Kieran Nolan

Mastodon - Cut You Up With a Linoleum Knife http://youtu.be/9Vf3VzVbrXU

Found these great flash cartoons on youtube, by animator Hiroshi Namiki. All feature this ape with a snot bubble hanging out of his nose, who mostly spends his time harassing a bulldog, which has similar nose hygiene issues. The use of sound adds to the surreal humor, particularly the canned laughter and applause. The same animator also has a series of short sixteen second pieces about a mischievous piece of sushi called Okapa-makiko. Anyhows, it's exercise time with WarangUtan and company...

Just stumbled across this website from Japan all about robots and found the very impressive walking, fist throwing robot by Vstone called the Black Ox . It stands a mighty foot and a half high, has twenty articulation points and will lay waste to any miniature cityscape or opponent that stands in its way. The Black Ox is the nemesis of Gigantor, from a manga first published in 1956. It's great to see a fictional character brought to life like this, next step will be a full-scale model :)

Over the last couple of weeks I've been using this great flipbook creator from benettonplay.com with a beginners animation class. It was developed by Fabrica, Bennetton's R&D center. A clever feature of this little web app is that in addition to publishing your flipbook as part of an online gallery, you can also export it as a PDF, allowing you to print and out and get busy with your scissors and glue to construct a real, on-paper flipbook. Here's one of the animations from the students, the whole 'stickman meets a grizzly end' theme was fairly popular!

I caught a few of the presentations at Friday's session of the Darklight 2007 symposium. First up was a talk from reps of 02, Eircom, Babelgum and RTÉ about the future of television and how mobile-tv and tv-on-demand rewrite the rules of the normal linear broadcast model. For example the primetime slots for mobile tv are commuting hours and work breaktimes.

Next up was a workshop by Brown Bag where they described their experiences using the animation toolset 'Toon Boom Studio' to create a new children's tv series 'Wobbly Land'. It seems to have a steep learning curve, particularly if you are used to Flash (no tweening!) but they had great technical support from Toon Boom's creators, including 2 weeks of training. TB also created custom effects plugins for Brown Bag, that helped give the show it's unique (and very non-generic vector animation) look.

The last workshop I attended was 'Machinima FilmMaking' (the art of making movies inside video game engines) by Friedrich Kirschner, the developer of Movie Sandbox, a heavy modification of the game Unreal Tournament 2004 that turns it into a Machinima application. The game world becomes your stage and the characters your actors, who you can direct as you please, either 'live' or through pre-defined scripts.

Some cool input methods were shown, one involved controlling your 'actor' like a virtual puppet using the strings on a usb golf controller. Another made use of the Xbox 360's Guitar Hero controller so your machinima actor can jam on some chords.

Also demoed was an innovative supporting technology called Milkscanner, a low budget but highly effective method of scanning 3d objects using a webcam, lego, a bowl and some milk(!). A (small plastic) elephant was gradually submerged in milk, each stage captured by the webcam and then the software assembled each 'slice' into a 3d wireframe suitable for import into Movie Sandbox. Great stuff, innovative and nutricious!