Heath Robinson Contraptions

William Heath Robinson is famous for making over elaborate machines held together with string and made from old brooms and pieces of furniture. He illustrated the Professor Branestawm books by Norman Hunter and has been used in advertising things such as Guinness. One of the automatic analysis machines built for Bletchley Park during the Second World War to assist in the decryption of German message traffic was named "Heath Robinson" in his honour.

Geoffrey Beare has edited together a collection of the wackiest machines in this newly published Heath Robinson Contraptions book.

Plain figures

I saw these figures in ModelZone on the way home this evening. They have great potential for stop motion animation as they can be painted to requirements and are very posable. They are made by Sideshow collectibles and come in grey, caucasion or African American in male and female varieties. The sizing is a little smaller than an action man/barbie but I would expect that clothes could be modified to fit more easily that making clothes from scratch. These figures have much more articuation than their child's toy equivalents and they are much cheaper too.

Tales from Earthsea

Studio Ghibli's latest film comes to the UK on August 3rd.



Goro Miyazaki's latest creation contains all of the elements expected, fantastically detailed painted backdrops, colourful characters and fantasy animals. The story is based on the book series from Ursula Le Guin. The film will be shown in both subtitled and dubbed versions. The English voice artists include Timothy Dalton, Matt Levin and Blaire Restaneo.

The UK website was not working when I tried it last but here's the Australian link that will give you access
http://www.talesfromearthsea.com.au/

London International Animation Festival

http://www.liaf.org.uk/

The London International Animation Festival is back this year at the Curzon Soho and the dates have been set for 21st August to 26th August. Over the six days 200 films will be shown from 28 countries. The programme has not yet been finalised but I'm sure it will soon be appearing one their website.

Take a step to the left

In the latest animation sequence of the Flea Circus Film, the Ring Master turns to the left and takes a step closer to the table to peer over the ring.

This proved to be a rather tricky maneuver in Poser. Because the leg moves and pauses I knew that it was likely to be affected by the issue with splines that I had back in February. However the key issue was that to rotate a figure in poser, you rotate their hip and the rest of the body follows. When turning people rotate around the foot that is on the ground not around the hip. As per usual I sought help from Renderosity and as per usual LittleDragon and PhilC came to my help with some suggestions and ideas. One of these was to parent the actor to an object that was at the point of rotation and rotate that. One of the issues with this is that an object can't change parents mid animation. Also the IK functionality does not help here with the feet sheering off when rotated.

However these technique seemed a little too manual for my liking and I wondered if it could be done with Poser's Python scripting language. In a moment of clarity, I thought back to my A-Level Maths days and remembered something like the following:

"that a rotation, about any point, is equivalent to a rotation (by the same angle) about the origin combined with a linear translation"

The Poser Python documentation that comes with Poser6 is not very user friendly, I was hoping for a graphical object model but the document is just a straight list of values, objects and methods in PDF form. There's also no examples with it (although there are some on the web). So the net effect is that I've not had a chance to get coding. I'm not sure if the Poser7 manual is any better and there does not appear to be any books for sale on this topic although there are plenty on Python and Poser separately.

However in the process of investigating Poser Python I stumbled across PoserSpeak a Windows based product that uses SAPI to add voices to your poser characters.