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Mark and his Sarah Palin animated nemesis in action
Last Wednesday I was delighted to see that my suggestion of Mark Fiore as a visiting lecturer to our weekly Knight Fellowship seminars became a reality. In case you didn’t know, Mark recently won a Pulitzer prize for non-print based journalism (the category’s only a few years old) – he specializes in animated editorial cartoons, which he puts together in Flash.
Not only was it heartening to see the love and respect he had for the masters of animation (Hanna Barbera, Mel Blanc), but also really impressive to see how he pulls together an entire 2-3 minute animated short every week. Just when I thought making comics was labour intensive, he’s working with voice actors, doing lip synching (keyframe by keyframe – no flash tweening here thankyouverymuch), the lot. Even better was the chance to check out, and see how he builds it up, layer by layer. Here’s one of the many clips he showed us:
Who knows, I might even give a short animation a try – watch this space. That is, if I get a chance in between thumbnailing my latest version of the prototype, which I’ve been working on with fellow fellow Sahar Ghazi. Speaking of Flash, I’ve also stumbled across the perfect prototyping tool for future iterations, involving everyone’s favourite frame-by-frame interface. So long as there’s no code involved, I think I’ll be fine…
I also had a great chat with Dominic Price (one of the developers of the Cloudpad web app from Nottingham University) this morning, who talked me through downloading the code for the latest iteration and the steps I need to get it up and running so I can start bending the code to suit my project’s nefarious needs. To do that, I have to figure out what type of server the Stanford webspace runs on, and some other essential info I’m at a current loss to mention.
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