Okay so Tuesday first week of my holiday already I don't know what the date is I've spent yesterday and will be spending today teaching some teachers about digital media but getting some ideas as I go the ideas that came up yesterday were particularly to do with rotoscoping because these teachers had done some very successful rotoscoping particularly a cartwheel which fitted in very well to things I've been doing and they entered these rotoscopings for a competition and they involved Julian Opie who is obviously an artist who has used rotoscoping quite extensively in his art so there is the link there to Julian Opie as an artist but also I was introducing them to the idea of a fixed rotation like the cartwheel cycle that remains in the middle of the screen while the background goes past behind like a panorama and I was looking into that a bit and discovered that the diorama a sort of endless landscape not endless but a landscape that went past operated by a couple of cranks and with another crank performer music hall Muybridge sort of character doing a talk err possibly puppets and that sort of thing in front of the diorama possibly with a proscenium so that it really is a precursor of Cinema and it was very popular in fact at one point it says in Victorian times it was the most popular form of entertainment and the people who ran these dioramas would go from town to town giving their shows a bit like the Punch and Judy man I guess so there's a link with and earlier even earlier generation of showmen so it all sort of fits together in retrospective and then there was the programme on television and Paul Merton presented on very early Cinema err and some ideas have people to look at but a particular idea picked up from there was to visit the current exhibition of early cinema in the museum at Hove and that led me then to think about adding exhibitions and meetings to the website that I'm creating and to get in contact with Antony Penrose again to arrange a meeting with him it's going to be a very busy Easter I think but good news today in that my iPhone app has been created as a draft so I need to download and look at that and possibly I can get in contact with the person who programmed the zoetrope app just to get some more ideas from him some connections or maybe suggest things to him err what else has been going on this as a bit of a chatty and newsy recording this morning rather than a meaty one I desperately need to get on with the writing and that my early-morning rambles are making connections but I did have a thought yesterday while I was demonstrating Photoshop to these teachers that a lot of my use of Photoshop is trial and error iteration rather than really a solid knowledge so my demonstrations particularly when I'm trying to demonstrate in talk at the same time are not brilliant but I can do it if I'm not talking so it's definitely that right brain left brain stuff if you believe in that

Tags: animation,Muybridge,blogging,apps,zoetrope

Monday, 23 March I was downloading a program iTunes last night which is a digital zoetrope beautifully done and there it got into the Apple editor's pick so I was a bit cross about that at the time because I feel that this is what I had in mind but on looking at it a little bit further what I am doing is more of a display of images this zoetrope on iTunes on the iPhone is much more of a toy and I'm hoping that what I can produce is more of a tool more of the game so that got me thinking about the nature of game and toy the balance between something that is just a curiosity a pub game something that makes you smile for a second or two that is really are quite boring after that or something that you want to come back to again and again because it interests you and captures your imagination and that is the tool that I would be looking for one that I could really use with students in school and a tool that would capture their imagination and it is after all the capturing of the imagination which is what I am after as a teacher that's what I'm doing in my classroom I don't think I'm teaching skills they learn those I am out to capture their imagination get them fired up so what is it about the nature of games and gaming not that it goes to far to take up too much time it needs to be simple and easy beautiful and fun amusing titillating somewhere between game and toy toy and game it is the do with visual illusions so it is in the realm of the wonder err a must stop doing errs because my voice recognition software isn't too good with err though maybe this time I would have trained it enough that that is all beside the nature of games and gaming and how much time people are prepared to spend I found with photoshoppingpong earlier in the year that it took me a while to get into it took me a while to get going and then I was addicted and I was always looking forward to the next volley but I have had a lot of difficulty getting students involved to this extent it is much easier to get them involved within the structure of a lesson and much much more difficult to get them involved and working outside of lesson time until I have got them going far enough that they are doing it for themselves rather than for me I have not ever been particularly interested in games playing as games playing has developed over the last 30 years I'm of a generation that missed out on this but there are things that interest me about media it is much easier just to sit down passively in front of the television and watch whatever is in front of the eyes without having to even bother with making a choice as to what to view I have a library of interesting programs interesting films that would be much more edifying than the slush that is normally broadcast and yet it is an effort to to set them up to watch I have to watch them where as in front of the television with my laptop on my lap idly surfing the Internet while half watching a crass quiz I can successfully waste a lot of time the second gate

Tags: zoetrope,games,pingpong,television,addiction,play

A word that I have just coined, to denote a presentation that is neither still image nor moving image, but somewhere between the two. The philm is a sequence of still images, but not an animation. An animation is a sequence of still images that recreate the actuality of a live movie, by re-creating the movement in a real movie. Still images are a movie that re-create the still image perhaps. At any point one can move through the sequence, or stop and look at an individual image. The experience of a philm is tactile - it is the scrubbing through with the finger or mouse. The philm might be the child of the zoetrope or flip book, phlipbook... a pook, as in photobook.

Tags: kinesthetic,touch,animation,zoetrope,flipbook