It’s time, once again, to delve into the mixed grab bag of what people have been tapping into google in order to end up here over the last fortnight.
Just in case you hadn’t realised: people scour the internet for some odd things. Have some Coasters to ease you into the randomness:
And now to the search terms! Read the rest of this entry »
This Search Term Sunday comes to you from the addled mind underneath my brand spanking new haircut. I now look eerily like Nick Drake, and let’s face it, who wouldn’t want that?
Since the last track on his second album, Bryter Layter, is an instrumental piece simply titled ‘Sunday’ it’s clearly appropriate listening on the last day of the week.
I don’t understand what’s going on with this video, or why it’s claiming to have lyrics, so I suggest you just shut your eyes and listen instead.
Lay back, lounge around, and let me insist that things will get better and brighter later. Spring’s a-coming, and there’ll be sunshine and petals and frolicking bunnies all around soon. And if you need a reason to smile before that’s actually upon us, then have a gander at some search terms! Read the rest of this entry »
2011 is revving up to zoom off into the past, and to leave us all in its resultant dust. It was the year of Van der Memes, the London Riots and the great PCP takeover. So I think it’s fair to say there’ve been both extreme highs and lows in the past twelve months.
But over all, pretty good, right?
Miss Penn’s TV wishlist and the recent slew of Christmas-themed episodes (especially the Parks and Recreation one) have convinced me to embrace the holiday spirit.
Even if I can’t be bothered to think about gifts yet, and am still piqued by the absurd lack of snow, I can catch the cheer through over-exposure to Christmas music. The good kind.
Here are ten of my favourites, rather than the even hundred I could easily run up to! Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t understand the internet. I just don’t get it.
That might sound mildly ironic (or just plain worrying) since I’m both sort of studying it, and using it right now.
I’m not saying that I have no comprehension of it though. In fact I can recite, and explain, a load of internetty facts. To wit, the internet is not the web, HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and internet access isn’t internationally ubiquitous.
But being able to recall trivia isn’t all that useful in actually understanding something. (Unless all you’re trying to understand is how to win a pub quiz.)
I’ve come to the conclusion that my problem is generational.
This is a weird time of year- betwixt and between seasons. A few summer shows- like Breaking Bad and Weeds- are still airing, but they’re winding down. The True Blood and Damages season finales have already aired, and other shows, such as Leverage and Pretty Little Liars are on hiatus for a month or two.
Other things are coming back, and some new shows have already started. The first episode of Ringer, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s much-hyped new show, already happened, and next week there’ll be new How I Met Your Mother, Glee, Community, Supernatural and much, much more.
But what are you supposed to do up until that deluge?
DVDs may well hold the answer. Not only can you prepare for the upcoming seasons by rewatching episodes, but you can also discover hidden delights amongst the DVD extras.
For example, an oldie but a goodie, the Community season one cast evaluations: Read the rest of this entry »
Now, I don’t often disagree with any of my fellow playpenners- we’re a bundle of love over here. But I’ve gotta stand up and write my piece- I love spoilers!
While Miss Thropist may not be a fan, I’ve gotta agree with Miss Penn and defend spoilers. Vehemently.
There’s a reason we have TV- to get us obsessed and addicted, like sad little crack-smoking plot-line-needing, desperate-for-character-development monkeys. Yes. That’s me. So we follow, and we watch as our favourite characters go through all sorts of trauma/humour/love life complications, and then every week they leave us hanging.
This is especially relevant if you’re a UST freak, like I am. When there are two characters who should be romantically involved, and the network is drawing it out over two seasons- well, I’m sorry, I gotta know. I’m the kind of person who phones up my friend for the gossip as soon as it happens, none of this ‘I’ll see you next week’ crap. Tell me. Tell me now. Read the rest of this entry »
“old”
Old is a negative word – unless we’re talking about a vintage wine or valuable antique – but to be old is just not considered good in the Western word.
I’d love to be told about a sitcom, film or documentary that has a focus on what it really feels like to be old rather than to merely inhabit the body, and to carry the preconceptions our society has of ‘an old person’.
An 83-year-old woman told me yesterday that she has no idea yet about what it feels like to be old. However, for at least half the population of the western world, old is what happens to you after about 33 years of age.
The age pressure on woman is greater – the biological clock, inequality of opportunity and the lack of positive comments from our TV, films and books about being an older women.
How rare is it for menopause, for example, to be projected as positive? Why do we so rarely see scenes of women discussing it openly, especially discussing it as something natural as opposed to completely awful? Read the rest of this entry »
There’s some rather unorthodox means of getting to Pop Culture Playpen (and I ain’t talking about railways and caravans and carpet rides).
I don’t always understand the odd things people search for to end up at this website, but I always enjoy looking through them.
Come on a whirlwind tour of this week’s with me, cos you obviously already got here. Somehow.
buffy porn
This does not star Phoebe Buffay, no matter what you might hear to the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »
Women of 2011, I beseech you, read this now. You need this article. You need this article that you are probably reading on your Blackberry, or iPhone or super cool laptop, whilst sitting on a squashed tube, or at home, nursing your numb feet that have been squished into overpriced shoes. You falsely believe you are a Power Woman. That you, with your well paid job in the media or some such, with your designer handbag and ability to quote Audrey Hepburn without blinking, are the epitome of what the modern woman should be. That you’ve broken the glass ceiling, that you’re powering forward in the urban abyss towards success.
Except your heels are so high that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to stand barefoot on the grass. You’ve forgotten how to play on the swings, to push yourself higher and higher until you feel like you can fly. Your life has been crudites and salmon for so long that you don’t remember just how good a jam sandwich tastes.
But lucky for you, it’s not only Women’s Day on the 8th of March, but the Spring Equinox, the pagan holiday of Oestara on the 20th. So really, it’s the month of the Goddess.
In the run-up to last Christmas, messages from Amazon suggesting I buy a Kindle began polluting my inbox.
I deleted every one with gritted teeth, mentally screaming “Don’t want!”, as if the Devil was trying to pester me into exchanging my print-loving soul for a literary iPod.
But, as I began to investigate electronic publishing in Indonesia, I decided it would be good to actually test one of the evil things.
Don’t knock it before you’ve tried it, and all that.
Gramedia were generous enough to lend me one for a week.
Seeing the Kindle in the “flesh” melted away quite a number of my reservations. It did look like a literary iPod… in a good way. White and sleek, with an “electronic ink” screen that was incredibly close to paper. I ran my fingertips over its smooth service, intrigued as Rio Eka Putra, head of Gramedia’s IT & Research department, gave me a demonstration.
At home, I logged onto my Amazon UK account and downloaded Charlaine Harris’ Gone and Dead, which I had been waiting to be released in paperback form in Indonesia – that would have been May this year or even later. The process was effortless, speedy and exciting.
Reading on the Kindle was initially odd, but I soon got used to it, and found “turning” the pages and finding my place intuitive, although I missed knowing what page I was on – instead the percentage read so far was displayed at the bottom of the screen. I especially liked being able to read with one hand. The battery power was impressive. I only had to charge it once in the week I had it.
However, there was definitely room for improvement. As an electronic device, it should be backlit so you can read without an external light, and have a better way of categorizing purchases.
At least the two purchases I made remain mine even after I surrendered the device to Gramedia, and I can send them to any future Kindle-compatible devices I may have in the future.
I also discovered that it wasn’t the presentation of books that mattered so much – at least in the case of image-free texts – it was the words and stories.
I had chosen Dead and Gone because it was “light reading”, but when my friend in the UK recommended via MSN messenger Daphne du Maurier’s The Breaking Point, a collection of short stories, I immediately took her advice. Within moments I had the electronic version on the Kindle, a heady dose of previously unimaginable instant gratification. Du Maurier – a more literary author than Harris – was just as magic on screen as she was on paper.
I imagine owning a Kindle would mean I’d buy less of certain kinds of books (light reading, series) and maybe invest more in limited editions I wanted to have on the shelf.
A Kindle extends the reading experience, allowing for experimentation and less waiting time. And it was great having so much choice at my fingertips. Definitely a winning travel companion.
Even though the pros arguably outweigh the cons, the price is rather steep, at US$259-489, especially with hefty import and shipping costs if you’re having it delivered outside of the US. But for avid bookworms with cash to spare, it might just be worth it.
Karim Charlebois-Zariffa creates the kind of magic you see all the time but never really thought about.
Commercials where buildings explode with paint, music videos where rock stars appear to be floating in thin air or film title sequences where plasticine figures morph into live action people and back again.
This is motion design, sometimes known as “the invisible art” – on average, twelve minutes of every hour of broadcast television is the work of a motion designer, taking the form of commercials, title sequences, trailers and special effects.
“Often people think motion design is a new field of graphic design but in fact it has been around for many years, in different forms,” Charlebois-Zariffa said, citing the 1950s and 1960s work of Scottish experimental filmmaker Norman Maclaren, Czech surrealist artist Jan Svankmajer and American graphic designer Saul Bass, who created the film title sequences to several Alfred Hitchcock films.
“For me, motion design is a mix of everything. It’s mainly graphic design and movement. It’s using a variety of techniques to get to what you want to say. What I find most interesting is finding a new technique of animation every time. it’s always a challenge.”
Recently, Charlebois-Zariffa came to Jakarta to present a talk, “International Motion Graphic”, one of the highlights of the “Plaza Desain 2009: *Kinesis’” graphic design event organized by Bina Nusantara University, which took place between July 7-12.
The 25-year-old was born in Quebec City, and is currently based in nearby Montreal, which he says is “a great city to be a designer”.
Artistic from an early age, Charlebois-Zariffa joined the local graffiti scene, and from there learned about graphic design, which he studied at CEGEP level, a Quebecois qualification between high school and university.
His first professional foray was as a fashion designer, starting a company, Colourblind, which offered shoes, hats, t-shirts and skirts. However, he eventually decided he needed to find something that offered more opportunity for innovation.
He soon found what he was looking for after doing Photoshop work for an animator who was making a music video clip involving motion design.
“I had no idea at that time about motion design. So I saw him work and I was curious and interested. I asked him to show me what motion design was and how it worked. I became hooked.”
As there were no specific motion design courses on offer, Charlebois-Zariffa largely taught himself, and soon received many assignments, which kick-started his career.
Most of his jobs have been making title sequences for soap operas and documentary series. These include title sequences for science show Le Code Chasteney and Montreal in 12 Places, which highlighted spots around the city such as a street market and horse race track. The latter, which required a year of intensive work to create a minute of animation for each of the twelve places, netted his team “pretty much every motion design award there was to win in Montreal”.
He also aligns 3D objects, such as pills and colouring pencils, for magazine spreads. At one point these were so in demand he began to feel typecast and so ended his run with a print book, which showcased on everything he owned, all aligned in his apartment.
“Nothing was hidden. Everything I owned was shown, without any shame or whatever. If I had something I wanted to hide, my rules were that I had to show that.”
Most recently he has been making title sequences for feature films, like French-Canadian De pere en flic (2009), which he prefers, as they can be longer and have a larger budget and more time.
Charlebois-Zariffa always strives to “do what a camera couldn’t do”, which involves combining a range of techniques from stop-motion, live-action and 3D animation. The end result appears effortless, but requires endless hours of meticulous work and planning, from methodically positioning glass strings to creating 24 frames of stop-motion animation for one second of animation. He says he is driven not by patience, but by passion.
“If I’m doing a stop motion that takes me months, it’s because I love it.”
Charlebois-Zariffa says what made him fall in love with graphic design was the work of “rockstar” graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, who has designed album covers for the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith.
Last year, he did a week-long workshop with Sagmeister, and eventually plucked up the courage to offer himself as an intern. A few months later, Sagmeister invited him to join him during his sabbatical year, which he takes every seven years.
So for the past five months, Charlebois-Zariffa has been in Bali with Sagmeister, who asked him to extend his stay, as an employee.
Along with a small team of graphic designers from all over the world, as well as Balinese artisans, Sagmeister and Charlebois-Zariffa are working on a top-secret, experimental project.
Charlebois-Zariffa says Bali feels like home right now, remarking on its natural beauty and inspiring craft culture.
Although he looks forward to returning to Montreal within a month, he knows he will come back to Bali, particularly because of his ongoing collaboration with Sagmeister and the facility of working with Balinese artists.
“We could never find these kinds of talents in New York and if we could, they’d be too expensive. Balinese are very happy people and very willing to try out new stuff.”
Although he is still passionate about motion design and the constant, creative challenges it offers, Charlebois-Zariffa does not see himself focusing on it indefinitely.
“I really like sculpting right now, and art in general. I love everything about designing art, so I hope I can move on. Right now I’m moving more into video clip direction.”
“I’m never going to be a lawyer or accountant, but for sure, in the same field or tree, I like to touch all the branches.”
Visit www.karimzariffa.com for more information.
During the 1920s, a young man created Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character that quickly became a success for Universal Studios.
But when he asked the producer, Mintz, for more money, the producer insisted upon a 20 percent budget cut, reminding the young man that the studio owned the character. The young man disassociated himself from Oswald and moved on.
He was, of course, Walt Disney, and his next project was Mickey Mouse. Today, both Disney and Mickey are famous the world over, synonymous with animation and imagination.
Oswald will always be Mickey’s shadow, but for animator James Speck, he remains an inspiration.
“The irony is that [Mintz] did Disney an enormous favor. Yes, Mickey Mouse resulted from losing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but the bigger lesson was that Disney never ever again trusted his business partners,” Speck says.
“He realized that they were all short-term thinkers, and that they underestimated his talents. Had Mintz given Disney what he wanted, Disney would have been tied to Mintz, a producer whose films are basically obscure.”
Speck has learned from Disney’s experience. Since he first became interested in animation at age 15, he has continued to hone his craft, always endeavoring to remain in creative control and own the rights to his own creations.
His projects include Hollywood films, international television productions, commercials, fine art exhibits and live motion capture performances.
Born in Michigan, but calling Arizona home, Speck first came to Jakarta in 1992, when a Montreal-based company, Softimage, sent him to ASEAN to develop their 3D software. He moved to Singapore shortly afterward, where he has remained.
There, he founded Cowboy Water Design in 1994, a company that aims to “continually push the boundaries of computer animation and exceed client expectations”.
His company’s unusual name and idiosyncratic logo (the rear view of a naked child in a large cowboy hat, peeing) were inspired by Speck’s earliest childhood memory.
“When you name something it should be really personal and it should have meaning for you,” he says. “My youngest memory was in South Bend, Indiana, four years old, in front of a mirror, going ‘Drink cowboy water’. It stuck in my head … It’s timeless, it’ll never go out of fashion. That little boy in the hat is me.”
Last Thursday, Speck was in Jakarta to present a talk on “Technology vs Creativity”, one of the highlights of the “Plaza Desain 2009: ‘Kinesis’” graphic design event organized by Bina Nusantara University, which took place from July 7 to 12.
Speck might not have found his Mickey Mouse yet, but he already has a host of creations under his belt, ranging from a perky blue-haired television host to a urinating chihuahua.
At the talk, Speck declared a new art movement, “Wanga-Manga” or “Wanga”, a fusion of Western art and Japanese manga.
Lili, a real-time virtual character that debuted in 1998, is arguably his most famous creation to date, as well his first realized example of Wanga, a figure displaying manga-style facial features and a Western-style body.
The Lili Show, on the MTV Asia Network channel, involved Lili interviewing pop stars such as Madonna, Bono and Coco Lee.
In 2000, The Lili Show won the Asian Television Award for Most Innovative Program. It remains one of the most highly rated Asian MTV shows of all time, attracting an audience of 1.2 billion at its peak. Lili, along with sidekick Bibi, appeared in Time magazine and on the CNN network and performed live at the MTV European Music awards. Both Lili and Bibi continue to represent a fashion line and appear at live music events.
“It was so far beyond what I could imagine success-wise: thousands of screaming fans in Taiwan for this character,” Speck says.
“That show opened up a lot of doors for me, but that was it. I thought, now the money’s just going to come rolling in … but then nothing… I own the rights to this character and have done a few things with it, but mainly, I’ve moved on.”
In 2004, Speck created Quu and Tee, a pair of Wanga-style characters designed to represent Animax Asia, a 24-hour Japanese anime channel.
Adding to his live motion performance work, in 2007 Speck developed five real-time virtual characters for the Woolworth’s Corporation in Australia, which over a period of five days performed live for an audience of 40,000 people at the convention center in Melbourne.
“Grown businessmen were suddenly talking and laughing and having a really good time, because of the crazy cartoon characters.”
In 2008, he created canine mascot Randy for Singaporean IPTV channel “Razor TV” (www.razor.tv). The chihuahua’s most notable feature is his frequent urination.
“Why put a cartoon dog in a live set? Why put a cartoon dog in anything?” Speck says. “Because people love to be entertained. People like talking to cartoon dogs.”
Speck introduced two Woolworth characters — a laddish household cleaner and imperious washing powder box — and Randy to the seminar attendees, demonstrating real-time lip-synching technology.
The characters are controlled by a computer keyboard, a mouse and a microphone. Their rate was between 57 and 60 frames per second, which approaches Pixar or movie quality. Speck also included secondary motion, which enhances lifelike performances.
The seminar attendees responded to the characters, performed by Speck, with laughter and smiles, a response that Speck is used to, but never gets tired of. “People behave so interestingly when they talk to a cartoon character.”
His latest project is Tra the Tiger, a ukulele-playing, Wanga-style Sumatran tiger that dances with musical durians. He hopes to collaborate with the WWF and use Tra to promote environmentalism internationally in a fun, accessible way, through television, merchandising and licensing.
“Tra the Tiger will be a spokesperson for all animals and all different types of tigers. He’ll be talking and dancing and singing, with the ukulele,” he says.
“I don’t think there’s any other tiger that plays the ukulele. I’ll be the first one.”
While his other characters have usually been voiced by professional actors, Speck plans to voice Tra himself.
“I want to make him a tiger with a real attitude, like, ‘Dude, get your hands off my skin’.”
Speck hopes that Tra will eventually be able to interview high-profile conservationists such as Jane Goodall.
He plans to target palm oil plantations and large-scale companies such as Tiger Beer and Tiger Airlines for funding, as part of their CSR (corporate social responsibility) programs.
He hopes to convey through Tra that it is not a simple case of megacorporations being the bad guys and ruining the environment, and that these are issues that should be on everyone’s conscience.
“None of us are innocent. Palm oil is used in shampoo and foods … I probably used a product today, maybe it was in my soap,” he says.
“I found that Exxon Mobil spends US$10 million a year to save the tiger.”
Inspired by his treks around jungles in Sumatra, Speck decided to focus on saving the tiger, because he observed that their presence was linked to the condition of the environment.
“If you go and try to save a bird or snake or whatever, there’s no point if there’s no tiger. If you’ve got a tiger in a forest, that [place] is in really good shape. If there’s no tiger, everything goes downhill.”
He intends to remain in Asia, which he feels currently offers far more opportunities than the US, but hopes to leave Singapore soon, possibly for Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
“Singapore may fund this project, but after that it’s going to be game over. They have their own animators now, I trained a lot of them … It’s time to wake up and do something different,” he says.
“I want long-term, I want sustainability… I hope I can retire with Tra the Tiger.”
James Speck can be contacted at cowboy@singnet.com.sg. Tra the Tiger is available to add as a friend on Facebook (search “Tra Tiger”).
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