Her book may be purchased at Oz books from the Cowardly Lion—Baum and More!

Available in HD at YouTube

One of our students from an early workshop, Reggie, wanted to make a globe. We said “sure.” Our strategy was to build it out of layers of pine — and that was REALLY hard.

We all took turns rasping and sanding that #$%@ thing:

We made a “skin” for it using gords painstakingly laid out with huge rulers and large homemade compasses and Reggie drew his ideas of an old-fashioned map onto them.

In the end we had an OK first effort definitely falling into the “Done Is Good” category.

If we were going to do it again I’d unhesitatingly buy a big wood lathe and simply turn the big ball on a lathe.

Or, I’d take other’s beautiful work as a good example:

Today I saw this great project at the MAKE blog

Image by davesbit from Flickr

From MAKE: Flickr member davesbit built a globe by making a mold from a beach ball, and designed a map for it using The Generic Mapping Tools.

The globe is about 20 inches in diameter, made from fiberglass and filled with foam. The map parts are built with the Generic Mapping Tools and glued on…

Making-of photos on the Flickr photo page.

Footage from the original Night of the Living Dead combined with Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams.”

Last night I uploaded it onto YouTube (finally). And now, please enjoy “Evil Angel”!

Princess Mononoke – Evil Angel

The video was my first filmmaking workshop project. I rather enjoyed making it because it showed something that I really enjoyed and I learned how to use Corel Filmmaking Studio. Janet and Nate assisted me with editing and adding effects. I got all the pictures and images from the internet, the hand in the video belongs to Janet, and the song is one of the more intensely climactic songs in the movie. We’d love to embed the video, but the company that made the movie, Lionsgate, has content claimed the video, so we can’t.

Unlike my previous video about Larry, “Bupim’s Quest I” contains an actual plot. The evil quasi-robotic villain BVG is doing vaguely evil stuff, so Bupim has to go and stop him. Along the way, he encounters three bosses, including Ghost Guy, a ghost who looks like something out of Pac-Man, Uberfly, a giant dragonfly with extreme levels of geekiness, and TVon, a giant… thing that apparently likes card games.

This video was mostly made with stop-motion applied to clay models (thus the bad lip-synching), but there are also still drawings (for the BVG pictures and the post-credits stinger), pixel drawings (for the Ghost Guy battle), live-action stick puppets (for the Uberfly battle), and live-action card games (for the TVon battle). Because card games are serious business.

The video also has a guest appearance by Larry Lysosome, some references to Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series, and cards with completely original and never-before-seen characters (please note that the Jaun card is not meant to make any resemblance towards anyone actually named John).

(Note that Bupim has not actually gotten to BVG yet. He’ll finish the quest in Part 2 of… DRAGON BALL Z!!! BUPIM’S QUEST!!!)

The song is one I found long ago, sung by the VOCALOID system. The story of the song, and my video combined is that a young boy lost his sister and builds a robot in her image. Unfortunately, that robot has no genuine emotions – no “heart”. The boy dies trying to create an artificial heart for her.

Several hundred years after his death, the robot becomes curious of the unfinished program. When she programs herself, the wave of emotions unleashes her tears and a singing voice. The robot sends a message to the scientist and her past self, her lovely song programming her past self with a second heart. Shortly after, the heart crushes her system, the size and weight too much for her. At the last second she smiles and stops moving.

When it came time to cast the characters, it was agreed that Wesley should play all of them. This proved to be a creative challenge for Wesley as an actor and a technical challenge for us during filming and assisting Wesley in post-production. Keeping the camera stationary, we shot footage of Wesley in his various guises, and then using masking, merged these clips so that Wesley’s characters occupied the same space at the same time onscreen. (This required a fair amount of tech support from Dan and a software upgrade.)

Wesley dubbed his dialogue over the video, voicing each of his characters, and cut it together adding his titles, stills and video clips pilfered from the internet and voila! It was a group effort hatched from the imaginings of wizard Wesley.

Stay tuned for “Kokoro”, Devon’s latest Anime Music Video with original drawings!