Sarah Asper-Smith and the Molly Whoopie made the front page of the Empire yesterday! The article mentions many of her creative projects and shines a well deserved spolight on all the work she’s been pouring herself into.
We entered the YouTube Sketchies Sketch Comedy Contest with a short film called Nipple Fire. It’s about a musician reluctant to light his nipples on fire. It’s also about how our friends make us do stupid things.. like make movies about Nipple Fire.
I don’t know where ideas like this come from but it was probably inspired by films like Doctrine and Spinal Tap. The crazy thing is how many bored kids are actually lighting their nipples on fire and posting it to youTube. I’ll pretend they’re our loyal followers.
YouTube Nipple Fire Roundup:
Last night I was reading the Cartoon Brew blog and I came across the Morse Code challenge they posted. I started fiddling with the letters a bit and must must have flipped some sort of implanted hypnotic trigger.
It was a slow rumble at first and then a doughy computer science student lumbered out of the cobwebs of my subconscious with a fist full of stuffed crust pizza. He downloaded some bad techno remixes and started finessing the keyboard with his chubby finger tips. A couple hours later he was gone and in his place there was a slight grease stain and a recursive function for decoding Morse Code without spaces between the letters.
Unfortunately my inner C.S. nerd didn’t write a function that would cross check with a dictionary for real words so I was stuck scrolling through a giant list looking for words or names. So far the only semi realistic sentence I’ve come up with is “Key Sound Talent Amy Nero.” I don’t think this is what it’s supposed to say and actually suspect that there isn’t a message in the image at all but I do like the idea of hiding secret codes in short films. I think I’ll try to make a point of it in my own work.
The forum installation is complete! I’ve linked up Orphan Army and all the comics and films from the Alaska Robotics site.
RSS feeds are probably the best way to keep track of updates as they occur and you can even create custom feeds by adding different topics to your list of favorites. If you haven’t used RSS feeds before you’ll want to try it out. My Yahoo!, Personalized Google Search, and the Firefox Web Browser are a few easy ways to keep up on the RSS feeds.
Let me know if you run into any problems or have suggestions to make it better. See you in the forums!
This week it was revealed that the Corrupt Bastards Club might actually be full of Corrupt Bastards. Charges of bribery, wire fraud, mail fraud and extortion were handed down to former and current representatives and subjects of last year’s federal investigations.
Those involved are certainly innocent until proven guilty but given the damning evidence I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of wriggle room on this one.
It sure was nice of the feds to come in and do a little spring cleaning but it really didn’t do much to strengthen my trust in big business or government. After hearing the news Lou, Aaron, and I climbed up on the roof and did a little video commentary. It’s a proposal to pool the money of the citizens of Alaska and buy back the state legislature.
I wrote the original script earlier this year but decided to shelve it because the legislature passed an ethics bill and my outlook was a little rosier. The script was a lot longer and I planned on having more animated bits but we trimmed it down so it would cut tighter and get done over the weekend. Hope you like it!
This marks the end of my fourth week teaching a digital video class at the Yaakoosgé Daakahídi Alternative High School here in Juneau. The school is a part of The Association of Alaska School Boards’ Consortium for Digital Learning initiative, an amazing effort to get laptops into the hands of every student in Alaska.
I’m not sure what the ultimate fate of this initiative will be but it sure makes it easier to teach a video class. I was over at Yaakoosgé a few years back as part of the artists in the schools program, both the students and the school have come a long way since. I’m not sure what part the laptops play in this evolution but the students are demonstrating a great deal of responsibility and proficiency with the two thousand dollar machines they’ve been handed by the school.
I’ve been utilizing YouTube heavily to teach the class and assignments aren’t complete until they’ve been uploaded and posted to our class group.
The first assignment on the first day was to create and introduction video journal and post it to a YouTube account. Some students already had their own accounts and others didn’t even have email but most everyone seems to have caught on quickly.
The second week, after everyone saw the process of creating a video and posting it to our group, we took a step back and focused on editing techniques and cinematography. I’ll be filling in more holes as we go so the videos should be steadily improving.
Our first big project started last week with the students working to create public service announcements. Many chose to make recycling PSAs so that they could participate in the JUMP Society Recycling PSA Competition.
The class will continue to produce video journals as we go and the culminating project starting next week will be a short documentary film.
YouTube has been a great platform for teaching since I can post short lessons for the students or share links to videos I want them to see. All the movie clips and pirated content has been a great resource too. I’m no lawyer but I believe that it’s a fair educational use of that material but I suppose it doesn’t absolve YouTube of any wrongdoing in the eyes of the content owners. Maybe they could start an educational branch of their site for qualified students and teachers to share relevant clips. It sure would save teachers time hunting down videos in the library or trying to rip clips from arcane formats.
Excellent news! We’ve been offered the opportunity to be vendors at the Bumbershoot 2007 Indie Market. The big information packet arrived today and we’re sifting through it as I type. Well.. Aaron is sifting, I’m typing. It should be a good place to hawk our Alaska Robotics and Smack of Jellyfish goodies.
Here are some sketches of our proposed layout, if you’ve got any suggestions to make it better let us know! I think maybe we need to install a crow’s nest.
Bumbershoot Tent - Top View
Bumbershoot Tent - Front View
I’m trying to introduce the main cast of characters before I go down too many of the meandering tangents I have planned for my comic strip. This week was dedicated to Sarah.
It’s easy to figure out wacky adventures for the boys but Sarah has much more poise and grace. It makes her a difficult character for me to understand and portray. I think I did a decent job of it although I’m a little worried that the strip has too many inside jokes.
It might be helpful to know for example that Sarah is working on a children’s book, Aaron has an imagined shark fetish, and Lou has whatever version of tourette’s syndrome causes a person to randomly bring up beetles in everyday conversation.
Pat - “Hi Lou, How’s it going today?”
Lou - “beetles.”
Pat - “Yeah, I hear ya bro.”
Lou - “hymenoptera.”
Comic - Collective Nouns
