This one has Yakety Sax and stop motion blankets. Happy Friday!
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Here’s a film we made a few months ago. It features the best belch ever courtesy of the character Burp-quake. Of course, we only came up with that name AFTER the movie was done.
Also, this is my third post today. Guess which of the following is the reason:
a. I don’t teach on Tuesday
b. I have a test and quiz to grade
c. I have a test to write for tomorrow
d. my fragile ego desperately wants to see the visitor count numbers climb.
e. all of the above
First one to guess the right answer gets a hearty “Atta, girl!” or “Atta, boy!”
We have a few valued traditions in the Hosler household. Every Sunday morning we have angel cream donuts from Weis Market, once a month the boys and I make a trek to the comic book shop and every Saturday night we watch a Godzilla movie and drink Orange Cream Soda. We’ve seen all of the Godzilla flicks we could get through Netflix and a few we came by through other means. One of my advisee (Hi, Paul) loaned us Godzilla versus Biolante (a giant killer…Rose?) on VHS.
Since we have almost reached Godzilla saturation, we’ve now expanded our movie choices to include Mothra (including all three of the Mothra reborn trilogy), any movie with giant insects (Them!, The Deadly Mantis, Beginning of the End) and most recently a giant octopus (It Came form Beneath the Sea!). Not sure what we will watch tonight, but I do have a few illustrations for your consideration. The first is one of two Godzilla pictures I drew for the boys (still playing with that gray marker). The second is Max’s full color battle royale between Godzilla and his greatest foe King Ghidora.
And last but not least, we present our own Godzilla masterpiece Godzilla versus The Giant Spider in full quality Youtube-a-rama.
…I’ll have to be content with this impromptu movie I made when I was supposed to be grading. It’s great what you can do with action figures and too much time on your hands. If you see me at a convention, ask me about the Bug-tastic Ant-Man story I’ve been writing in my head since graduate school and I can bore you to tears. It has Swarm, the Wasp, the Beetle and a whole gaggle of Giant insects from Marvels 1950s monster comics. All this and the answer to burning the question how DOES Ant-Man shrink?
This week we Hosler’s rediscovered our love of Rube Goldberg devices. It has been a long, lasting love even if we don’t write as often as we should. Although Goldberg intending his “time saving” devices to be commentaries on an increasingly technologically dependent society (and I get that), I also see them as meditations on the the intrinsic creative aspects of both art and science.
Max and Jack can trace their fascination with these devices to the Road Runner cartoons I’ve forced them to watch since a very early age. This supplemented their intrinsic interest in how things work. To fuel that interest I got this excellent collection of Goldberg strips.
They so inspired Max that he began constructing his own elaborate devices. Here’s one he did when he was six. I used in a talk I gave about science and art.
Goldberg (trained as an engineer) is especially interesting to me because he represents another interesting science/art hybrid like Santiago Ramon t Cajal or Osamu Tezuka. Anyway, our interest in wacky machines was reawakened when I came across the following OK Go video for their song “This too Shall Pass.”
That blew our minds and we watched it a zillion times. We even downloaded the song. The next day (this is the synchronicity part) I made my monthly trek to the Comic Swap in State College where I discovered Jason Shiga’s “Meanwhile” (FYI, I also picked-up the terrific European comic album “My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill”). As he mentions here, Shiga was inspired by a choose-your-own-path comic in Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics.”
I didn’t tell the boys about “Meanwhile” for awhile because I wanted to check it out for myself. Frankly, it is insane. Wonderful and fun, but clearly the work of a deranged mind. The amount of work it must have required fills me existential dread. The story snakes through the book, constantly splitting-off, offering the reader alternative storylines full of secret codes, adventure, disaster and, on one path at least, a happy ending. I’m glad I took some time with it before I told the boys about it, because I haven’t seen it since. Everyone should buy this book.
See? Crazy. Each panel is connected to the next by a thin tube that sometimes splits and can take you forward or backward in the book depending on which one you choose.
As I type this, I am also reminded of similarly complex animations I saw recently on the blog Drawn! If “Meanwhile” left me feeling inadequate, imagine what I felt like after watching these…
parkour motion reel from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.
videogioco-loop experiment from milkyeyes on Vimeo.
Wow and wow.
For anyone that has ever marveled at how squid can change colors so rapidly, here is a fantastic video. I am particularly delighted in the old school approach to animation. They have taken complex ideas and distilled them down into a well-thought out and compelling explanation. I will have to visit their website to see more, but I think it is very exciting that this was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Definitely a good use of funds.
CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.
Welcome to Drawing Flies, a blog about making science comics. I will be posting updates on upcoming projects, etc for all of you science comics mavens out there. To commemorate the first post on this blog, here is a ceremonial lift-off by our mascot Wilbur.
