Overheard on Carlisle street:

Guy 1: "You're like that guy from Weekend at Bernie's"

Guy 2: "Yeah, except he's dead".

Obamafy

Obamafy for Photo Booth on OS X Leopard. Hope happens.

Using grass

I was chuffed to receive my copy of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in the mail last night, after ordering the web-based 'media bundle' back in August. It's nice when you order something, forget about and then are reminded again.

I like the album, and had some large expectations about it as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Byrne and Eno's last collaboration) is a very important work to me. It's a new thing, and completely stands on it's own in a new way. I endorse it's purchase.

I opened the CD's digipak and was greeted by an internal design using grass as the design element and texture.


For my commercial work I did a CD-ROM for the Australian Football League which also used grass on the disc and packaging design. In fact, I was surprised I got away with it, as on opening the package the viewer was confronted with this huge expanse of green with little breaking up the page. Here's the disc design:


Sagmeister are responsible for the (amazing) design work, and achieved a far better and conceptually different grass than I did. The whole package is a tasteful bit of work.

Bear in mind, I'm not posting this to suggest that I was there first or anything like that - grass is a fairly common design element. It's interesting to see how an idea can be presented differently by only using a texture. With my grass I was going for a worn, used and ran-upon grass, where Sagmeister's is far more hyper-real, quasi-fake and suburban.

Google doesn't understand me

I recently installed the Google app for my iPhone after reading that it has voice-recognition search functionality. I'm not sure if it's my thick Australian accent, or the fact that I was perhaps slurring my words, but Google and I had a degree of trouble communicating.

I tried to search for this blog, so my spoken search term was "Medium Tedium".

My first attempt, the app interpreted my command as 'nadien kdm'


Then 'medium tv m' - perhaps the closest out of all the tries.


My personal favourite: 'canadian kadian'


'michigan stadium' if-you-will. This attempt was with an American accent, remembering that the Speakable Items on my old Quadra responded better to this type of accent.


Failing that I tried an English accent, resulting in 'la ti do'


'canadian staduim'. At this moment, I'm considering speech therapy to assist with my pronunciation of the letter 'm'


'vb net com'


And again, I get a medium in there. 'medium tv mo'. Another close one.


At this point I gave up. However, it's a decent little app. All the searches open up in Safari, and I've yet to try it's integration with other Google tools. The thing I liked most about it was that after you've spoken, the app shows an accurate waveform of your voice recording. I think this has some nice potential for future apps with visual data being manipulated by real-world sounds.

CHEEKS IS OMAC

I've been enjoying the revamped Ambush Bug Year None series, and have been waiting for the delayed issue 4 which is allegedly now on sale tomorrow (after previously being posted to be on sale 29th October). I'm wondering if the delay somehow fits with the theme of the "missing" Ambush Bug (see the cover here) as I think the logical step for this 4th-wall-violating series is to manifest itself in the real world.

Anyway, I don't want to focus on a publication being late, especially if it's some kind of high-concept meta malarkey of which I completely approve.

So here's a scan of my favourite page from ABYN #1, where Cheeks the Toy Wonder (previously blogged about here) becomes an OMAC, falls to earth and does nothing.

[Art by Keith Giffen, dialogue by Robert Loren Fleming and the Bible, inked by Al Milgrom, 2008]

What! Is! Sound!?

I was leafing through the Final Cut Pro manuals (four chunky volumes worth!) today and I found this handy explanation of "sound":



Kooky CMYK moire effect on some letters a bonus due to shaky hands holding the book down.

Landscape with dog

My life... As a cloud

Yesterday someone had written "__________________________________" in the clouds.

Monsters fighting on TV

I was cleaning up some discs and checking some data in my studio recently and I found a CD enigmatically labelled 'Other backup'. I checked the content, some backed up applications, a little bit of work and a folder full of digital photographs, circa February 2004.

Many of the photos found were pictures I took of a friend's TV-set of a cool Japanese fight-game, the name of which escapes me... I'm pretty sure it had something to do with either Ultraman or Kamen Rider (but know it wasn't Kamen Rider Hibiki - the only game I know of where one character defeats a giant spider by Taiko drumming on it's back). The game featured anthropomorphic monsters (guys in suits style) fighting each other in front of desolate industrial backgrounds.

Crab guy...


And Medieval guy...


FIGHT!!


Tiger guy with spikes for arms vs Something (Frog guy maybe):


Tiger guy with spikes for arms emerges victorious!!

You get the idea.

Bonus: Crab guy and Medieval guy morph into abstract weirdness!

Directional film on YouTube

I finally uploaded a recent video work onto YouTube, of which I've blogged the progress of a couple of times here. I've decided it's "finished" (whatever that is).



The work is built out of the directional arrows in the side-scrolling adventure mode of 'Super Smash Bros. Brawl' using the inbuilt snapshot technology. The images were taken in (relative) sequence then converted and sequenced together. The audio is a sound edited from the game's interface and surround-mixed to follow the direction each arrow is pointing. I then mixed that down into stereo.

[UPDATE 30th July 2009 - replaced with higher quality widescreen version]