I’m gearing up to do the most interesting Seder-Masochism episode: the Golden Calf, wherein the stiff-necked people disobey Moses and revert to their pagan, goddess-worshipping ways. Lotta design work this month, because goddesses.
Golden Calf 1
Category: work-in-progress
Linoleum cut printimation
These are some lousy test prints (I have no skill as a printer plus I used cheap water-based ink and cheap thin waste paper) I made of some linoleum print plates I designed and “cut” with the laser engraver at the local Fab Lab. The plates are to be part of a larger project with many artist participants, organized in Germany; I’ll write about it when it’s properly printed and officially released. My understanding is it’s about how the advent of the printing press led to the explosion of a unique kind of illustration: the wood-cut. Since I think the internet is in many ways analogous to the printing press, I saw a parallel in its own new kind of illustration: the animated gif. So my (linoleum) “wood-cuts” were designed to end up as animated gifs. When the project is done I will use the final, better prints to make better versions of these loops. But patience is not one of my virtues and I am excited about the test animated gifs I made from my lousy test prints, and when I make an animated gif I can’t wait to post it, so I didn’t wait, so here:
Here’s a phenakistoscope from another print, using the same all-purpose goat in our Chad Gadya embroidermation:
Some photos of the linoleum plates themselves:
The plate on the right is of the “Death” animation; on the left is my test plate, which I used to gauge the laser engraver. I also did some hand-gouging on it, confirming I’d rather use a machine.
The Exodus
Following the Ten Plagues – particularly the Death of the Firstborn Egyptians – the Hebrews finally leave Egypt.
Music: Free To Be You And Me by the New Seekers. More about that song and my use thereof in another post.
Exodus 12:28 And the children of Israel went away, and did as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.
Exodus 12:35 And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses; and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment:
Exodus 12:37 And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children.
:38 And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle.
Exodus 13:21 And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night:
Exodus 14:21 And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.
Exodus 14:22 And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.
Exodus 14:23 And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen.
Exodus 14:28 And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.
Exodus 14:30 Thus the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore.
…..
The last beat is the desert, where the Hebrews will spend the next 40 years:
Exodus 16:3 And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of theLord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.
GNU & Improved GIFs
Big ups to my friend Barry Israelewitz, who wrote a shell script for ffmpeg (based on this article shared in this comment by Paul Wise) and taught me how to use Terminal on my mac to make much better animated gifs than Flash exports directly. Currently it’s significantly more work than just exporting .gif from Flash, because I have to instead export a PNG sequence, import the frames to Quicktime 7, and export as a new .mov to use as an input file for making the gif. This may be streamlined a little bit in the future, but for now at least I can make higher quality gifs if I need to.
Below are close-up details of single frames. “Before” is here, “after” is above.
Here’s a smaller-sized (because fewer frames) animated gif for side-by-side before-and-after comparison:
Much better, no? Plus using Terminal is METAL.
The Promised Land
Soon I hope to be able to make gifs that look a lot better than this. A friend is helping, but he first needs to teach me some command-line stuff which I’ve never done on my Mac. Meanwhile here’s a dithery giffy glimpse of the Promised Land that is smaller than 640×480 because WordPress has a 2MB limit for image uploads. My next modification to this scene will be adding milk and honey, and maybe some rainbows coming out of the flying unicorns’ butts.
A Bug in My Ass
So I’m animating an ass for Seder-Masochism, so the Hebrews have something to carry their stuff out of Egypt so their arms are free to let them walk jauntily and leap around. I export a test and see this weird artifact on the upper foreleg. Flash is rendering the shape as it looks in vector editing mode. If you look carefully you’ll see the point on the upper right has a little bezier handle. Weird, right?
It’s a bug in Flash (pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash 8, the only Flash I use), the likes of which I’ve never seen before. To make the artifact go away I had to re-draw the foreleg. Below is a render sans bug.
What’s great about this is it solved my problem about how to best use “ass” in a blog post title. I was considering “What an Ass” or “A Fine Ass” or “I Made Myself an Ass,” but this is much better.