Friends Kyle (age unknown) and Maeve (age 5) host the weekly kids’s time radio show on community radio in Guelph. Last week I made a special guest appearance on the show to talk about the elusive pugbunny. Every show has great themes ranging from pancakes to animals. The show combines great music with stories and news about fun kids events.
You’ll find an archive of past episodes on the CFRU radio site.
My quick walkthrough of the Zimmer Twins. Loads of articles, ideas and videos from Dust or Magic is available on the Dust or Magic Wiki.
Optimizing vector artwork in Flash is usually the last thing on an illustrator or animator’s mind when they’re drawing in Flash. Unfortunately, when all the artwork is done and it’s time to get it ready for the web, it can be pretty daunting to think about going through the FLA and doing Modify > Shape > Optimize… by hand.
One of the most helpful (and under-used) features in flash is the ability to write Javascript to automate tasks in the authoring tool. Rather …
This Sunday Anne-Sophie and I will be heading to New Jersey to attend this year’s Dust or Magic Institute. Given the breadth of work we are involved with we often find ourselves at larger television, animation or technology conferences. This year we’ve made an effort to branch out and sample some smaller events with hopes of meeting new and interesting folks. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to the Annecy Animation Festival in France and Showcomotion Conference in the UK to talk about …
One problem I always run into when developing a game in Flash is how to tell when a timeline animation is finished.
The quick and dirty solution is to put some callback functions on a frame (or two or three) on the MovieClip’s timeline. This works well for simple cases, but gets messy quickly. And the problem gets worse when you create subclasses and have to maintain all those timeline actions manually. Ugh.
In ActionScript 3, all of the frame …
Drupal has been our choice of CMS since James Walker worked with us to build terminus1525.ca. Ashok Modi is our very own Drupal guru and recently undertook a major project in porting the Zimmer Twins site from Drupal 4.6 to Drupal 6.0. Ashok will be giving a bit of ‘behind-the-scenes’ tour of the process involved in building the new Zimmer Twins site at an event on Tuesday, October 7th at 6:30pm. The event (part of a semi-regular monthly drupal meetup) is …
Crappy Cat is not a good kitty — unless you consider hard-drinkin’ and hard-livin’ to be desirable qualities in a cat. Then Crappy Cat is a very, very good kitty. The new Crappy Cat game, (which we’ve been programming all summer) went live this past weekend. It’s a bit different than most of our work (definitely not for kids), although you might notice a few similarities if you’ve ever played Fly Guy. So what’re you waiting for? Crack open a six-pack of Tallz and …
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.