The Great American Pixel

Of Cut-Scenes and Inchymations

Being back with the family over the holidays gave ample time to lounge on the couch and partake in one of my favorite activities: making little animations mixing drawings and photos. Ah yes, the humble North American inchymation:

Now, to some extent, I brought home the magic beans here because what I set out to do was make a cut-scene that advanced the story of The Bridge To Everywhere — a narrative going on in the background of the 50,000” Hello World microhood about a 50,000” bridge across the Detroit River made out of inchernet that can reach anywhere in the world. I mean, the bridge is in there, but what it is and does remains as hazy as ever. As they say in the biz: to be continued… :-)

On process and credits, it’s kinda interesting. I basically took screenshots from inchernet.com, a whole bunch of my photos, a whole bunch of screenshots from Google Earth, a couple of borrowed shots of Joe Louis’s fist from urbanadventures on Flickr, a couple of Ambassador bridge shots from an image search, a shot the 8-Bit Detroit map we commissioned from Brett Camper, and processed everything through the Instagram app to get the old Polaroid-y look. The music is borrowed from the song Grain Towers, Telephone Poles by The Gloria Record, the underwater freakout guitar riff of which came to mind across the years while editing.

AND! Most excitingly to me, the World Turtle is a creation from back in the day, illustrated by my good friend and partner-in-crime at large, Pierce P, which I want to bring back into the act. Also known as Russ, the turtle disappeared for a while, but he’s too good to stay gone. His origin story is the ancient myth about the world existing on a turtle’s back, which stood on another turtle, and then other turtles all the way down, with a little jPod “think like a turtle” office dystopianship thrown in to taste (though we don’t linger on that part :-)). He’s also a metaphor for the entire networked world becoming one thing that needs to be anthropomorphized, or at least turtle-ized. Plus Inchy could use some new friends!

The instagramized (instramation?) stills look really pretty. Here are a few from the stream. I love the dirty mix of pixels and atoms, like someone spilled coffee on computer code and patched it up with neon straightness:

And back to cut-scenes, I really wish that every time we hit a significant point of progress with LOVELAND that we had a cut-scene ready ala Angry Birds and many other video games, to help move the story forward in a fun way:

One day!