Cartoon Central

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett latest collaboration "Monkey: Journey to the West" is an opera in nine acts based on the epic Chinese story. The Th��tre du Ch�telet site describes it as "A magical work telling the story of the Monkey King, the most popular character of Chinese literature, who rebels against the Powers on High and declares itself to be a grand sage, comparable to Buddha."

ISFAT was given the opportunity of talking to Dony Permedi, the animator and mind behind “Kiwi!”. Dony was interviewed by evil from ISFAT.com (real name Jordan), who also wrote this shiny article. In the interview, Dony answers some questions you might be left with after watching “Kiwi!”, discussing many of the creative decisions involved - namely the ‘thud’ at the end of the short film.

I recently needed to create animations on one of my web sites. This may not be easy task to manage animation working on many browsers !!! Especially if multiple animations must be managed concurrently. That’s the reason why I published my piece of code on SourceForge at http://css-anim.sourceforge.net/. I hope everyone will enjoy it and improve it !

These are perfect for use in your dashboard storyboards and mockups created as you work through the iterative development of dashboards with each audience. You can use simple Powerpoint animations to show how the dashboard will work based on the rules you will agree upon with each audience as well. Very cool!

I used a fair amount of internet projects with my students this past one. I set up a website celebrating the last project with my 7th graders, where some students set up websites, recorded and posted a podcast, did some animations and PowerPoint presentations.

Has it ever seemed to you that there couldn’t possibly be enough girls in the world ages 11-15 as there are on Satanspace? Nearly every cursed page on that website is devoted to seizure-inducing ‘Hello Kitty’-esque flashing animations or ‘Disney pop’* music videos of adolescent girls with fake knockers and fake voices.

Say the user clicks a button and something updates elsewhere on the page. How do we inform them that something happened? There’s a number of answers to this question: Animations and special effects are just two of them. But what if they have a low-resolution screen, they’re using big fonts, or they’ve simply scrolled too far, leaving the vital animation or effect off-screen? What about screen-reader users - how do you tell them that only part of the screen has updated?

I just got a 512 megabyte memory stick from PNY technologies. That thing is awesome! I put all of my animations on it, which has taken up about 3/5 of its’ memory.

For the amount of time I spent on this project, I think it turned out pretty good. I really liked some of the other animations as well. As is mentioned earlier, Ben’s is one not to miss! I was also really impressed with Liu’s. There are a number of others that deserve mention here as well, but I am a lazy typer, so forgive me if I haven’t mentioned your masterpiece!.

Yah yah…I kind of disappeared for a while there….but for good reason. I had started a write up on animations and I soon realized how worthless screen shots are for animation examples. It’s like drawing a flip book cartoon with only one page. Then I remembered WBA’s (Web Based Applications) and realized I could post working examples! Amazed at my own ingenuity I told a coworker about my great idea. He promptly pointed out that it would be easier and smarter to make a single app to display all of my examples instead of a bunch of little apps for each example. I didn’t care for his tone so I told him it was a stupid idea and stormed away. Later that night I realized it would be easier and smarter to make a single app to display all of my examples instead of a bunch of little apps for each example. I immediately gave myself a pat on the back…and it felt good.

Another thing I’ve been working on, aside from driving in circles, looking like a madman, staring at granite blocks, is doing some cel shading. I taught myself how to use Macromedia Flash a few years ago, and I do all kinds of little animations now. Well, the scariest of all of my projects, and I’m not quite sure what to call it, has involved me filming myself jumping up and down, and tracing over the footage in Flash to make an animation of me doing what? Jumping up and down. It’s silly. However, there is a point to all of this.

I have very recently got into Flash animation. I’ve already made a few animations. A very simple dress-up game, an animation of a stick man kicking another stick man, one of a stick man shooting another stick man, and a stick man going off a ramp on a skateboard and not doing very well. Currently I’m making a flash movie called Ben and Bog. More info on that soon.

Hey what is up all you 3D junkies. I just landed a Internship at Scripps Institute of Research. I am modeling regions of a rats brain and doing some animations.

Well, I’ve had a lot of fun making animated gif files and want to ‘take it to the next level!! hoooaahhh!’ so I’m going to watch a few lessons in Macromedia Flash and learn how to do some sweet animations. here is what I’ve made with Ulead gif animator:

This traffic-simulation software, Streetscenes, is also used to reconstruct street accidents. The software analyzes the data involved to compute the unknown variables, such as vehicle speeds and changes in velocities, and delivers its results as 3D animations which can be shown to juries, lawyers and insurance companies.

This overview contains more details and references, and includes many links to pictures and animations.

These flash animations are BRILLIANT! A must see. You will laugh, and then the message sets in. Perhaps an insidious new advertising method, but these folks have the onions to oppose Corporate Entities and instead support true grass-roots causes. Hurray!

Visible Earth: a catalogue of NASA images and animations of our home planet. Amazing images with a very good resolution of countries, agriculture, atmosphere, biosphere, oceans, hydrosphere, land surface, cryosphere and more. BTW, here is the gallery of photos of my country and my city. (Thanks Andr�!)

TokyoPlastic.com. this is the most amazingly fluid and stunning flash site i have ever seen. if you have the time, look at everything in the site. there are some short animations, links to merch, but overall, just some amaizing work.

The special effects were fantastic: the whimsical-yet-solid spacecraft design; the Vogons; the jaw-dropping Magrathean sequence; the Guide animations; the Infinite Improbability drive. The plot changes from the book were understandable and for the most part interesting, but in many cases unresolved, so the best part of all... please... let there be a Restaurant movie!

Spirit has been capturing some amazing photographs of dust devils blowing across the Gusev plain. Visit the MER Press Release Images page to see some photos and animations created from photos. I'm fascinated by seeing weather, up close and personal, on another terrestrial planet.

Real-time data-driven animations can be very powerful for conveying dynamic information. With nVizx for Mathematica, it is easy to build and animate models for displaying otherwise static data or the results of simulations or model calculations as they are generated. In this instance, we have animated a data set showing the highest annual concentration of total phosphate (TPO4) at five sampling sites in Lake Okeechobee over a ten-year period. Data for the animation was obtained from public records made available from South Florida Water...

Wow! My brother is diving into Quartz Composer, part of the Dev Tools in Tiger. Amazing stuff. Graphical programming for graphical animations. All of Quartz exposed in an elegant GUI. For you Tiger fans, here's a little test... clap your hands to make the image move.

If you want to see a higher resolution set of the animation, I would recommend downloading the Bittorrent software first, and then downloading the 70MB file from the sepiamutiny site for all the four chapters. The full treatment for the envisioned project, including description of the key characters can be found here. Obviously these animations, even when all finished, only provide a pinhole into the characters, stories, and the magic of the Ramayana...but it's a great start to see the old anew.

Developing small scale animation and video for interpretation (please don’t spell-check - I type like crazy thru these sessions :) ) Hermninia Wei-Hsin Din (chair) - international panel… Alaska, Taiwan, England… (cool)

Ever seen Hanuman pluck a double bass? Animator Nina Paley has created a witty, ’20s jazz musical version of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues (via Turbanhead). Her lovely, highly stylized characters evoke Betty Boop, Amul Butter ads and Ghee Happy, and Sita is voiced by ’20s blues singer Annette Hanshaw.

Watch the clips or, if the site is slow, see the end of the post to download.

This animation’s original title seems to have been The Sitayana. Like Anna’s feminist neologism, ‘Herstory,’ Paley had replaced Rama with Sita in the title. And she goes even further: Sita has the only speaking part in the entire animation. Rama is strong but silent, a Ken doll and essentially decorative, the inverse of most action flicks. But Paley stays reasonably faithful to the original text. Her Sita is still a maiden in distress rather than a Shrek-like princess-ninja.