Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Showcomotion conference in Sheffield, England. The conference was a crash course in the children’s media scene in the UK and I met plenty of interesting folks.
There were a few excellent speakers showcasing their recent work. Mark Walsh from Pixar gave an excellent behind-the-scenes look at his work on Ratatouille. All through his talk it was clear how dedicated the studio is to producing a great story. Simple reminder of what it …
This summer, the Toronto Public Library KidsSpace website comes to life as a larger than life Dewey visits locations around Toronto. What’s a Dewey? Dewey is/are the KidsSpace mascots and they are helpful alien clones that love to read, play, and tell stories.
Dewey was discovered in late 2005 by intrepid explorer, and builder of fine boogaloos, Jerrold Connors. Since then, Dewey has been hard at play hanging out with all sorts of kids online and at Toronto Public Library branches across …
Don’t miss the opening of the Cheap Date at the Steamwhistle brewery on June 4. The group show includes work from number one super dude Aaron Leighton. Aaron is the creator of the Zimmer Twins characters and has provided illustrations for a number of our projects. I imagine Aaron wishes we would stop calling him with work and crazy project ideas. But no luck. Such is the price of being such a talented and hard working art machine.
A little over a year ago we received an email from a company working on ‘an open source consumer electronics device’. About a month later we got a package in the mail containing something that looked like a bean bag with an LCD screen attached to one side and a little label reading ‘prototype’. It was a Chumby. It ran Flash Lite and it was cute.
Some people ask right away, other times it’s a question that comes up only after a few beers. What kind of name is zinc Roe and what does it mean? Over the years I have developed several replies to this enquiry.
A few years ago, zinc Roe began working with the Toronto Public Library to develop a tool for displaying archival books from their various special collections branches. The library’s inspiration was Turning the Pages; a tool created by the British Library that, at the time, required the Shockwave plug-in (The British Library has recently produced Turning the Pages 2.0 as a Windows Vista / Silverlight application). Turning the Pages was available for license through the British Library, but the Toronto Public Library …