Bunny Blog

If you’re a UI designer of any sort, you might be looking for a swift, elegant, and why not, even web-based solution for quickly mocking up components, web pages, whatever.  Enter the Mockingbird.

What, you mean you've never used MockingbirdTube?

Mockingbird is a fast, easy interface for building and sharing wireframes.  You can add links to your wireframes for live navigational previews, quickly share with others via PDF exports or email, and live collaboration tools are apparently coming soon.

Mockingbird is currently in beta, but that ends real soon.  Mockingbird operates on a subscription-based model – perhaps a little overpriced if you’re not doing this stuff constantly – but it’s still worth a look!

Yon trim Shakespeare on the tree, indeed.  Wow, that’s probably the most esoteric reference I (or possibly anyone) have ever made.

The front page of Yahoo always has some great news headline that makes me click. Their headlines work the opposite way, I think, of how newspapers work, in that they usually don’t tell a lot of information. Scanning through newspaper headlines, or even CNN headlines, you can tell get a good sense of what is going on really fast.

With Yahoo, and a lot of other websites, the headline is not actually meant to inform. It is there to lure you in to reading the whole article. And for me, it always works. I find myself clicking on them all the time. Usually I’m slightly disappointed, but that doesn’t make me less curious the next time.

This Yahoo front page, taken from a few weeks ago, makes me very click-happy. What is the outcry? I want to know! How is the actress’ ad raising questions? Tell me all right now! They usually tell you everything except for one crucial detail, the detail that makes it a “story.” And that’s what you really have to click for. The McDonald’s meal in question was a new burger called the “McItaly,” made with all-Italian beef. If the headline was “McItaly burger sparks outcry in Italy,” which still doesn’t say a lot, I would have surmised that Italy was angry that McDonald’s had named a sandwhich named McItaly for some reason. Probably because of the name. And I would have moved on. But with the headline not including that crucial information, I immediately wondered if McDonald had a new happy meal with chidren’s meat inside. So I had to click.

I suppose fictional stories work the same way. You have to leave some things to the imagination. You’ve got to get readers to bite.

So, in the information age, how do you decide which crucial information should be left out?

Hey friends!  Seen these badass new Transcend HUD goggles?

That’s right, they’re ski/snowboard/whatever goggles that have a live heads-up display feeding you moment-by-moment data on your speed, direction, temperature, whatever you like.  Basically, it turns you into a living human F-16.  Pretty badass, right?  At $350, even I am tempted to buy a pair, and I’ve never been snowboarding in my entire life.  That’s how cool they are… in theory.

So how the hell do you make a promo video for something so badass that fails to actually show you an immersive simulation of what it’s like to actually wear them??

As someone who’s spent a lot of time creating exactly this kind of video, I’m really disappointed in this obvious oversight which makes me wonder… did they somehow manage to make this product not cool?

I am so very very glad she's painting in the Patron Saints series again

Long ago when I was kind of a jerk, I knew a very talented young woman named Sarah Atlee, with whom I once dropped a box of superballs down a the 14-story stairwell of the local Marriott to see how high they’d bounce back up. Sarah is a professional artist and a very good one at that and as part of an ongoing penance for that whole being a jerk thing, I like to make people aware of her work whenever I can.

I caught a blog post of hers last week that I quite enjoyed, about useful things to try when you are feeling stumped. I love, love, love that in addition to being a working artist who is genuinely doing interesting things that showcase her own unique voice and perception of the world, Sarah takes the time to be much better at having a blog than we fools here at the Bunny. Sarah’s tips for re-starting the creative juices can be read here. And while you’re at it, you should read her treatise and suggestions on How and Why to Title Your Work.

I have an unabashed love of movie titles.  A good title sequence is a work of art all on its own, and can bring incredible value to a film - in mood, story, and production value.  Nobody knows this, or analyzes it, better than The Art of the Title, a site/blog that features great movie titles, detiled analysis, and interviews with some of the biggest title designers out there.  If you’re interested in the thught process behind some of your favorite title sequences, this is the place, and f you just want to watch some incredible titles, everything is available in SD, HD, and even for iPhone.

Some of my favorites:

Alien Quadrilogy analysis

Dexter

Freaked

The Impostors

Tension in Title Sequences

I’ve noticed recently that all the movies I don’t want to see all have the same basic design for their poster, which looks like this:

The main characteristics, I think, are the white background, the red type, and a bold sans serif font.  Let’s take a look, shall we, at a few similar posters which should prove my theory true:

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Fleshmap, a nice little piece of data visualization from Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.  (may be NSFW)

Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.

Broken down into a handful of experiments on the themes of “Touch”, “Look”, and “Listen”, each explores a different aspect of our relationships to our bodies (or, more usually, to others’ bodies).

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Avatar just got all nostalgic on me in an unexpected way.

Sure, I’m a sucker for all things Cameron (yeah, that’s right, my 16th birthday party was a trip to see Titanic. We all dressed up. You wanna make something of it?) but, like everyone else, I’ve been underwhelmed so far. However, I just learned that Wayne Barlowe worked on creature design, and, well, my geekmeter just went off the charts.  You see, for a certain subset of the populace, Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials was a little handbook of pure awesome.  Published in 1979, it contains Barlowe’s designs for a vast number of creatures from sci-fi literature, complete with write-ups.  My ratty old paperback version has been thumbed through on countless rainy afternoons, and inspired me to read more than one great sci-fi book. In fact, in my head, “Barlowe” was more some mythical chronicler of alien species than a dude who could draw real good.  He felt like my own personal shopkeep in the Neverending Story.  It’s almost funny to think of him having a concept design job on a movie, rather than traversing interspace searching for new species to document.

So way to go, Barlowe.  You’ve suckered me into another story.

One of our favorite tutorial websites, Video Copilot, just released an updated version of their Action Essentials stock footage collection, and the leap in quality since their last installment is AMAZING. They now have 720p HD, as well as 2K. Included in the package are multiple clips of explosions, smashing glass, bullet holes, blood bursts, fires, muzzle flashes, falling debris, powder, smoke, sparks, 3D shell casing models, water splashes, textures and MORE!

They’ve got a really cool trailer, some tutorials, and a way more in-depth video about how huge this collection is. We just bought the $249.95 2K resolution box set - we’ll let you know how it works out. As much as we’ve used the first Action Essentials (which is dinky by comparison) I don’t think there’s any way we won’t get our money’s worth. As far as stock HD or 2k video footage goes, this is dirt cheap.

Creative COW Magazine was so interested in our CineBingo project that they asked me to write an article about it for their latest “Games” issue. They wanted to know what kind of process we used to help create this live gameshow for movie theatres, how we got the job, and how we dealt with the interactivity of such a game. Trying to figure out how to come up with 2400 words, I actually got the chance to reflect how the job was a quasi-culmination of all of our graphics, interactive, and production experience. I also got the chance to reflect a bit more on our company mindset, and how that led us to here.

ALL THAT AND LIKE 10,000 BAGS OF CHIPS! Oh man, I wish that phrase was still in use after like ten years.  Sigh.

Hope you enjoy the article! You can either read it on the Creative Cow website or download the pdf. It actually does look quite a bit better in the actual print magazine, so I’d suggest downloading the pdf.

Rick Castaneda CineBingo Article on Creative COW website

View Rick Castaneda CineBingo Article PDF