A Matter of Taste

Imagine going into a restaurant and saying to the Waiter "For starters I'll have a Bugs Bunny, followed by Pinocchio with some Bambi on the side, Ah yes, the Wallace and Gromit looks nice, I'll have that for desert".

The Waiter might think you are a couple of frames short of a cycle, but it could make sense if you suffered from synesthesia; a condition where the senses overlap so that words and pictures, get translated to tastes and smells.

It is a condition that quite a lot of people have. I play the guitar, and think of different keys as colours; F is green, while G is dark red. I have spoken to several musicians who also think like this, but have their own colours.
Now that recent developments allow computers to handle smells there seems to be a niche market here for movie makers.

A news article today announced that an animated movie 'Elephants Dream' is the first one to be made totally with Open Source (free) software.
This might seem a small step for a man but a giant step for a cartoon character. If movies can be made with legally free software then that opens a new entrance level to the industry.

Of course, there is much free software available, but most of it is not up to doing commercial work, and the time taken to learn it makes not worth the bother. Perhaps a new era has started, but in this business that's a daily occurence.

For those of you who do have time to spare, take a look at the National Film Board of Canada site http://www.nfb.ca/atonf/events/moreManchette.php?nav=6&v=h&lg=en&id=1228 for the 'Make the Pixels Dance' competition.

Stan

Air Guitar

Happy Birthday World Wide Web - 16 today - and like all teenagers - confident of going onwards and upwards but not quite sure where. I was over 60 when the Web was born, but cannot now imagine what life would be like without it.

Just today I came across yet another marvel; A T-Shirt that you can don and play Air Guitar.
There have been other 'computerised' Air Guitars, which work on the basis of Motion Graphics as used for 3D animation, but this one uses Intelligent Textiles; similar in principle but more sophisticated. In this Blog of 20th October, I reported on a T-shirt with a built in screen, so we are getting close to becoming walking computers.

My interest in the Air Guitar is that I am a strummer myself and use guitar programs that teach by having animated scales and chords. I have seen robots that play piano quite well, and knew of someone who used a midi-keyboard to operate theatre lighting.

One of my pet themes is to be able to create movies in the way one can write scripts. It requires some form of visual input device rather like the above T-Shirt instead of the network of attached wires used in Motion Graphics. Perhaps future T-shirt will have on them 'Been there, done that, now watch the Movie'.

Stan