Every year for the past 3 or 4 years I have been disappointed that I’m not in a position to fly down to the South by Southwest Conference in Austin Texas.
However, I still enjoy following along with some of the interesting presentations such as this fabulous look at typography for the web by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton.
Also to check out from SxSW 2007, Will Wright’s fantastic keynote address.
Last summer, Ray Keim of Haunted Dimensions released an extremely cool paper model of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square.
My brother and I started working on it as a summer project, but since he was only here for one afternoon, we didn’t get very far. Lately he’s been back visiting and it got me back working on it again. Today, it’s finally finished and it looks great!
I heard the news today that Captain America is dead1
This got me thinking about a Canadian I met when I lived in Utah, back in 1999. His “claim to fame” was that his dad, Richard Comely, created the comic book, Captain Cunuck (wikipedia).
This guy used to brag about how much better Canadians were than Americans. He relished in the pleasure of pointing out any remotely interesting Canadian accomplishment and all the while derided our neighbours to the south. While my primal instincts told me to admire this man for his obviously superior intellect, not so deep down I realized it was a pretty jerky way to be and I figured all he was really accomplishing was to make them dislike us. He didn’t care, and although he was friendly enough to me, he wasn’t a particularly popular guy living in middle America.
Canada/US relations aside, learning about Captain Cunuck was kind of intriguing. Here was this super hero that I had never heard of, and probably never would have heard of, but yet there was something alluring about the fact that there even exists a comic set in Canada. They used famous Canadian landmarks as backdrops and even the characters had particularly Canadian background—Captain Cunuck’s alter ego works for the RCMP—and yet, he is a super hero.
This might not seem like a big deal for American’s who have lived their lives seeing whom and what they expect to see; his or her country, familiar landmarks, and national in-jokes; casually depicted in TV, movies, and comic books. But for me, this was something completely new. The closest thing I had ever known as a Canadian super hero before this was Wolverine (this X-Men character is from southern Alberta), but despite the fact that he was born somewhere near Lethbridge, he’s still an American icon.
I found a tribute site for Captain Cunuck, and this is how that fan remembers the comic:
Captain Canuck was like its American progenitors: a pulpy, action-adventure series, with plenty of running about, narrow escapes, and two-fisted thrills. What made it “different” was a willingness to have actual plots!
How many U.S. superhero comics have you read where the first issue of a two-parter starts out great: intriguing set-up, interesting characters are introduced, you can’t wait for the continuation… and then you get the continuation and it’s just one long fight scene: no plot, no story development, no characterization. In Captain Canuck there were plot twists, surprising changes in direction, and a sense you were reading an actual story, not just a vignette. There was also some nice dialogue and easy badinage between the characters that a lot of U.S. comics lack, even today — a real plausibility to some of the lines.
Isn’t it telling how even in a comic book description, Canadians compare ourselves to the US. Anyway, here’s to Captain Cunuck, a true Canadian hero. Oh and Americans we’re sorry about your namesake super hero taking a bullet.
A little tidbit of my own Canadian-esque bragging… Superman—that’s right, the Man of Steel—was actually co-created by a Canadian. This pleases me, but I’ll be the first to admit: nothing says America more than Superman, so we can’t even pretend to claim him… at least not publicly. So every time he flies to his fortress of solitude up in the Canadian arctic, we can just quietly think to ourselves, welcome home, Superman.
The animation students at Gobelins l’école de l’image are rolling out some fabulous work. Check out the fantastic student short: Burning Safari.
(Via | Previously)
On Saturday and Sunday we, the human population, had an opportunity to see the moon completed blotted out by Earth’s shadow in one of those rare events known as a Lunar eclipse. Personally I’ve always thought solar eclipses to be the more interesting variety and so I never even bothered looking for the moon over the weekend.
However, thanks to the power of modern computing, here is an animated version of the entire phenomena, for those like myself that want all the reward without any of the effort.
I have to admit, the orange glow that appears on the moon during the middle of the action is kind of cool.
Here is an interesting use of camera tracking, 3d animation, and possibly some motion capture: Snickers Stop and Go ad. It scores points for being new and different, but as Matt Haughey observes, “the message is: nothing makes me hungrier for a Snickers bar than beating the piss out of someone within an inch of their life.”
Uploaded by Razorbuzz
Hit play or watch at Daily Motion.
Ira Glass bequeaths the tricks of the trade in four YouTube videos that are extremely interesting, whether or not your are in the publishing/podcasting/video making business.
… It is your job to be kind of ruthless and to understand that either you don’t have a sequence of actions — you don’t have the story part that works or you don’t have a moment of reflection that works and you’re going to need both, and in a good story you’re gonna flip back and forth between the two like to be a little bit of action and someone will say something about it and then a little more action and someone will say something and it and that’s really like a lot of the trick of the whole thing you know is to have the perseverance that if you’ve got an interesting anecdote that you also uh… can end up with an interesting moment of reflection that will support it and then the two together interwoven into three minutes or six minutes or however long your story is will make something that’s larger than the sum of its parts.
(Via Kottke)
Please enjoy the beautiful Oscar winning animated short, The Danish Poet. It’s done in a very traditional Canadian animation style and has a storyline that will melt even the coldest of hearts.
The Danish Poet, Torill Kove, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
Nick Tosches spends a year in search of the mysterious origins of his Windows desktop image: Autumn and the Plot Against Me. It’s an interesting read for all of us would-be detectives.
I’m a typographic artwork fan, a Quintin Tarrentino movie fan, and I really like motion graphic compositing projects, so, when I saw Jarratt Moody’s time-based typography assignment (at SCAD) based on Samual L. Jackson’s “Say What Again” dialogue from Pulp Fiction, I figured I couldn’t pass up the chance to share this:
The basic idea of the project is to take a piece of audio from wherever (movie, song, poetry reading, answering machine) and then represent that audio on screen using only typography.
Jarratt chose a famous bit of dialogue from Pulp Fiction as his subject matter. (Okay, what dialogue from Pulp Fiction isn’t famous?) The resulting piece is full of whimsy and style. Jarratt does some great things with scale and simple but effective camera movements. Get those headphones on and prepare yourself for several lashings of Samuel L. Jackson’s naughty tongue.
