I’ve been doing some updating on the site. Two months ago, we changed servers from Laughing Squid to some kind of custom thing my teenage son made with Digital Ocean. I don’t know if you’ve notice the difference, but it’s huge. Much quicker, more responsive. We had some email glitches but those are fixed and all seems to be working well.
The only remaining issue is in converting my old illustration galleries to new formats and getting them to work. I’m also going through and finding out-of-date media and trying to convert it to modern stuff. Namely, Flash animations to anything that isn’t Flash. One of my first attempts at animation was in 2004 with the trailer to a little French book I made called Un Mode de Transport. Today I nailed it down using a .FLV file I found in my archive hard drive, and converted it using Adobe Media Encoder. The soundtrack was made using Propellerhead Reason, which was the first electronic music software I played with. Here I sampled my own voice for the first part, and used a bunch of accordion and percussion samples for the second. It’s always nice to use hot-stuff electronic music software to make something sound like it was recorded in a kitchen with pots and pans.
Un Mode de Transport from Brian Biggs on Vimeo.
HarperCollins posted a fun little movie trailer for Everything Goes on Youtube yesterday.
My little movie “Playground” got featured on a terrific blog called PlayGroundology. It’s all about, yes, playgrounds. LIke it you will.
This lovely Spring day makes me think of bicycles. So I thought I’d post a movie taken last September of me.
This last Saturday, Wilson, Elliot and I volunteered at the kids’ old school to help build their new playground. When we arrived I was quite surprised to find hundreds of volunteers from the Wharton School of Business and Kaboom.org there to build as well.
The entire thing was completed in seven hours. We started building around 9:00am and we finished around 4:00pm.
I brought a camera, tethered it to my laptop via Firewire, and used iStopMotion to record about one frame every ten seconds. I made a little soundtrack with Ableton Live and the result was posted here. Enjoy.
Another oldie but goodie. I posted a movie I made in 2002 that’s basically my 1993 graphic novel Frederick & Eloise set to music with me narrating. It was done for a special comix event at the Prince Music Theatre. I really enjoyed creating this thing and I think that the book actually lacks for not having music. I met Tin Hat Trio at a concert in 2003 and gave them a DVD with the movie on it, and asked them if it was ok that I used their music. Rob Burger answered in the affirmative. It’s here in the animation department.
Went out riding with the kids this last Saturday. Then I spent some time with Wilson yesterday in my new Premiere CS3 checking out the features. We remapped the time and sped things up, added titles, and imported a new version of an older tune. See it all here. If you aren’t happy with Vimeo, see it on Youtube as well. Enjoy.