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Spinning, Flopping, Bucking & Sucking

Yes, the title of this post sounds exciting and dirty, but it is in fact a very accurate description of some special effect chairs that were built over at Scenario Custom Scenery a few years ago for a set of commercials for Badcock Furniture. I personally worked on the first chair shown in this video…. check it out and I’ll explain a bit more afterward:

Okay, in the first part of that video you saw a chair’s upholstery being sucked up into a vacuum cleaner, right? Well here’s how it worked…. Continue reading Spinning, Flopping, Bucking & Sucking

The Price of Nostalgia

Last weekend I got a call from someone who was working on a film project that required a slight tip of the hat to that most iconic space operas of our modern age. While I was busy digging out some of my old reference books two tiny scraps of paper fluttered to the ground. When I picked them up my eyes practically goggled as I realized that I’d discovered a couple of really old movie tickets that could have only come from a trip to see one of the installments for the original Star Wars Continue reading The Price of Nostalgia

Not an Artist? It Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Dear Bauder College,
Thank you for your interest in the field of Graphic Design. I found your newest television commercial, in which a representative for your school cheerfully proclaims “Not an artist? It doesn’t matter anymore!”, to be particularly exciting as it helped prove a point that I’ve long been trying to convey to my colleagues in the arts. The reason I’m writing this open letter to you is to express my happiness that you’ve had the guts to take a Post-Modern leadership position on what makes a person an artist. Thank you for stating unequivocally, as an institution of higher learning, that sophisticated graphics software has finally reached a state that eliminates the requirement that the operator have even a passing knowledge of Continue reading Not an Artist? It Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Cryptonomicon

Dumb luck is the best kind. The only reason that I pulled Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon off the shelf was that I had kneeled to look at something on the next shelf over and didn’t want to stand back up without a book in my hand. Besides having a long and imposing title the paperback is as thick as a brick, which is a great thing when I can plow through a normal paperback in a week’s worth of lunch hours. This book looked to be an Everlasting Gobstopper of modern literature.
Continue reading Cryptonomicon

A Lot of Questions

The following is an email that I sent out to the list back in mid-March, just now making it onto the website.

“Do you miss it?”
I keep hearing that question echo through my mind.

“Are you coming back?”
We all know that very few get away clean.

*Do* I miss it? More than you know.
The water-slicked streets, the low background rumble of city traffic, the electric jolt of adrenaline knowing that your next decision could affect billions of people around the world.

Am I coming back? Eventually. Somehow. I have to.
Continue reading A Lot of Questions

Favicon Swap

My favicon has been bugging me lately so I decided to spend some rainy day downtime making a new one. No matter what I did with my zapgun logo it keeps looking like the yellow duck from Adventure, so I’m sticking with the letter “D” for “Drewprops”. Or “Duck” (as in yellow duck from Adventure). I think I’m the only one who cares about this little detail, but if for some inexplicable reason you do care and your browser is still showing the old favicon instead of the new one, you need to find where your browser stores your favicon icons and dump the old version. Don’t ask me how to do it on your OS/Browser setup because I only know how to do it with Safari, and only then because I asked Mr. Google.