Part 21 in an ongoing series looking at New York City in animation.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an entry to the Animated Manhattan series, but I’m bringing it back with a look at the most adorable cartoon to feature New York so far. It’s called Wonder Pets, and it’s produced completely in New York City by Little Airplane Productions.

Wonder Pets uses animated mixed media to tell the stories of three preschool pets — a guinea pig, duckling, and turtle — who leave the schoolhouse after school to save animals in peril. In an episode called “Save the Pigeon,” the pets travel to New York to save a pigeon perched perilously on the Statue of Liberty’s nose.

The episode starts in the schoolhouse, where it’s clear that kids have been learning about New York. Lots of nice New York details can be found in the classroom.

A few more classroom details (including a King Kong reference):

As the Wonder Pets arrive in Manhattan, the music references Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Finally our heroes reach the perilous pigeon, who has fallen out of her nest and is afraid to fly back up.

I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, but I’ll tell you that I learned a valuable lesson about encouragement and believing in one’s self.

As night falls over Manhattan, the Wonder Pets make their way back home:

This show is sewiously the most adorable program I’ve seen in a while, and the New York episode is available from iTunes if you’d like to check it out.

Posted by David at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under: Animated Manhattan

Instead of hiding your outlets behind furniture and worrying about the mess of wires tangled behind your entertainment center, consider making an entire wall that’s nothing but outlets. Then you can artfully plug in your appliances wherever the cords look pleasing to you.

Imagine no more crowded outlets or multi-plug adapters.

Of course you don’t have to actually wire all the outlets on the whole wall for electricity, but you’d better come up with a good way to remember which ones are live.

Detail:

Posted by David at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (134)
Filed under: Ideas | Technology

Note: This post is not about the band TV on the Radio.

This Friday, June 12, TV stations nationwide will cease broadcasting analog signals and switch to digital-only broadcasts. That’s fine with me. I have a digital television, and I have cable anyway, so it won’t affect me. At least that’s what I thought. Only recently did I realize that one of my favorite ways to enjoy television will go away. Starting Friday, I can no longer get TV on the radio.

As a kid in the 1980s, I enjoyed the same TV shows my friends did. But I also loved listening to old time radio shows, most of which I checked out from the library on vinyl records. I especially enjoyed comedies like Burns and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Abbot and Costello, Jack Benny, and the Great Gildersleeve. I couldn’t get enough Dragnet, or Dimension X. In my head, as I pictured whatever action was happening in the show, I also imagined the studio where it was recorded, the actors with their microphones, the audiences at the comedy shows, and the sound effects man simultaneously adding door slams and footsteps in real time. Theater of the mind was so great, I wished I could have been around when these shows were still on the air. The library only had a few episodes of each program. Why didn’t radio networks do this sort of thing anymore?

For my Bar Mitzvah, someone gave me a gift certificate to the Sharper Image. There were so many cool gadgets to choose from, I had trouble deciding. I considered the telephone in the shape of a bulldog whose mouth moved in sync with the person you were talking to. That would have been a riot. But then I saw the Sony Tap Tunes Shower Radio that received AM/FM and TV Audio. A radio that gets TV signals? I had to have it.

Continue reading “The Death of TV on the Radio” »

Posted by David at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (29)
Filed under: Entertainment | Technology

I don’t know who first asked what chairs would look like if our knees bent the other way, but that old question may have been in the back of my mind a couple years ago when I found myself wondering how things would be designed differently if our middle fingers bent the other way. Would that make life more difficult? Or would it make certain tasks easier? What would musical instruments look like? What about computers, or eating utensils? Is there any way that having a backwards middle finger would be useful?

I considered writing a blog entry pondering this question. As I like to do, I came up with a photo-illustration to accompany the blog entry. I took a couple photos, played around a bit in Photoshop, and accidentally ended up with an image that is so bizarrely disturbing that I can actually feel my brain having trouble making sense of it. I could not in good conscience subject an unsuspecting reader to this photo. So I killed the whole post.

I just came across the file now, and it still disturbs me. But I hate to let a good disturbing image go to waste, so now with the proper context, and a build-up designed to minimize the shock, I present the photo illustration that I killed two years ago. Click on the pixelated version below and get ready to look away:

Posted by David at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)
Filed under: Design | Photography

Part 37 in an ongoing series of (approximately) 60 Second Films.

Posted by David at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Filed under: 60 Seconds

Sometimes it’s not appropriate to have my cell phone ringer on (like at the movies, for example), so I set the ringer to vibrate. It’s not a big deal if I forget to turn it back on right away because I keep my phone in my pocket, so I’ll feel the vibration when I get a call. But sometimes I come home and empty my pockets and forget to turn the ringer back on. I’ve missed calls because I didn’t hear the phone vibrate from across the room.

The phone has an accelerometer built in. So how about an optional setting for vibrate mode called “motion-sensing vibrate”? If it doesn’t detect any movement for, say, 15 minutes, it would automatically turn the ringer back on, and also make a noise if I missed a call in those 15 minutes so I know to check my messages.

Before automatically turning the ringer back on, it could vibrate steadily for 15 seconds as a warning indicator, just in case the phone is still in my pocket but I’ve somehow managed to stay perfectly still for the past 15 minutes (which seems unlikely to me). This would give me fair warning that the ringer is going to turn on so I can override it if needed.

Of course, if you keep your phone in a bag or purse, you would not want to use this setting.

Posted by David at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)
Filed under: Ideas | Technology

I recently photographed Art Fry, the inventor of the Post-it Note, for an ongoing photo project I’m doing about inventors. After the shoot, I asked if he’d ever seen the Sticky Note Experiments video by Eepybird (the Mentos and Diet Coke guys). It turned out he hadn’t. Well, I just happened to bring a copy of the video with me on my iPhone so I could show it to him.

I filmed his reaction as he watched it:

If you haven’t already seen it, this is the video he was watching:

Posted by David at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Filed under: Art | Technology

Have you heard? Citizen Kane is getting the IMAX 3D treatment!* From the press release: “Finally audiences can see Citizen Kane the way Orson Welles intended. From the halls of Xanadu to the Chicago Opera House, audiences will feel like they’re really there. Through a revolutionary process, Citizen Kane has been masterfully converted to 3D. No longer will some characters seem smaller than others on-screen, an unfortunate side effect of projecting images in two dimensions. Now audiences will finally see that the smaller characters are really just further away.”

Get out your 3D glasses. Here are some promotional stills from “CK3D”:

*not really.

Posted by David at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Filed under: Entertainment

Just about a year ago, I came up with a concept for a clock whose hands are shadows projected by bulbs shining on a center post. I called it the Bulbdial Clock, and my concept design looked like this:

Well, I’m thrilled to see that the evil mad scientists over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have actually built a working model! They posted lots of pictures, and it’s pretty awesome:

Head over to their site and see how they made it. They’re considering making a kit available so people can build their own Bulbdial Clocks. If you’d like to see that happen, let them know in the comments on their blog.

Posted by David at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Filed under: Ideas | Technology

As the weather gets warmer, smooth-chested guys nationwide will be hanging out shirtless in parks and on beaches. A hairless chest is so trendy these days that it’s practically a fashion accessory. But what’s a guy with a hairy chest supposed to do? How can he incorporate his hairy chest in his own fashion?

Well, that’s why I’ve come up with T-Shirts for Hairy-Chested Men, with strategic cutouts that allow your hairy chest to show through. They could feature portraits of famous curly-haired celebrities like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Harpo Marx (for blondes). At last, the Hairy-Chested Man can finally showcase his own natural chest hair with style.

Posted by David at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)
Filed under: Ideas

The movie begins in the middle of a chase. Our hero, Buttons, a scrappy little dog, is running as fast as he can through dark and scary woods. A pack of slobbering wolves are hot on his heels. We hear Button’s cute voice saying lines like, “Oh, no! I’ve got to outrun these guys!” His lips don’t move when he talks. We just hear his voice, like in the Talking Dog Movies of the 1980s.

The thick woods reach an end, and Buttons is in a clearing. It’s bright, sunny, and he can see his home out in the distance at the edge of the field. His owner, a young boy, is standing outside calling out his name. “Buttons! Buttons! Where are you?” Buttons is running his little heart out, saying things like, “Tommy! I’ve got to reach Tommy! Almost there! I’m coming, Tommy!” The wolves are close behind. Buttons reaches Tommy and jumps up into the safety of his arms. The camera swirls around them, joyous music swells, Buttons licks Tommy’s face, and the wolves cautiously retreat back into the woods.

Suddenly, in voice over, we hear a gruff voice saying, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What the hell is this crap? How many times have I said I’m not going to be in any more cheesy kids’ movies?” The chase scene ends abruptly, and we find ourselves in a Hollywood movie producer’s office. This is the Real World. Seated around a table are several people, and a dog. It’s the same dog we just saw. Or, rather, it’s the Dog Actor named Buddy Duke, one of the most famous actors in the world. With him are several humans: his manager, his agent, his assistant, his bodyguard, a producer, a director, and a writer. They’re pitching a new movie to Buddy, and we’ve been watching the corny scene they’re describing to him. Buddy hates it.

Here in the Real World, when Buddy speaks, we do see his lips move. In fact, all dogs can talk in this world, and their lips move like in any modern Talking Dog Movie. They have normal jobs, just like people. They work in every industry, alongside humans. But when humans speak, on the other hand, we don’t see their lips move. We just hear their words as voice overs. Preferably, the voices will be done by different actors than the ones we see on-screen. So the human actors on screen will have to act with body language and facial expressions alone, and then their voices will be supplied by other actors in voice over.

Continue reading “Idea: Not Your Usual Talking Dog Movie” »

Posted by David at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Filed under: Entertainment | Ideas

I go to the grocery store, and I see delicious-looking ripe bananas. I buy three of them, figuring I’ll eat them over the next day or two. Inevitably, I don’t eat as much banana as I think I will, and one or more of them ends up getting overripe and rotten before I have a chance to eat it. Into the garbage it goes.

Next time I’m at the grocery store, I think ahead. I’ll buy some not-yet-ripe bananas so I have them when I want them. Of course, inevitably I overestimate the ripeness and bite into a banana that isn’t ripe yet. Have you ever eaten an unripe banana? Gross. Another banana wasted.

Grocery stores should sell progressively packed produce. Instead of buying a bunch of bananas picked at the same time, you get a packaged bundle of bananas (or other quick-to-ripen food), each at a different stage in ripeness, with stickers on them telling you in which order you should eat them. Sure, there would be a premium attached to progressively packed produce to account for the back-end difficulties, but just think of the savings in wasted food.

[Original banana photo by Jason Gulledge via Flickr]

Posted by David at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)
Filed under: Ideas

Back in July, I launched Thsrs, the on-line thesaurus that only gives results shorter than the word you look up. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that people are really using Thsrs to help them compose shorter Twitter messages, write more concise headlines, etc. So I thought it would be interesting to check my logs and find out what the top search terms are on Thsrs. What words are people trying to shorten?

The Top 30 Thsrs Search Terms are:

thesaurus
explain
dictionary
hello
love
beautiful
awesome
computer
complicated
penis
sex
fantastic
happy
synonym
abbreviation
ironic
ridiculous
amazing
excellent
internet
word
exhilarating
encyclopedia
available
house
information
sesquipedalian
establishment
long
wonderful

A lot of those are pretty obvious search terms, the sort of thing someone types in just to test Thsrs. So let’s jump ahead in the list to, oh, number 500. At that point, these are the next 30 most popular search terms on Thsrs (all are tied with 6 lookups):

preposterous
kiss
accommodate
copulation
request
carnivorous
wonder
plethora
establish
husband
movement
find
appointment
silly
advantage
transport
terrible
like
uninterrupted
constantinople
recognize
mirror
explanation
discovery
immediately
criticize
exquisite
trustworthy
face
splendid

I love that there are 6 people who looked up Constantinople.

Posted by David at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
Filed under: Language | Technology

A couple years ago, I thought it would be fun to make an old school geeky Sierra-style adventure game using Adventure Game Studio. I got far enough to realize that it would take a lot more time (and probably skill) than I had to make it. But I did do some work sketching the game on paper in a spiral notebook which I happened to come across this week. I’ve scanned in some pages so I could show you the aborted adventure game I never made.

I hadn’t settled on a name for the game, but I thought about calling it “Blogosphere” or “Blogosfear” or “Blogosphear.” The opening animated narrative would introduce you to the protagonist “Dave” who was staying up late reading blogs instead of going to bed. Some sort of mishap (energy drink spilled on the computer?) was going to start a chain of events that digitally teleports him into the internet. The teleportation was going to look like Flynn being digitized in Tron.

So the gameplay begins with Dave finding himself materialized in a waiting room like one would find in a doctor’s office:

The only door, with a sign reading “Blogosphere,” is locked. But when Dave pulls a number from the “Take a Number” display, the receptionist’s window opens. The receptionist was to be played by Clippy the MS Office Paperclip, who has had to find other work since he’s no longer employed by Microsoft. Through witty interactive dialogue, Dave would protest that he doesn’t belong there and needs to get back home. Clippy would explain that once you’ve entered the blogosphere, the only way to cancel your account is to consult the Great and Powerful Eula. And this sets up your adventure to find Eula and learn how to get home. Clippy buzzes Dave through the door to start his adventure.

The next room is the BlingBling room:

This room has an airport-style metal detector which doesn’t allow anyone through to the blogosphere with anything in their pockets. The sign says “BlingBling: the Gateway to Wonderful Things.” The gateway is guarded by Cory Doctorno and Jenny Gardner. The walls are covered with banner ads for t-shirts. Dave turns over his belongings, which means he starts his adventure with nothing. Cory and Jenny explain that to find the Great and Powerful Eula, Dave should follow the Yellow Paved Road. He continues on his way.

The next screen reveals that the Yellow Paved Road isn’t very long. In fact, the Great and Powerful Eula’s place is right next door.

Continue reading “Idea: The Blogosphere Adventure Game” »

Posted by David at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Filed under: Games | Ideas | Technology

Maybe this is a sign that I’ve been using my iPhone too much.

Posted by David at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)
Filed under: New York | Technology

The previous “I wrote it, you made it” posts have been examples of people who executed an idea I proposed. But this time I’m writing about people who took one of my ideas to another level altogether.

In September, 2007, I demonstrated how an image can be hidden in the histogram of another image. The example I used was the New York City skyline…

…hidden in the histogram of a simple gradient:

I followed that up by writing about Josh Millard, a reader who figured out how to embed the histogram in a more recognizable picture than just a gradient. He was able to embed the NYC skyline histogram in the original source image of the NYC skyline!

But I never wrote about what Stewart Smith did with this concept. He took the idea in a different direction, wondering if it would be possible to embed an actual word or phrase in the histogram of an image. So he developed Histoface, a web app that allows you to generate a gradient which contains a secret message in the histogram.

So this image…

…has this histogram:

It should be obvious that it says “STARWARS” but unfortunately not all the letters in the typeface are as easy to recognize as these. It’s difficult to create recognizable letters that work in a histogram. But I give Stew major credit for making it this good!

I’d love to see a combination of Stew’s project and Josh’s project, allowing you to type a message and hide it in the histogram of any grayscale image. Who wants to work on that?

Posted by David at 8:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Filed under: Ideas | Technology

I don’t want to encourage marketing people to send me stuff hoping I’ll write about it, but this is a particularly nice bit of marketing so I think it deserves a mention. It’s creative, and has a personal touch.

The team behind the upcoming movie Coraline has sent 50 handmade boxes featuring props from the movie to 50 different bloggers. I’m the recipient of Box #40, made from an old cigar box:

I admit, it was pretty cool to get the box and wonder what it contained. I won’t keep you in suspense:

It contains 3 headless dog bodies. Somebody else got the dog heads. It also contains one glittery halo, and still images from the movie scenes in which these objects appear. There is also this quote printed on a piece of paper: “She heard a shuffling noise, and a light came toward her, swinging from side to side. When it was closer she saw the light was coming from a flashlight being carried in the mouth of a large black Scottie dog, its muzzle gray with age.” -Chapt. IV

Not all 50 boxes have turned up yet, but NOTCOT has a pretty good roundup of those that have.

Thanks, Coraline Team!

Posted by David at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Filed under: Advertising | Entertainment

Back in November, 2006, I posted an idea for a commercial I’d like to see. Some time later, I was contacted by Ethan Cushing who wrote, “I am a director trying to expand my reel and would love with your permission to hire a crew, rent some great HD cameras, and film [this].”

So without further ado, I now present… the commercial:

Nice work, Ethan! Going back and reading my original post, I was surprised to realize that he more or less used what I wrote verbatim. If I’d known that would happen, I would have spent more time crafting the dialogue.

Incidentally, I’d still love to see this battery commercial concept turned into reality. It would require a bit of F/X trickery, I think. If anyone wants to take it on, go for it.

Previously: I wrote it, you made it: Montris

Posted by David at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under: Advertising | Ideas

And all this time I thought epsom salt was only useful for relieving sore muscles and constipation.

Posted by David at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Filed under: Advertising | Design

Sometimes I post ideas that would blow me away if they could actually be made real (I’m still waiting for someone to build an Ant Desk). But occasionally I do hear from people who have taken one of my more practical ideas and actually turned it into reality. I keep meaning to write about them, so I’m starting with this one: Montris.

About a year ago, I came up with an idea for a game I described as Tetris, one brick at a time. I called it “Montris.”

I was eventually contacted by a reader named Chris Kastorff who decided to make a working Montris game. We discussed various factors that would affect game playability: The number of colors, the width of the playing field, etc. He wrote a proof-of-concept game that allows users to adjust all of those factors. (Note: In his conceptual implementation, bricks do not fall on their own. You must press the down arrow to progress the game).

More recently, I heard from a reader who has actually taken the concept and fleshed it out completely into a functional game! He calls it Sirtet. You can find it along with other games on his website.

I like that he penalizes players for making pieces of more than 4 squares. It adds another level of complexity to the game. Nice work!

Posted by David at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under: Games | Ideas