This made cackle louder than anything else today so far.
It adorns (don't know why and very typographically confusingly on my screen) this Mark Steyn Spectator piece trashing poor old John Nuancy Boy Kerry.
Ah, I've just spotted the Canadian flag. That must be the Steyn connection. So, Canadian subs are not very good, I suppose. I missed that. Kind of took it for granted.
I've just started to watch American Splendour (no link – google your way there if you want to, but I'm busy watching it and I don't want to jeopardise the Purity of my First Response), and this is the first Definitely DVD movie to have come my way. By this I mean (a) you need to own it, and (b) you can't possibly get top value from it without regular use of the pause button.
Many of the early shots are of cartoons, and the editing went past them before I had time to read the captions. So: go back, pause.
Many of the frames make excellent pictorial decorl when paused. Here's what looks to be one of the key moments of the entire movie. This is when the central figure is first shown with a cartoon bubble over his head. Idea!!!
All good movies (and I rather think that this one is going to be very good indeed – one of my recent top favourites) about Creative Types seem to have one of those Creative Moments, when they Crack It. "You've cracked it!" says Mrs Pollock in Pollock, with some addition swearing if I remember the moment correctly, when Pollock finally gives up doing pictures of stuff and starts splashing and dripping his paint about, just like the real Pollock eventually did. "That's it, that's the sound", says Mrs Glenn Miller in The Glen Miller Story. It's the magic moment when our hero finally hits the trail.
What a splendid country America is. You get your chance to do this kind of thing. And if you succeed, they make a movie about you.
Actually, it turns out, maybe he's not a cartoonist, just the guy who did the words, while his pal Crumb takes it away and illustrates it. We're in the Restaurant. "Wow man. You'd do that?" Apparently so.
I'll keep you posted.
By the way. I did buy this, ex-rental. Sight unseen. Inspired purchase at £7.99. As Woody Allen says, the public just gets a feeling about a movie.
I've just started to watch American Splendour (no link – google your way there if you want to, but I'm busy watching it and I don't want to jeopardise the Purity of my First Response), and this is the first Definitely DVD movie to have come my way. By this I mean (a) you need to own it, and (b) you can't possibly get top value from it without regular use of the pause button.
Many of the early shots are of cartoons, and the editing went past them before I had time to read the captions. So: go back, pause.
Many of the frames make excellent pictorial decorl when paused. Here's what looks to be one of the key moments of the entire movie. This is when the central figure is first shown with a cartoon bubble over his head. Idea!!!
All good movies (and I rather think that this one is going to be very good indeed – one of my recent top favourites) about Creative Types seem to have one of those Creative Moments, when they Crack It. "You've cracked it!" says Mrs Pollock in Pollock, with some addition swearing if I remember the moment correctly, when Pollock finally gives up doing pictures of stuff and starts splashing and dripping his paint about, just like the real Pollock eventually did. "That's it, that's the sound", says Mrs Glenn Miller in The Glen Miller Story. It's the magic moment when our hero finally hits the trail.
What a splendid country America is. You get your chance to do this kind of thing. And if you succeed, they make a movie about you.
Actually, it turns out, maybe he's not a cartoonist, just the guy who did the words, while his pal Crumb takes it away and illustrates it. We're in the Restaurant. "Wow man. You'd do that?" Apparently so.
I'll keep you posted.
By the way. I did buy this, ex-rental. Sight unseen. Inspired purchase at £7.99. As Woody Allen says, the public just gets a feeling about a movie.
The entire purpose of this posting was/is to see if this animated .gif file on the right would work. And so far it seems that it does.
I got it from b3ta.com, and I don't understand what it was doing there, other than that it was vaguely related to another graphic of the evil chicken coming out of a magic door. But there I was looking at it, and then when I moused over it up came that set of little pictures that usually mean you can copy it, so I copied it, to see if it would copy, and it copied. If you doubt me, you could copy it yourself, from here.
How do you set about creating something like that? Is it easy, or quite hard? Do you make lots of pictures and then pile them together into one file? How do you make it happen at the correct speed? Why did the evil chicken cross the road?
This file contains rather a lot of white space on its right side, doing nothing very much. I tried cropping it in Photoshop, but although the result was duly cropped, it was also immobilised. So that was no good. Is there any way I could have cropped it and kept the evil chicken moving? Can that be done in Photoshop, or would I need other (animation?) software?
One of the annoying things about Movable Type is that the "preview" function isn't. That is to say, you do not preview exactly what you will end up viewing in the final blog posting. That's no good. In particular, it means with an exercise like this that I can't do exactly the right amount of text to reach the bottom of this graphic and then stop. I have to do more than I really need, with some of it sticking across under the graphic, and I only get to see what I have actually done when it is posted.
Blogging is an art, but how can I practise my art in unsatisfactory working conditions of that sort?
Says BuzzMachine:
Hugh Macleod, the cartoonist whose canvas is the back of business cards, has turned his site into a cartoon blog: a cartoon a day, with comments. Love it.
Ditto. I got there by following Instapundit to BuzzMachine about something else.
Good stuff often appears that way, I find.
