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I was really taken by the short above by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the Gregory Brothers, and the ACLU. It does such a great job of using animation to demonstrate an individual’s rights to photograph the police in public spaces through a catchy song and the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. This has been such a huge topic […]


Now, I love Joss Whedon and will honestly read/watch/listen to anything he makes. ANYTHING. But I have a problem with how obsessed he is with the specific actors that he chose to play his characters. The recent fan-driven discussion around bringing back Firefly indicates how specific the actors are to the characters: Step 2: Cancel […]


On April 26th I eagerly attended a Vancouver SIGGRAPH presentation by Ken McGaugh on Double Negative’s creature work in Disney’s John Carter. It was great to hear about how Double Negative worked with director Andrew Stanton to figure out how the Thark performances were going to be done. Stanton chose Double Negative, who isn’t known […]


I hate to admit that I’d never heard of Peter Stephan Jungk’s book Perfect American before I read the about Philip Glass doing a stage production of the book. Michael Barrier has some real issues with the book, but it seems like it’d be an interesting read to get an idea of the popular myths […]


Image via Movieline Wow, so much cool Avengers stuff in the last week. I’m glad that it’s been revealed that Kevin Feige is behind the Avengers Initiative storyline. Interviews with him: Wired Movieline SuperHeroHype Cinema Blend Joss Whedon Interviews: Wired Salon Movies Online Wired loves the Hulk and has video on how it was done. […]


  On Monday the 11th I returned home after teaching a class in Animation Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and while I was eating my lunch and catching up on Daring Fireball I came across a link to Michael Gartenberg’s Why “post PC” doesn’t mean “sans PC”. I eagerly read what […]


Sadly, the VLC app on the iPad choked on the 720p video of Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars that I managed to find. But that just meant that I had to watch the movie on a laptop like Jobs intended. However, this hiccup didn’t take away from the resounding amount of pleasure that I took from […]


My Mom got an iPad for her birthday back in November and this Christmas eve was the first time I really got a chance to spend hours with the device and really give it a once over. I was eager to try the keyboard for longer writing tasks (like this post) and see what else […]


I recently saw this amazing piece of animation done using only Google Docs. It’s really impressive how people are able to use what are now basic business tools for decidedly non-business purposes. Also, it’s an indicator of the ubiquity of animation these days and how the rules of animation exist outside of cinema. Click here […]


A click here for a great short biography on Nintendo’s legendary Shigeru Miyamoto by Nick Paumgarten of the New Yorker. I have issues with the way that Paumgarten discusses games, but otherwise really well done and a fun read.


I’ve been a Gorillaz fan since the first time I saw the Clint Eastwood video back when it was released. But it wasn’t until the past year that the scope of the project has started to dawn on me and trigger thoughts on the relationship between music and images, virtual bodies, and representations of celebrity. […]


Thanks to a wicked hangover from Claudia’s birthday party I didn’t get to see my first VIFF film until Sunday the 3rd of October. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child It didn’t take much convincing to get me to see a Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary directed by Tamra Davis. In my world she has a golden halo […]


The Vancouver International Film Festival 2010 (VIFF) gets underway this Thursday September 30th which means that my cheap downtown pizza consumption will skyrocket in the coming weeks. I’ve been working my way through the festival guide in both paper and app form and have found that I still prefer the paper guide. It bugs me […]


Recently Stephen Wichuk, Emily Carr’s awesome animation tech, gave me a DVD of animation by Vancouver’s own Stu Hughes and Ben Jacques who used to do animation under the name of Crystal Beard. I had seen some of their work when attending Animatron at Little Mountain studios a few years back, but this was the […]


I wish I had come up with “Kung Fusion,” but I didn’t. It’s the title of a chapter in Vijay Prashad’s book Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, which is now on my must-read list. I’m happy to see that chapter is available in Google Books, so I […]


My new hero is Dr. Clifford Nass, who I could hug for coming up with the phrase “Computers are Social Actors.” I’m really fascinated by the way his work engages with the way we respond to computers the same way as we would a person. This research is vital to interface development as it shifts […]


Recently I caught a Boing Boing post about the USA’s deployment of predator drones along the Mexican border and it made me think of the sequence in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. It’s the sequence where the Predator drone is launched after the Decepticons knock out communications in the area and it’s the military’s […]


I’ve been thinking about the adoption of the martial arts in Western culture for a while. However, it’s really been on the front of my brain since this spring when watching The Boondocks. I had noticed it right from the title sequence where Huey is brandishing a sword. In particular I was really blown away […]


As if it were necessary to prove the expression that everything happens at once, but here I go anyways. This weekend I’m heading down to Seattle for Bumbershoot (Neko Case and Jenny Lewis on the same weekend) and PAX but am cursing the fact that I won’t get to see The Secret of Kells at […]


Death by VHS was the name of Clint Enns and Leslie Supnet‘s awesome program of short films from Winnipeg through the DIM Cinema series at the Pacific Cinematheque on Monday the 30th of August. Link soup follows. Cattle Call (2008) by Mike Maryniuk & Matthew Rankin Thunder at the Track (2005) by Walter Forsberg Zwei […]


Back in September I had spoken to Megan and Jay of the amazing band Fine Mist about helping them make some t-shirts. They needed help because they were trying to recreate a design that had originally been done in scotch tape and gold spray ink on one shirt, but were unable to make multiples because […]


On Saturday December 5, Michelle, Mauve and Setareh who work together at Whitecap books dropped by to do some screen printing and so I could do my tortilla tutorial that I had wanted to do for Michelle Meals. I had 4 screens assembled and prepped with photo emulsion so we didn’t waste any time with […]


Back in June I travelled to London to visit friends and the Netherlands to finally make a pilgrimage to the country that sprang forth Piet Mondrian and MC Escher, two of my favourite artists. Why would someone on this trek to visually ransack a culture with a long line of talented artists then decide to […]



For Rich’s birthday I decided to create a beer brand and label for the home brew that he’s been cooking up since the summer. The first batch was named after our softball team, the Re-Ups, but we all agreed that the beer should be its own thing. I batted a couple of ideas about and […]