The rendering of my penguin cartoon is over. Now I will review it and add a soundtrack. If everything goes right I hope to have it up by tomorrow or Wed at the latest.

Apparently showing a trailer for a movie about Christ at a Christmas festival is too much for Chicago officials. Although Fox was prepared to pay $12 000 to the festival if the trailer for “The Nativity Story” would be shown throughout the festival. Sorry, said the Political Correctness Police, we can’t appear to be endorsing any religion. Never mind the fact that there’s a menorah on display at the festival.

I finally finished the animation for the penguin short. It looks to be about 2 minutes long. (Not including opening and closing credits) I will now begin rendering and we shall see just how long it takes to render. I was originally going to do an HD render, but I’m afraid it will take much longer than NTSC. Also, I had been using 25 frames/sec and NTSC is 30. Since I’m going to edit it later to add sound, I guess I’ll do with 30 frames per second. So it may move a bit faster than I thought. Actually, I think the biggest lesson I will have from this animation will be timing. It’s been hard trying to think about how long things take. What should happen after one second? What happens in a half-second?

Now that I have begun uploading my videos to Vimeo (and intend to digitize my portfolio) I have revamped my video production site to be much better organized. I will be adding new content in the next few months. A lot of it will be in my “Early Work” category as I upload videos I created during my High School years. If you haven’t seen any of my work, give it a shot. There’s stuff in every category from silly to serious!

Photo SharingPhoto Sharing

Photo Sharing

Someone at MIT has used a Nintendo emulator to deconstruct Mario as you play it. You can see just what was going on in the Nintendo’s RAM as you played the game. It is a very neat hack and definitely worth checking out!

As Neal Stephenson tells us, “In the beginning was the command line…” But then came the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. These point and click environments, as they came to be called, originated in Xerox’s PARC research center. However, the Macintosh was the first computer to bring it to the masses. For someone my age, I experienced most of this as it happened. For you younger readers, you can look back and see how primitive the GUIs used to be. Remember that when they first came out, they were state of the art and some even decried them as pointless. Experience it all here.