At the Fair

The Silverado Country Fair returns Saturday October 3rd and Sunday 4th , all kinds of cool crafts for sale and live music. Again this year my family will have a booth. Stop by and have a good time.





From Orange: (Click Map Images for larger view)
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From Lake Forest:

Game Difficulty vs Player Strength

Here is a fun page for the gamers out there in my reading public. These graphs are from a game charting assignment for my History of Videogame class at Laguna College of Art & Design



The idea for the project is to reverse engineer the thought process used to design game play. This graph is the last part of the project and is graphing of Game Difficulty vs Player Strength.

Week In Review

MAGICK MOMENT:
Every so often you have one of those moments. Wednesday after History of Videogaming class a couple of the students stayed after. So how hard core of a gamer are you? A fair question. Students should always have the right to question the credentials of their teacher. They are spending good money that they may be paying back for years.

So I was breaking into Dec`s mainframe at night in 81 to pay a Dungeons and Dragons like game on a computer that I helped build. The dungeon was created top down view with text characters for the walls ( _ ) and an asterisk as the character and enemy. And I pumped a lot of quarters into the arcades in the 80s and I still play a lot of games on a lot of systems but I am not into online gaming scene. I did try to float a game in 2004 but my programmer talked a better game than he programmed. There is a 160 x 120 video of the reel from that game on the class website.

What do you mean float a game? The other student pipes in: there are a number of ways to break in, one is to develop a game and sell it to a gaming company. You should have come to the presentation they had Friday. The hiring agent for Obsidian, He was great. He went all over the best ways to break in.

Me with a smile behind my voice, Jim Rivers, yeah he was one of my students about 10 years ago when I was running my ROP animation class. Both him and his brother. Instance credibility through reflected glory! Those moments don`t come often but when they do there is a certain joy to them.

FREAK:
Another enjoyable thing this week was finding the first season of Freakazoid at Target. I picked up the last copy at my local store. I loved Freakazoid when it first came out. It was one of the first shows with an absurd attitude on in show reality. Sure, that is an idea that has been taken far too far and beaten to death in today`s market but it was refreshing at the time. And it was fun to see the directing credit of Ronaldo del Carmen.




FESTIVAL:
Saturday morning I ran the judging of the AEF/ASIFA Student Animation Festival at DreamWorks. Thank you Tim Johnson, Melinda Faffar and DreamWorks for hosting the judging.



There are some great animations in this first year`s festival offering that exceed the expected student level. The exceptional animations in the mix of student festival submissions made the judges` job easy. We did the screening in a pitch room and our deliberation in Tim Johnson`s office where we also got to look at his story development for 3 future feature animations.

I also got to talk to Tim bout my favorite scene (Hammy Time) in Over the Hedge, one of my all time DreamWorks favorites. Hammy Time is one of the best timed gags ever animated. It has a story arc that parallels 2/3s of the feature. The pacing is flawless. And the whole scene came from a throw-away gag that happened when the animals are first going through the garbage.

Another highlight of the day was meeting Ric Heitzman, 3 time EMMY Winner production design and art direction for Pee-Wee`s Playhouse. Ric came in at the last minute when another judge had to drop out because of last minute commitments at Disney Florida. As a stop motion guy I am a major fan of Playhouse, a show that did so much to promote stop motion and all forms of animation.

Got some cool stories from Ric on for Pee-Wee`s Playhouse, like the fact that at one time, about 4 or 5 years in, Paul Rubens wanted to go completely animated with Playhouse any only voice his Pee-Wee character. The network liked the idea but not enough to cough up the money it would take. Missed opportunities.

Pong, Betty, Lots of Students and a Festival

Last week I met with Chris Padilla, the guy who put on all the Animation Festivals in Laguna Beach back in the 70s and 80s. Chris was in town from Hawaii working a mega-cool project that I am not at liberty to talk about at the moment. Let me just say that he first contacted me about one of the films I was showing at the Stop Mo Expo. So his project does have something to do with stop motion.

I am in my office at Fullerton getting ready for office hours. I have 99 students now with I think another 2 or 3 in the process of adding. Tonight is their first quiz. Do not look forward to grading this baby but I did make them give me a TA.

This week is the judging for the Animation Educators` Forum / ASIFA-Hollywood Student Film Festival. The judges will be meeting with me at DreamWorks at 10 in the morning this Saturday.



I was at the 99 Cent Only store today and things are showing up in the 99 DVD racks. This week it is Atomic Betty. Also found a PC port of Pong. Atari has been porting their classic games for a while now and they have been showing up in the cutout rack at the 99 Cent store for the last 6 months.

Last Wednesday I was teaching my class about the Magnavox / Sanders Pong law suit against Atari. Atari lost on that one folks if you didn`t hear and videogame companies had to pay license fees to Magnavox / Sanders to the tune of 100 Million in a 10 year period. Something that Ralph Baer, the creator of the brown box that became the first videogame console, did not know until 2002. The lawyers wanted to keep it very quit for some reason

New and Older Friends at the 99 Cent Only Store

The animation work of friends Lili Chin and Eddie Mort, Mucha Lucha, makes it debut at the 99 Cents Only stores. And the lips of Tinker Bell, Margaret Kerry, also make a dollar debut with a new release of the old Clutch Cargo.



I am glad to add the 2 volumes of ground breaking Flash animation and the new volume of Clutch Cargo in space to my collection.



But a little saddened that Lili and Eddie`s work is being sold off at discount prices. I know that they are working on pilots for other projects. Hope to see something on the air soon.

And Margaret, you still the best lips in Hollywood. Your a great lady and I love you.

Goodbye Bill

Bill Melendez and I were not really friends. We knew each other. I talked to him a number of times. I guess you could call us good acquaintances. I know a lot about him because of the Evening With Bill Melendez DVD I produced.

Several years back I was talking to him at a Chuck Jones Gallery opening that he and Martha Sigall were headlining. Someone asked Bill about Martha`s career and he responded by saying that when he worked with her she was in Ink and Paint.

I then told him the story about how Martha was an animation camera-person during World War II but that the Cameraman`s Union pulled her ticket the day the war ended because she was not a man and therefore could not be a CameraMAN.

Bill was outraged. They can`t do that. That is not right. He was ready to pick up picket signs and go into battle to right a wrong he found intolerable 50 years after the wrong was done. He was fiery, a fighter.

The descendant of Mexican Generals, his father wanted him to return to Mexico and go to military school but his mother decided that he should develop his artistic skills. He was one of the Disney strikers. He never backed down on anything. He was an animation union president. He was both a great artist and a man who always fought for what he knew was right.

If they can say half as much about me when I am gone I will have lived a good life. Goodbye Bill you were a hell of a man.

Playing Games

Had my first History of Videogames class yesterday. Have a great class of 13 students. 1 to 13 are much better odds that 1 to 99 when it comes to one on one teaching. I really miss that in the big classes.

Here are some excerpts from their first assignment. I like to give assignments that force the student to analyze and think. Here I have the students judging a game on a number of scales: Realistic Environment to Cartoony Environment - Programmed Non Player Character Action to Artificial Indulgence NPC action. etc.



The final part of the assignment is a graph of player`s strength vs difficulty of play over the play the course of the game.


The idea is to have the student think about game play and what goes into an enjoyable gaming experience. The upside is that when these students start creating games I have a better change of enjoying the games they create. Enlightened Self-Interest is the name of the game.