November 22, 2003
-
The Week in Review:
We were going to go to a birthday party tonight but I think we’re staying home instead. Eddie feels he’s coming down with the flu and I’m exhausted. I don’t suppose two chi-chis at the Tiki-Ti last night and today’s trek from Hollywood to LAX (to pick up our packages from Sydney), to Sherman Oaks, North Hollywood and Burbank helped. Tomorrow’s a big drive-around day too – we continue with our “homemaking” chores, buying furniture and trying to get some sort of ‘work space’ set up in our apartment. That’s if Eddie feels up to it… We are both taking lots of vitamin C and echinacea tablets….
OK. The cool stuff this week -
We are now proud owners of a sensational limited-edition print by the talented Miles Thompson. Personally autographed at the Tiki-Ti last night. (hey we’re locals now!) We had the pleasure of meeting his friend, Andrew who is also a remarkably prolific artist.
Also check out Miles’ tribute to Tiki-Ti!
Bob’s Big Boy Burgers & Classic Car Show is very LA and we love it. We’d been told that every Friday from 6-10pm, the parking lot of Bob’s is packed with all manner of classic cars and hot rods so we had to go and see…To be honest, I don’t know a thing about cars let alone old cars… Can’t even draw them. But seeing that Eddie is currently writing a ‘hot rod’ cartoon, we thought this was a good opportunity for visual inspiration and research by osmosis. You gotta be there and see these things up close, you know….
Oh and the burgers were good too!
There was a Mucha Lucha focus-testing session on Monday… Very interesting and an eye-opening experience. If the thirteen nine-year old boys in that room were an accurate representation of their demographic, you could conclude that all boys are interested in are action and fighting. Sure, they are smart enough to discern good jokes from bad jokes, and imaginative enough to make sense of illogical wacky plot twists… but at the end of the day they want more action and fighting. And they can’t get enough of this….
Left: Three episodes of ML were screened. Each kid has a dial – which he turns up when he sees something he likes and turns down when he is bored or disapproves…
Right: In the other room, behind the one-way mirror, the producers have their eyes glued to a “graph” on a monitor running the same episodes. Ironically, the results of the graph did not correspond at all with the verbal feedback offered by the boys after the viewing…
Links:
I’m reading “Vroom With a View” by Peter Moore, an Australian travel writer who rode from Milan to Rome on a ’61 Vespa. The book is fun but the photos from his trip on his website are awesome!
Vespa Museum; Vernazzo port
(from Peter Moore’s photo slideshow)Flash MX 2004? Ibis Fernandez reviews this new version Just as we thought – the “improvements” are of no relevance to Flash animators(only web designers/developers)
Zazzle.com is similar to Cafepress. (They now call themselves “Cafeshops”). Zazzle.com has a much smaller product range but I couldn’t help noticing that they stock COLORED t-shirts for customization…
Some other stuff to do this weekend:
- Email interview for AWN (Animation World Network) magazine
- Interview with Mr. Unknown of FPU magazine
- Watch Santitos – We just bought this on DVD. The movie is based on the novel “Esperanza’s Box of Saints” in which the main character has a romance with a masked luchador…
- Start updating website . I can’t bear to look at the current site anymore…
- Watch ML – Direct to Video animatic.
Comments (2)
Just for the record, the actual results and the verbal results never seem to correspond with testing. I’ve been doing usability testing for 9 years now and every time someone will sit there and struggle with software for half an hour and then tell me, “Oh, it’s really good! I liked it!” Sigh.
Tree
I hear ya! Regardless, this data (which is open to interpretation anyway) will get used to justify certain creative decisions.