A while back I got an idea for a Grim Reaper image with him blowing on a party horn. Ultimately I ended up doing the image in 3D and placed him in the context of the 2004 presidential election. I think the final image was successful, but it looks quite a bit different from the original doodle I did at work. I liked the doodle well enough that I stuck it on the fridge, and have been meaning to post it ever since. Recent events have made the concept relevant again, so now seems as good a time as any to finally get this out there.
When Joe Barbera passed on recently, I was reminded of a line from an animation book I've got referring to Hanna-Barbera as the "Kmart of animation." I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one with mixed feelings about Mr. Barbera's legacy...
Found this on the Harry Potter News Site. I couldn't find a way to link to this specific article, so if you want the rest you'll have to scroll a bit (look for the Dec 2 entry). The story was about some group of religious nut jobs that were protesting the Harry Potter books, and of course burning them. I think you'll agree that they are indeed blessed-- just not with any sense.
The fire so inflamed parishioners' passions that, according to the Detroit Free Press, some of the 50 spectators proceeded to burn the Book of Mormon, a non-King James edition of the Bible, and even the Dan Aykroyd movie Coneheads. Turner regrets that things got out of control, but adds, "Since the burning, our ministry is growing and can seat another 400 members," he says. "God has been blessing us."
One of the quirks of Chandra's brain is its inability to keep common sayings and metaphors straight. For example, if she saw a remarkably tall thin person, she would very likely say "Wow, what a string pole." The more typical phrases here being "string bean" or "bean pole." I've mostly gotten used to this verbal quirk, but there are times when it rears its head in remarkable ways...
InT. dining room, morning
JASON sits down at the dining room table with a bowl of "Pirates of the Caribbean" cereal. He joins CHANDRA, who is already seated.
Chandra
I see you're eating the breakfast of champions again. Aii!
Jason
(a long beat)
Arr?
CHANDRA
(Realizing that she has done it again)
Uh, yeah-- Arr! What would you do without me?
JASON
I'd spend a lot less time being baffled, for one thing.
I was so hungry
I had to eat a pop tart
God bless 'merica
My job frequently takes me to different spots on campus, and while I prefer to walk to these meetings, I do sometimes find myself taking the bus. This is on-campus transportation, so I normally find myself sitting with a bunch of students. However, yesterday I hopped on a bus that went to our local transportation center before it came back to campus, and as a result found myself with several people who I think work in food services.
The first person on the bus was pretty boisterous, and seemed not to be aware of the rule that you only speak to other people on public transportation under very specific circumstances. The most important of these rules is that you do not stride halfway across the vehicle to engage someone in conversation. Violating this rule puts you firmly in the category of "loon." Fortunately, once a couple other people boarded, the loon moved on to accost others and left me in peace. Several of the new passengers seemed to know each other, and conversation was pretty lively. If it hadn't been 10:00 in the morning, I would have thought that I was headed for a party.
Once the bus headed into campus and picked up a handful of students, however, the entire dynamic immediately shifted. The students also knew each other, and spoke to each other in fairly hushed tones. What I found particularly amazing, though, is that the originally noisy passengers stopped their conversation entirely once the students boarded. I doubt anyone was consciously aware of it, but the feeling was almost like what you would expect from a group of teenagers when their parents suddenly enter the room. Very weird.
It's amazing the things you can find buried in academic websites sometimes...
(thanks to Erin for pointing this one out...)
Keith Lango points out some statistics on the rendering for Cars vs. Toy Story. While you might expect the rendering times to have gone down, apparently the "average" frame in Cars took 15 times longer than an "average" frame in Toy Story. Keith leaves us with this thought:
But I’m left with this question: Eliminating the variable of increased audience expectation for technical sophistication in CG visuals- was the core metric for film quality (the artistic, visual, social and emotional result) of Cars superior to that of Toy Story by such an expansive order of magnitude?
Cars is generally considered to be a much weaker film than Toy Story, so of course the answer to Keith's question is "no." However, I think it would be wrong in this case to come to any conclusions that the good folks at Pixar are losing sight of story in the face of the marvelous technology they have at their fingertips. In fact, I think before we even think about Keith's question we need to take a closer look at what "average" means here. Take a look at the following three shots from the movie:
Note the racing scene in particular, with it's thousands of spectator cars and high-speed racers. Even with a substantial amount of cheating, those shots had to have sky-high polygon counts, plus whatever else went into rendering those scenes. On the other hand, much of what takes place in Radiator Springs is much more tame by comparison. The question I have, then, is what do we mean by "average?" Even if we assume that the modeling, texturing, and animation is more complex in Cars than in Toy Story, I find it hard to believe that the average rendering time means what it seems to here. Instead, I suspect that the racing scenes in particular (and maybe the stuff in the cornfield) took a phenomenally long time to render, throwing off the stats for the whole movie.
So-- whatever the flaws of "Cars," I think the problem here we have is sloppy math and a geeked out writer marveling over the computing power thrown at the movie, not any misplaced priorities on the part of John Lasseter, et al.
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