You want Monkeywiz, we got it!
I decided it was about time I saw what this whole MySpace thing was all about, but didn’t want to just repeat myself over there and make this blog redundant. I noticed there are lots of characters from films/tv etc. represented and making friends so figured why can’t I do the same.
If you’ve got a page/MySpace then feel free to make friends with my character Jerry over on his MySpace Page. He’s happy to chat to people when he can.
I might be the last person to see this again, but very worthy of posting about.
Little handpainted people left in London to fend for themselves
I love this, it reminds me so much of when I was a child and your bedroom/backyard/garden etc. would become a vast imaginative filled world of canyons, sea’s, deserts or whatever you wanted that day for your toys to live their lives out in, and the old re-runs of Land of The Giants.
Tom Wilson posted the link to this one himself on his myspace page with the wish to pass it along, so as he asked (and it’s damn funny) here you go.
The Daughter Song
As I was putting it up I may as well add the previous song of his I mentioned a few posts back (and the fact I can’t stop singing it I may as well get it stuck in your heads too).
The Question Song
My first attempt at Toy Making whilst not a complete failure was slightly abortive, but was an interesting experiment and taught me enough to spur me onto a second attempt.
Whilst there is a still some work to be done as the casts I have made need cleaning up and painting, I count this attempt as a near complete success. It is possible to make models, molds and casts at home for very little cost and in a relatively short space of time.
Watch this space to see if I decide it’s worth trying to go into full production at home. Anyone interested in owning their very own limited edition Jerry Collectable Model let me know.
There was a clip of the whole first 6 minutes of Pick Of Destiny up on YouTube and other places, but obviously that kind of thing is being cracked down on a lot more nowadays, so to keep us occupied till it’s release (24th November here in old Blighty) here’s a full episode of ‘Heat Vision and Jack’ that was posted over at Gutter Zombie a few weeks back.
I’d always had it in the back of my head that at some point in the far flung future I’d like to create my own range of limited edition collectors toys similar to the kind of things that can be found over at Kid Robot but based on characters I’d create for my own animations, so that they’d have their own ‘life’ that people could follow in a kind of episodic nature, as and when I found time to animate them.
I was vaguely aware though that to create a bunch of toys you need money. Money for prototyping, money for mold making, and money to get a whole bunch of toys cast, painted and stored, with no prior guarantee that they would be popular enough to sell, so money that you might never see again.
Then a week or two back Angry Zen Master had a cool post about Hiroshi Yoshii’s Blog and how he’s hand making his own range of toys. It’s all in Japanese so I have no idea how/what he’s doing other than what you can see in the pictures (some of which are fairly informative admittedly), but it has inspired me to see what I can do at home with my very meagre budget.
Back in the distant past I used to like to make things and dabble in the odd bit of sculpture, but the only things I’ve made in the last 5 or more years is the odd bit of rickety splinter ridden shelving to hold my ever increasing collection of books comics and DVD’s, so where to start? Whether it’s the wrong way or the right way, I guess is part of the reason for going through this process, but to see what I’m up to and how far I’ve got, go to my new Toy Making page.
Another old link here you might already have seen a few months back and it passed me by, but now it seems theres a device which can ‘print’ on the surface of water by producing and controlling a series of small waves and ripples.
Not sure what the point is, but I’d certainly like to actually see it in action close up, and maybe have a go a spelling out words (remember your first calculator at school! 5318008)
One of the guys over at Gutter Zombie posted another cool link, with the question Real Tech? I certainly hope so, this looks like it could be a lot of fun to use/demonstrate with. I guess they intend it for educational use or the engineering environment, but I’m thinking real time ‘chess like’ turn based online physics battle game!
I was asked to edit a pre-existing interface called Chatties for a ‘create your own avatar’ flash app to accompany a text and webcam chat site Visual Chat to add a little more functionality and design a few sets of characters, this is one of the sets I came up with. You can find a version of the interface on my ‘Stills’ page or go to the Chatties site to compare it with the original.
Not sure if anyone had already seen this link (I just found it going through some of the old mailshots from Computer Arts Magazine which I never got round to reading).
It’s a really cool concept, but I’m unsure of how useful it would actually be, the danger for me is that it would be one more distraction, as I tend to save everything to my desktop rather than folders in case I forget where it is (out of sight out of mind is a big problem for me) and I could end up spending longer playing with my arrangement of files/windows and application shortcuts than actually getting any work done.
The official site is here if anyone wants to give the developers their vote for rolling the research project out as a full blown product.