Author: John

Storyboard for “Stimpy’s Invention”

The first time I ever saw Ren and Stimpy was the the short "Big House Blues" at a film festival in 1990. Right then I knew it was a winner. The rest of the evening anyone crying ‘the big sleep!’ would get me and my friends rolling on the floor… Anyway, the folks over at ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project have posted an original story board to a classic R&S episode:

Here is an excerpt from the original storyboard to "Stimpy’s Invention". The board is by Bob Camp; and the last panel, which is a xerox of a layout drawing is by Chris Reccardi. Take a moment and read John K’s notes on how he constucts his stories… and then take a look at how the theories are implemented in this section of board.

Don’t be an eeediot and not see this! 

[via Boing Boing]

John K’s storyboard for "Stimpy’s Invention" episode

f295: The Art of Pinhole Photography

I’ve been taking quite a few photos with my scratch built pinhole cameras lately and in my Internet treks to find out what other people have been doing I discovered f295. In the forums you can find discussions on everything from pinhole design and camera modification to building your own lenses (if your into that ‘glass’ thing). Pretty cool resource. Go read for a while and see if you don’t get bitten by the pinhole bug.

f295: The Art of Pinhole Photography

Dance Robot, Dance!

Robonova-1 

The degrees of freedom on these things just gets better and better as time goes on. I keep thinking that a clip of dancing robots will surface showing the guys building ‘robot’ pyramids or doing monkey chains. Looking forward to when they become waterproof and start doing synchronized swimming routines. The coolest innovation so far has got to be the way they can be programmed. You can still use the old spread sheet looking method of setting the joint position on a time line sort of interface if you want but the coolest way is the following:

The simplest way to program ROBONOVA-1 is with the “catch and play” function. Using RoboScript or RoboBasic, just move the robot into any position and click the mouse to “capture” that position. Move the robot into another position and repeat the process. The software then links these “captured” positions and once activated, smoothly transitions the robot’s movements through these programmed positions.

Hard to beat that!

Robonovanova-1

(Thanks to special agent Kevin who is on assignment at the digital frontier for this link)

DIY Macro Photography with Disposable Camera

I saw this over on Hack-a-day this morning while I was looking around the ‘net. The project is clever, I have a bunch of disposable cameras for playing around with myself. I find the lenses to be of a veru low quality but for doing simple macro work they are good enough.

DIY Macro Photography with Disposable Camera