crash course in MySQL and server overhead earlier this year when 4thletter! started acting up. It was crazy stressful, but I’m better for having done it.
Bruce said, on 1/2/2011 6:45:00 PM
Heidi, that was super interesting to read, and I agree, learning to do it yourself, as much as is reasonable of course, is always the way to go.
For the iPhone version, check out the WP plugin called WPTouch. It might be what you are looking for.
And I second Mike’s motion, The Beat most certainly rocks!
CitizenCliff said, on 1/2/2011 6:58:00 PM
I thought it was a pretty interesting read. Love the whole DIY effort! Glad the site it running smoothly,it’s one of my all-time favorites!
Steven Taylor said, on 1/2/2011 7:34:00 PM
PUNK!!!!
Steven Taylor said, on 1/2/2011 7:35:00 PM
…and I mean that in the most positive way!
Kelson said, on 1/2/2011 7:56:00 PM
Great write-up! And a great point about making sure you own your content, not just legally but logically, in a format that you can take with you. This is one reason I prefer blogging with an open CMS to relying on services like Facebook or Twitter. You never know when they’ll fall out of fashion — or even go out of business — and take your entire archive with them.
I’m going through some similar server problems at Speed Force, trying to figure out just what’s causing various spikes now that I’ve moved away from a server I actually managed myself (my previous employer was a web host that recently shut down).
I’ll third the recommendation for a mobile plugin. In addition to Bruce’s suggestion of WPTouch, I’ve had success with WordPress Mobile Edition by Crowd Favorite. That’s what I’m using on Speed Force and K-Squared Ramblings these days, and I can vouch that it works with both WP-SuperCache and W3 Total Cache.
toby cypress said, on 1/2/2011 10:53:00 PM
Really great article. Thanks for taking the time to explain. I was very curious how things started here, and your experience building The Beat. Thanks! ~T.
David Quinn said, on 1/3/2011 4:21:00 AM
Appreciate your characteristic candor and details… and will continue to appreciate as I read!
Torsten Adair said, on 1/3/2011 4:58:00 AM
Yup, tinkering with code and getting ito work can be highly satisfying…I caught that bug back in 1982 with a black Apple.
My only quibble is the lack of a mobile version. I scroll past 20+ screens of the top menus, which are rendered VERTICALLY in their entiretly, submenus and all.
Thanks for the look behind the curtain.
Rich Johnston said, on 1/3/2011 5:29:00 AM
I’ve sacrificed ownership for increased pay. You’d think I’d know better but right now it’s what I need, I work part time on Bleeding Cool and part time on advertising, and it pays me a London family salary. I have a flat being let out that covers the mortgage to hopefully see us okay in my old age. Oh and I may be writing one of the better selling comic books this year. But then I won’t own that either. Clearly I have not learned the lessons of the past.
robberry said, on 1/3/2011 5:34:00 AM
A great post on the many roadblocks, and advantages, that come with managing your own content in a changing world of new delivery systems. I can definitely identify with the frustration; when we started thinking about ULYSSES ‘SEEN” I barely knew how to type.
I’d be interested in hearing any follow up you might have to this regarding “profit and loss” strategies. Blogging is a tough business without some backing and no one seems very certain about how the ad-supported model still works. THE BEAT isn’t overly ad-heavy, which is great for readers like me, but can it sustain itself on ad revenue?
Steve Jobs is taking so much heat for his decision to ban Flash from iPads and iPhones, that he’s published a lengthy missive defending his company’s actions, along with spreading his fair share of misinformation. I’m no fan of Flash, but I’m even less a fan of what Apple is doing. And while I’m all for looking towards the future, my current iPhone doesn’t offer a “full web” experience and lacks functionality that could be easily remedied by Apple. I’m certainly not planning to plop down more money for a larger device that is similarly broken. Jason Scott may have put it most succinctly on his Twitter feed:
The fact Jobs can banish something from his platform on the basis the thing is not “open” means the platform is not open.
0 Comments on Apple Defends Its Decision to Ban Flash as of 1/1/1900
I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.
There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.
The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.
There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.
0 Comments on SXSW Interactive 2009 - Funologists live and in person: Guerilla Game Research as of 1/1/1900
I’ll share my experience starting some low-budget user research cycles for Second Life, and my work translating those frustrating observations into shippable engineering requirements.
There will be pretty pictures, and possibly cake.
The cake is a lie, but you should stop by anyway. There could be cake.
There certainly won’t be cake and not cake. Not at the same time, I can assure you.
So you want to get started creating your art digitally, but somehow that humongous software price tag is holding you back?
Here are two THREE vector app solutions I found just for you:
NeoOffice Draw (FREE): This is part of a family of open-source office apps that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. The drawing application is basic, but it does everything I need to. It’s free to download, but if you like it I highly recommend donating so they can keep developing new versions.
VectorDesigner ($70): This is an excellent value. From a company called Tweakersoft, this app does everything I need to create simple vector graphics. It has some nice effects, too.
InkScape (FREE): I did not have this in the post when I first published it, so I’m correcting the error! InkScape is another open-source app that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and there’s even an “unofficial” Fedora version out there.
I work in the Adobe Design Suites on a Mac. I started years ago using CorelDraw on a Windows machine. I sometimes dip my virtual pen into the well of an Ubuntu machine (because I’m geeky like that).
One of the things I’ve learned over the years since is that the tool is not the most important thing in creating artwork.
It’s your imagination. That’s free.
0 Comments on Cheap and free vector software to get you started! as of 1/1/1900
Over the past year, I’ve been sent links to a number of online start-ups that allow consumers to create their own animated films using free web software. Every one of them has left me unimpressed. Every one of them, that is, until Xtranormal.com.
Xtranormal advertises that “If you can type, you can make movies.” It’s not just the ease of creating cartoons that makes Xtranormal so appealing, it’s also that the final results don’t look half-bad, and at least as professional as many “Adult Swim” series. Xtranormal’s software has a robust (as far as these type of things go) selection of built-in camera angles, expressions and animated movements, and the end result is a film like this:
The cartoon above was made by Fran Krause, who we interviewed on Cartoon Brew last week. There’s probably a good post here about the democratization of content creation, but I’m going to follow another idea that occurred to me while watching various Xtranormal shorts, and that is the ramifications this has for professional animation production, particularly as it relates to the TV industry.
Fran Krause titled his first blog post about Xtranormal “New Website Makes Animators Obsolete.” In my opinion, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I’ve long felt that the amount of effort invested into TV animation is disproportionate to the quality of work that appears on the finished screen. Too many production dollars are wasted on menial artistic tasks that could more efficiently be handled by a computer. The only reason that studios continue to employ so many artists is that they’re too shortsighted and cheap to invest in R&D and devise new automated production systems that are appropriate to the dialogue-driven nature of contemporary animated shows.
Too much manpower and production money is wasted on redoing tasks that don’t need to be redone. Take this recent interview with Fairly Oddparents background designer Jim Worthy in which he discusses how much wasted effort goes into the production of the show he works on: “After 7 seasons, I’m amazed how many times I still need to design Timmy’s bedroom. Thanks to all the board artists for keeping me employed.” In other words, he doesn’t need to be redoing Timmy’s bedroom every episode; he only does it because an intelligent production system is not in place that could call up a template of the bedroom.
Dialogue-driven shows that are visually formulaic (i.e. Fairly Oddparents, The Simpsons, Family Guy, most pre-school and “Adult Swim” series
) could easily be replaced with automated production systems. Crazy talk? Consider South Park, a half-hour show that uses automated systems to deliver finished episodes in as little as two weeks and doesn’t suffer with audiences one bit.
The New York animation industry, in particular, is a hotbed for this type of automated animation production, especially with preschool-oriented shows like Little Einsteins and Wonder Pets. These shows rely on stock libraries of movements, expressions and takes, and entire episodes are animated in a month or less. The digital animators (a more accurate term would be “digital technicians”) set up the scenes and determine the sequence of these actions, but they don’t create original actions; there are also a couple traditional animators on board who create the original movements needed for each episode. The only manual part of the process is adding lip sync to the characters. In other words, Xtranormal is not leading the revolution; they’re only offering a consumer version of production systems that are already becoming dominant in animation. (Xtranormal, for its part, is currently working on creating a desktop version of its software that includes voice-capture and character customization.)
I don’t begrudge anybody putting together these copy-and-paste animated productions. While it’s certainly not my cup of tea, there is a legitimate need for this type of material as the number of channels proliferate in this new era of digital cable. My only question is why aren’t more shows throughout the industry saving money by switching to automated production systems?
Many traditional artists are beginning to see the future, even those who have worked in TV animation. For example, former TV series director Pat Smith (Daria, MTV Downtownwrote about Xtranormal on his blog recently: “If you’re wondering where the future is…pre-programmed actions using text. all this needs is professional voice acting, custom character design option, then tweeking by director, and you have a dialogue driven script and one hell of an entertaining film!!!”
There could not be a bigger supporter of artists than myself, but common sense tells me that the majority TV shows could cut their crews and budgets in half or more with minimal consequences on the visual creativity of the production. There are only a handful of shows that truly depend on their artists for the final results (Spongebob Squarepants and Superjail among them). So let’s get the technicians to create the rote and run-of-the-mill, and let’s let animators rededicate themselves to creating unique imagery that could only come out of the hands and minds of artists. With companies like Xtranormal, anybody can create South Park- and Family Guy-quality animation from their home now. Now is the time for animators to step up to the plate and create the kinds of inspiring artwork again that can’t be emulated by a ten-year-old sitting in his bedroom.
0 Comments on Xtranormal: A Glimpse Into the Future of TV Animation Production as of 1/1/1900
Those who desire a Muggle version of the Weasley family clock may not have much longer to wait for this type of technology to be available in their homes. The Times is reporting this evening that researchers at Microsoft have completed user trials for their Whereabouts Clock. As TLC reported back in 2007, the company had been testing this device which 'monitor[s] the movements of family
memb...
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This short article makes a few points very well. Many novice tech users are experts in other things and get easily frustrated feeling like they’re back at square one. That sort of thing needs to be considered when you’re figuring out the best way to approach teaching topics. Additionally, find ways for people to succeed, whatever their level of skill is. This can be a challenge for people who are really brand new, but just having simple taks like mouse proficency and “send an email to me. Oh look there it is” can give peopel the confidence they need to explore on their own. [thanks barbara]
5 Comments on ways to help new computer users, last added: 6/26/2009
Thanks for sharing this - it seems to me (being a student in library school) that this should be a service that is offered to patrons in libraries now. I can’t begin to count the times that I have heard people generally unfamiliar with the internet say, “I wish I had a facebook so I could keep in contact with my kids.” Of course, this could be from someone who is totally unfamiliar with the internet, or someone who is fairly proficient - but has reservations about the content/networking features of facebook. If libraries are going to offer this type of service, they really need to meet their patrons where they are - tailor classes to more and less experienced internet users, and try to avoid the blanket (trying to offer one thing for everyone in a class) approach I see often.
thorn said, on 6/19/2009 11:21:00 AM
this is a great piece. thank you for posting about it. i do think it misses one detail w/r/t the couple who became irritated with each other as the gentleman half tried to log into their gmail account.
could the gentleman type?
can we remember what it was like when *we* couldn’t type?
i had a math class in junior high back in the 70’s where we wrote 10 lines of basic, and then had 10 minutes each on the teletype terminal in a closet off of our classroom. my school did a (spendy!) timeshare on a mainframe computer that resided in a downtown office building. guess what the quality was of our experience, we 7th graders, with our 10 minutes? *none of us could type*. it took *forever* to type in our little 10 lines of code — and it had to be exactly correct or it wouldn’t run. some of us never even finished typing the code.
anyway. point being, the keyboarding aspect of anything computer-related is a *huge* source of frustration for anyone who lacks keyboarding skills. my father-in-law became so frustrated that he ultimately spent most of his online time browsing — clicking to navigate sites that interested him — because the need to type was reduced. my mother-in-law just dumbed down entirely, and used the computer very little, because as a retired secretary she could type like the very wind; a formerly ‘menial’ skill (she had been my father-in-law’s secretary at one point) that suddenly made my father-in-law feel stupid. when both of them tried to learn computer skills simultaneously.. well, it had a really bad effect on the dynamics of their relationship.
so i would suggest also considering orientation to the user-interface of a solid learn-to-type program. it can be done in private, and i know the old ‘mavis beacon’ program was a lot like a video game. my dad thought it was fun, and used it just to test himself, even though he could already type.
tamarack said, on 6/19/2009 12:12:00 PM
Thanks for posting the link and commentary, Jessamyn! I have done a lot of helping colleagues at university over the last couple of years (I’m a newly minted Library Tech), explaining things like why clicking the ‘Home’ tab in MSWord won’t bring up Google. There is a heck of a lot of fear holding back most of the people I’ve encountered who are having the hardest of times. Helping folks have positive (or at least, non-scary) experiences is the best thing I’ve found for it.
If anyone has any other links to share of a similar vein, or other suggested reading, please post up or email me at tamahoc/gmail.com.
Jud Di said, on 6/19/2009 9:54:00 PM
Great article, I do believe that we need to start being more proactive in these matters. all it takes is a little bit of patience and willingness to help them become sufficient. new york car insurance
Friday Link Round Up « ellie <3 libraries said, on 6/26/2009 4:05:00 PM
[...] ways to help new computer users Leave a Comment [...]
Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards.
Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not.
Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery. I chose to talk about the Librarian Avengers Film Rating System, which addresses some movie metadata I’d like to see. Things like “This film contains a Creepy child Singing” and “Warning! Sylvester Stallone!”
My bit starts around (44:45), but stick around for the whole thing. Make sure to check out Kirrily’s talk on Geeky Things you can Do with Textiles, and Liz Henry talking about the barriers to wheelchair hacking.
The format kept everyone pithy, and although I had to speak before the amazing Damian Conway, I didn’t throw up from stage fright once!
2 Comments on Me, bouncing around onstage at an O’Reilly Conference, last added: 8/9/2009
Last week I spoke at OSCON Ignite, the evening entertainment bit of the O’Reilly Open Source Conference and the Google Awards.
Talks took the traditional Ignite format of five minutes, 20 slides. Slides auto-advance after 15 seconds, ready or not.
Speakers were encouraged to address their personal brand of geekery. I chose to talk about the Librarian Avengers Film Rating System, which addresses some movie metadata I’d like to see. Things like “This film contains a Creepy child Singing” and “Warning! Sylvester Stallone!”
My bit starts around (44:45), but stick around for the whole thing. Make sure to check out Kirrily’s talk on Geeky Things you can Do with Textiles, and Liz Henry talking about the barriers to wheelchair hacking.
The format kept everyone pithy, and although I had to speak before the amazing Damian Conway, I didn’t throw up from stage fright once!
Erica said, on 8/8/2009 11:28:00 PM
Bad books aren’t worth talking about. Good books, however, should stand up and be recognized.
To that end, I invented a new thing that I’m going to act like I’ve been doing for ages: The Librarian Avengers Stomp of Approval.
As you know, Librarian Avengers stomp around quite a bit, railing against things and waving our [...]
Thanks to everyone who emailed today regarding the news of a clever real world Muggle marketing and advertising campaign that will echo the moving photos seen in the Daily Prophet. The BBC reports that on September 18, readers in LA and New York who purchase a copy of Entertainment Weekly will see their issue contain special video -in-print ads. These will be "slim-line screens - around the si...
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Like so many others, I was eagerly anticipating Apple’s iPad, but the device falls shorts in many areas, including in its usefulness to the animation community. As it relates to animation, it appears to me that its two biggest deficiences are:
— lack of stylus input, which means no animating on the device
— lack of Flash support (in other words, no indie animation on Vimeo or Newgrounds, no Flash on websites, and no ability for playback of your own Flash animation)
The absence of these two on the iPhone is inconvenient, but to have them missing on the iPad is inexcusable. Flash, in particular, is such an integral part of today’s web browsing experience that I can’t imagine owning a full-screen device without that functionality. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the iPad specifically as it relates to animation. What are the possibilities and what could be better in the next generation?
0 Comments on iPad as an Animation Tool? as of 1/1/1900
The crowd-funding path for short filmmakers is finally gaining traction, and established filmmakers are experimenting with the concept. Throughout the years, various filmmakers have toyed with the idea of funding their films in this fashion, mostly by soliciting Paypal donations, but the gamechanger has been new websites that are dedicated solely to facilitating crowd-funded projects. The two most prominent sites being used by animators right now are IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. There is a difference between the sites: IndieGoGo’s fundraising period continues indefinitely, whereas Kickstarter has a 90-day fundraising period and if the artist doesn’t meet their monetary goal, all the money is returned to the donors.
Last month on Cartoon Brew, I linked for the first time to a crowd-funded project, The Future. Expect to see us doing a lot more of this in the months to come; crowd-funding is a major development in how animated shorts will be funded. Right now, I anticipate the concept will work most successfully for filmmakers with a proven track record, like Nick Cross, who set up a page on IndieGoGo last week to fund his next short The Pig Farmer. Nick has made numerous animated shorts over the past few years (The Waif of Persephone and Yellow Cake among them) and all of them without any outside funding. Backers of his project will feel confident that they are investing in a name brand who will get the job done.
There’s also the stop-motion short Line by Justin and Shel Wagner Rasch. They’re asking for $2500 and are already halfway there. The Raschs have two things working in their favor. First, they’ve already posted an animated clip from the film that gives funders a clear sense of the type of work they’re helping them produce:
Additionally, they’re offering unique perks for funders at different levels, including actual puppets used in the film and a chance to attend the music recording sessions. As crowd-funding takes off, it’ll be fun to see the creative goodies that different filmmakers will offer their fans.
A point that needs to be made is that the Raschs and Cross are obviously spending more money on their films than they’re asking for, but at this nascent stage, modesty isn’t a bad plan. Crowd-funding is in its infancy, a natural by-product of the growing intimacy between artists and their audience. The most successful filmmakers of the future will be those who grasp the increasingly intertwined relationship between creator and consumer, and recognize how best to take advantage of this new connectedness.
Addendum: After I wrote this piece yesterday, I caught up with my blog reader and noticed that Aaron Simpson at Cold Hard Flash has also recently written a piece about crowd-funding. It appears that we were both spurred to action by the news of Nick Cross’s project, and we mention a few of th
0 Comments on Crowd-Funding Animated Shorts as of 2/10/2010 7:14:00 AM
appy news! 
I was invited to be a panelist at the 
Oh! This is actually really simple to answer :)
I'm assuming since you just copy and pasted in the past you didn't mess with the html mode for drafting posts, just did the visual (meaning you click 'bold' and the word is bolded, not surrounded by coding).
On the line where the bold/italics/etc is you should see a little blue and white rectangle, kind of like a picture frame. Click on that and it will give you SEVERAL options.
If you've uploaded before to the blog the second option will list out the pictures you've uploaded and you can load directly from that. If not the first option is the option to load from your computer. There's also the options to load from a webpage or from Picasa...but that's more trouble then its worth in my opinion.
Once you upload it if you hover over the picture options to align it will pop up, to re-size it, or add a caption.
Once you upload it once, it will always appear in that second choice on the insert picture screen.
Did that help?
For my reviews, I have set graphics, but they're pretty small. For all the other stuff, like book covers, etc., I don't upload the picture -- I go to the website where I found the pic, and just copy the link to it. :)
A lot of people have signatures that show up at the bottom of every post, and that is coded in to the layout some how (ask me not how), and so it doesn't have to be added.
i totally love your logo with all the books at the top!! new follower!
follow me too! http://lindsaycummingsblog.blogspot.com/
Honestly, I do upload EVERY time I post a graphic. It's been something I've been meaning to (maybe) change as I probably should worry about space. I do plan on removing graphics - such as book covers - from reviews and such once they are 2 years old.
If it's a graphic you have posted to your blog once before you can use the Add Images "From This Blog" option. I sometimes have a hard time finding the image I'm looking for since there isn't much order to the images but it's worth it if you are worried about space.
Also, you can check your Blogger Picasa account and weed out any graphics you 'uploaded' but never used or have since deleted. Might help with space issues.
Hope that helps a little!
I just did a check and even with uploading every graphic every time I post it, I'm still only using 5% of my Picasa account. Been blogging since July 2009 so I'm not too worried (yet!)