Nå er det jul igjen!

A project which I started when working at RawFlow was “Speak Your Mind”. A mobile box which featured a camera + a mic to be placed as a live-broadcasting-machine at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London.

Unfortunately the box was too heavy to bring on the tube (low budget!) and the 3G network in London did not have enough bandwidth for us to get going. Fun building the unit though…?

Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accoutrements, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies. Think of it as wearing a daily uniform with enough creative license to make it look like I just crawled out of the Marquis de Sade’s boudoir.

Bürger und Bürgerinnen!

Wer rettet die Stadt? Das Land rettet die Stadt. [...] Hundertausend Hektar liegen brach: Bauland, Kasernenland, Strassenland, Ödland. Man lege Hand darauf.

Man pflanze: Öffentliche Gärten – für die stadtgebundene Jugend.
Man pflanze: Pachtgärten – für die stadtgebundenen Häusler.
Man pflanze: Siedlungen – für die stadtgebundene Arbeit.
Und pflanze: Müstergüter  - für die Unversorgten.

Man pflanze!

Sitat fra Leberecht Migge “Der Soziale Garten – Das Grüne Manifest”

Hva redder byen? Landet redder byen. Fyll brakkland i byen med hager. Man planter! La byborgerne få kontakt med landbruket. Disse ord skrev Leberecht Migge i 1926.

På tide å børste støv av gamle tanker om landbruk i byen. Men det mangler politisk vilje til å opprette flere parsellhager og kolonihager. Likevel står et tusentalls Oslo-borgere i kø i flere år for å få lov til å drive hagebruk. Nordmarka er ikke svaret for dem som ikke kan komme seg dit. Eldre og studenter uten hage i storbyen har også behov for det grønne. Økologisk småbruk i byen bevarer miljøet og skaper kontakt med naturen for urbane borgere.

Man planter!

Inspired by Thoreau’s Walden (Life in the woods) and my pursuit to learn basic animation skills, I created this simple short teaser this evening.

Stumbled over a piece of software for mac today which allows you to record off whatever is on your screen and edit it afterwards.

ScreenFlow is:

An application for creating amazing screen recordings on your Mac. Using a unique new screen capture system, powerful enough to capture the contents of your entire desktop at the same time as your video camera, microphone and computer’s audio, it’s simple to create beautiful screencasts.

Read more and download it from Apple.com.

Click to watch video demo of ScreenFlow:

PS: You have to purchase the licence to export movies that does not say DEMO all over the place. It costs $99 which I thought was quite expensive.

Lets wait until we find a really useful project

….because here is what I did with it:

…and extending it to a tribute to a drunk Jens Stoltenberg (Norway’s PM):

Pixeldoggy in Germany animated a character using a press conference recording of the famous football coach and player Giovanni Trapattoni. Hillarious!

See the original press conference with Giovanni Trapattoni here.

Never heard of him? See Wikipedia article.

As described in a previous post, my current personal project is learning the basics of animation.

I haven’t decided technique, concept or story yet, but in this post I explore model making equipment using clay and computer software.

Model making and equipment

I went to the toy store to get some plasticine. Bought something which to me looked more like Play-doh. Tried to do mold it in to shape, but it was way to soft and just fell a part.

Do NOT purchase this stuff.

Can probably use it to do some scenery or something but not for the models.

Went to a hobby shop in Oslo instead called Panduro and got something called “Eberhard Faber modell-leire” at 19 kr per pack.

This felt more like plasticine. Also bought a wire for creating “skeletons” to make the models easier to move and more durable.

Spent the remaining time I had playing around with the plasticine and creating some small bunnies. The grey bunny in the background in the image below was done with the play-doh like plasticine and also the carrots etc. As you can see it is already started falling apart and the carrots appear to be cooked!

Much easier to work with the black bunny which was done with the other kind of plasticine which I got later.

What software should I use? Simple test of iMovie

Apparently there is a lot of fancy software you can purchase. For me, this is a personal project, so I have no budget. Decided to look at free options. First, I did a very simple test on software to see if I could use iMovie which comes for free with Apple Macs for the animation.

Turns out you can adjust the timing for each image. This is really all I needed at the moment.

For the fun of it, I snapped a few pics with my Iphone and imported into iMovie. Obviously you need to use a tripod etc and plan this better when you are doing it for real – but I think it is always useful just playing around a little to learn the software.

Choose timing for the image by clicking the small clock icon.

You also have to remember to remove the Ken Burns effect which iMovie automatically adds to any image (by clicking the “crop” icon and choosing “Fit”).

My first animation!

You can see the result below of my simple two-frame animation.