This is a short minute long interview was made in an Adobe Character animator performance edited in with live video. We meet this experimental puppet Ferfí as he discusses his unique approach to hairdressing and the business. I recorded the character voice separately using Logic and my best attempt at english lad accent. Lip-synced to the character in character animator. Physical puppet was made by Lithuanian illustrator Gabriele Gudaityte. More to come in character animator.
Watch me draw a background scene for an upcoming animation project using Procreate’s auto capture function (and a little extra speed boost for the reply added in editing). Colors are used to help separate layers in upcoming Photoshop setup. Using an ipad and stylus.
This free comic sans looking-ish font alternative, Cartoon Without, is distributed under the WTFPL license, meaning do anything with it. Write your passive aggressive comic sans messages without surrendering your sense of typographical superiority.
Hoping to experiment a bit with our motion graphics skills volunteering for a good cause seemed like a win-win way to play around a little with some new software with a goal in mind. Oddforms made this animation and we are hoping to continue working with the environmental commission on this important project for which this brief (and albiet a bit too fast paced) rough draft animation was constructed. Using Apple Motion.
Tattle Tale is a new roaming pseudo-horror game centered around a parody of the 90s animatronic doll Furby. The game, which mixes humor with atmospheric frights, falls a bit short in the scare department. Scares felt like they were meant to be a core part of the game (in addition to humor), and wonder if the artists and game designers may have benefitted from thinking more about what makes Furby scary, the very basics of which start with finding the right spot to put their knockoff toy in the Uncanny Valley.
The applied artistic use of a idea like the Uncanny Valley is probably no easy task, one that requires real artistic skill and a bit of luck to bring its concepts to bear – whether you are trying to avoid making a scary animatronic, or intentionally trying to drive to its bottom freaky-zone to make something feel frightening.
That said, artists who understand, and have a feel for the uncanny curve, certainly seem more likely to succeed in the robot-toy-video-game-horror genre.
Good to know that we are not the only ones suffering from this oddforms affliction, sharing a link to this post published by http://www.laboiteverte.fr/. Reflecting on our previous post on machine learning, finding faces in these odd forms of rock might be considered a human version of overfitting. Perhaps not surprisingly, the condition of seeing meaningful patterns in noise is a concept that has had many observers, and goes by many names. One of which is apophenia, coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, and was alarmingly considered a ‘prodomal mood and earliest stage of schizophrenia’. Here is a nice excerpt from Wikipedia:
In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness but is a “process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field”…
Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information.
Its nice to take note that if the world ever begins to make a little too much sense, its a good indication you may have lost your mind.
Randomly encountered these two very different sites back to back and felt compelled to share the experience.
Oddforms thinks the crowdfunded In-a-Nutshell videos are great. Video and simple animation go a long way when explaining complex ideas. ‘What is something’ felt like a relevant question, given that we have accomplished nothing on the site in the last month.
This bizarre man is what we might look like if our bodies were designed to withstand the injuries and risks of the road. A cool science communication project by Patricia Piccinini for an Australian road safety campaign. Food for thought.
Pareidolia, is one of the names given to the psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful patterns in noise. This is part of our collection over the past 3 months, some more random than others. Be warned, once you start to look for them, they are everywhere.
