I’m not a real artist; my freehand drawings look like something a third-grader’s mom would hang on the less-visible side of the fridge. I illustrate by tracing from photos. Yet somehow even when tracing from photos I manage to get some faces completely wrong.
It’s funny. Sometimes I just slash in a couple lines and discover, to my surprise, the intended face staring back at me from the screen. Other times I spend hours – well, I could spend hours, though I usually give up after twenty minutes or so – anyway, I spend a whole bunch of time tweaking and erasing, but no matter where I push the lines, the drawing still doesn’t capture the essence of its subject. The pieces are all there, but somehow they don’t add up.
I suppose real artists must know some tricks that I never learned. They could look at the pictures below and explain why cartoon Jeff doesn’t look anything like real-life Jeff. Something in the nose, maybe? The lips, the eyes? All the above?
My guess is that a proper portrait artist will know how to select the one or two features that are most characteristic of the subject and subtly exaggerate them in a way that seems true-to-life – even though it departs from the actual lines of the face. That’s just a theory. But what is Jeff’s most characteristic feature? I can’t decide.
I had a request to post these drawings of some of my VendAsta workmates, created for a recent MashedIn cartoon, on the blog, and with mild trepidation I oblige. Of the sixteen I think about nine turned out pretty well. To the other seven subjects, I apologize.
This cartoon I recently finished for MashedIn is a little over three minutes long. At a frame rate of 12 frames per second, that means it consists of about 2,160 frames. Almost every one of those frames had to be drawn individually.
Each frame consists of multiple layers. For instance, this image of me checking my wallet contains a layer for my face, another layer for my beard, a layer for my shirt, and a layer for my hands. (The microphone is another layer, but it’s a static unchanging picture, so it only had to be drawn once.)
My hands, luckily, are only visible for about a quarter of the cartoon. I used various shortcuts to avoid having to do my shirt over and over, but it still had to be drawn a few hundred times.
So there are, to be conservative, about 5,000 individually drawn images in the cartoon. It took between thirty seconds (for the beard) and two minutes (for hands and faces) to draw each of these pictures. So, once again guessing conservatively, call it an average of a minute per frame.
5,000 minutes is about 83 hours.
Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. 83 hours is only two weeks of work, give or take. And I worked on this cartoon, off and on, for almost two months. So why’d it take so long?
Well, bear in mind, that’s 83 hours of pure, mechanical, repetitive drawing. That doesn’t include any time for reflection, aesthetic evaluation, leaning back in the chair and stretching, or pausing to make tea and bring up a new artist on iTunes.
Nor does it include all the extra work involved in filming and editing the original video, hunting down sound effects, tracing my co-workers’ faces for the “virtual wallet” section, and making all the elements flow together smoothly.
I’m not complaining. I consider myself very lucky that I’m getting paid to do this stuff. But I often wonder if the investment of time is worth it. How many people, in the end, will ever see this cartoon?
Of course, every time we create a video, it’s a gamble. We’re gambling a few weeks of my time on the chance that the video will find a wide audience. If it doesn’t – and so far, none of them have – we can still throw the video up on one of our blogs for the amusement and edification of people who wander by.
Still, it makes me wonder. Are we gambling wisely? A couple months back, Brendan pointed me to this Social Media Revolution video. At the time, it had been seen by a few thousand people. “We should make a video like this!” he enthused. And his instincts were bang on – before long the video went viral, and now it’s got 1.8 million hits.
But what would “Social Media Revolution” look like if I made it? Instead of Fatboy Slim it would have a soundtrack by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. And instead of graphics that flew by almost as fast as you could read them, it would have a stammering voiceover by yours truly. And instead of 1.8 million hits, it would have 180.
Last week Jason and Dave were down at the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. While they were there they showed off a new app that the MashedIn team developed, which we’re calling Flutter.
It’s a mobile app for location-aware phones. Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar place – maybe at a conference in a faraway city – heck, say you’re at the Chirp conference in San Francisco. So you pull out your iPhone (or whatever), point your browser to Flutter, and bingo – up comes a list of people who’ve recently tweeted (or accessed Flutter) using their mobile phones in the vicinity of the conference center.
But this is where we seem to lose people. The exciting thing about the MashedIn technology that powers Flutter is that it reveals connections across social networks. For instance, if you’re a Facebook user who’s never heard of Twitter, you might nevertheless discover you’re connected, through a mutual friend, to a Twitter guy who isn’t on Facebook.
So let’s take another look at that list of people who’ve recently tweeted from the conference center. Right at the top of the list you’ll see the people you’re connected to – your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contacts, sure – but also people you don’t know directly but whom, based on mutual connections, you might want to meet.
What you do with this information is up to you. The Techi blog speculated that Flutter could be useful for stalking people. Well, I guess…but if Flutter is the best stalking method you can come up with, you really need some stalking lessons.
No, we think the main benefit of Flutter is that you can meet new people in strange locations. You might not know anyone at the Chirp conference in San Francisco, but think about how many connections Flutter could potentially reveal…
Maybe Flutter reveals that you’re connected via your ex-boss Cindy to a fellow conference-goer named Amber. So you fire Amber a message – “Hey, I used to work for Cindy. You want to grab a coffee and talk about that freaky hair-helmet of hers?”
Will it work? Maybe, maybe not…but it beats slouching back to your hotel room to watch old Friends episodes on TBS.
Before Jason and Dave left for San Francisco I dashed off a press release to see if we could generate some buzz for Flutter. I guess in retrospect I should’ve spent a little more time obsessing over the wording, because some people, like the guys at Techi, seemed to miss the point.
I’m on vacation, sunning on a patio in Palm Springs while my unfortunate colleagues shiver back home in Saskatoon.
But I’m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. The video has appeared in a bunch of blogs written in a bunch of languages that I can’t read.
Thanks to StepRep’s Reputation Monitor, I receive regular updates on my band’s virtual tour of the Old World. Today I was alerted to the fact that our video had appeared on the French blog Fumez La Moquette (“Steam The Carpet”).
Having by now seen my video praised as well as belittled in numerous online forums, I hardly needed to strain my tenth-grade French skills to interpret what the commenters were saying about it. Most of them liked it, some snarked about it, and a few wondered how many trees were chopped down to make it. (The answer is “many”.) But this comment piqued my curiosity:
sinon le bassiste dans la vidéo me fait pensée à l’acteur dans Very bad trip le beau frère louche
(“By the way, the bassist in this video makes me think of the actor in Very Bad Trip, the dissipated brother-in-law.”)
It took some Googling to figure out that Very Bad Trip is the title under which the film The Hangover was released in France and Belgium. Isn’t that weird? Instead of translating the word “hangover” into French, the distributors released the film under an English-language title that was different from the original title! Why would they do that?
Anyway, this commenter is saying that Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall looks like the co-star of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis. See the resemblance?
Zach Galifianakis and Andrew Hall
Mmm…maybe a little in the beard area?
This is just one more example of the fun that can come from using StepRep to monitor your online reputation. And that’s my contribution to StepRep’s marketing efforts for today. Now where’d I put that crossword puzzle…?
Since I don’t have time to make animated cartoons any more – and how’d that happen, by the way? – I’ve been spending a lot more time drawing static comics lately. At first I thought this would be a good deal easier. Since the images didn’t have to move, I figured, I could churn out ten times as many of them.
Alas, it’s not so easy. The movement in the foreground of an animated cartoon lets you get away with simple solid colours behind, whereas a comic, I’ve discovered, looks empty unless you put some scenery behind the characters. As another example, when I was making the Spokesmonster cartoons we always saw him from the same head-on perspective, so I just re-used the same three monster heads over and over again; comics demand a little more variation in the perspective, so each individual figure needs to be drawn.
Having spent many hours over the past few weeks creating this comic for my co-worker’s band Sexy Mathematics, and many more hours creating this other comic for the StepRep platform for online business directories, I have a renewed respect for real comic book artists, who have to churn out a twenty-page issue every month. Of course, they’ve got an unfair advantage over me: they actually know how to draw. Me, I have to take photos of my subjects and painstakingly trace them.
So thanks to Chris and Liz from Sexy Mathematics, and to Nicole and Tavis who posed for the StepRep comic. (Consider growing sideburns, Tavis. Seriously.)
We don’t have much of an advertising budget here at StepRep. To the extent that there’s a marketing department, I’m it. So I’m always jealous of other companies that can afford to shoot promotional videos with paid actors, real lights, decent sound, and so on.
But then sometimes you see the videos that these other companies choose to invest their energies in, and it makes you wonder.
Behold, Microsoft’s preparations for the Windows 7 Launch Party!
Perfect. It really can’t be improved upon. Unless…just maybe…
First off, and most importantly, look at the picture on the left. Neat, huh. I killed an hour yesterday drawing it. I like the girl’s raccoon-eyes and the Eurotrashy look of the guy with the moustache. What does this image have to do with StepRep? Nothing, but I used it to accentuate a recent post on the StepRep blog about being secretive. (We’re against it.)
Meanwhile on the MyFrontSteps blog I’m really focussed on explaining what MyFrontSteps is all about: Finding and sharing trusted local services. We were a little wobbly on this concept for a while, but we’re going to work harder to make it clear to people. We’re calling our strategy adjustment Plan B.
Just kidding. Even if I had an opinion about how the United States should fix its health care system – which, as a Canadian, I don’t – this wouldn’t be the place to air it.
But over the long weekend I was reading this article by David Goldhill in the Atlantic. Goldhill argues that the problem with American health care is that it’s not paid for directly by the consumers – sick people – but by the insurance industry. He points out how weird this is:
We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance.
So unlike other businesses, which have to focus on good service and competitive pricing to attract customers, health care providers can get away with half-assed service and Byzantine pricing schemes because their real customers aren’t the poor chumps in the paper gowns, but the insurance companies.
Goldhill also writes – and I’m arriving at the point, here, so stay with me:
It’s astonishingly difficult for consumers to find any health-care information that would enable them to make informed choices – based not just on price, but on quality of care or the rate of preventable medical errors.
It’s a matter for democratic debate whether health care should be a consumer good like any other; whether it should be paid for out of pocket, or by an insurance company, or by the government. But I think everyone would agree that citizens ought to be able to shop for a doctor in the same straightforward way that they shop for other services – by comparing prices, by looking for reviews online, and by asking their friends who they recommend.
Correction. I suppose there’s one group that would disagree: bad doctors.
People who are bad at their jobs rely on consumer confusion to keep themselves in business. No-one deliberately goes to a bad doctor twice; but many of us are too ill-informed to tell the difference between good medical care and bad.
The same applies, of course, for any industry. People innocently give their business to reckless real estate agents, clumsy carpenters, and visionless videographers.
Obviously, consumers suffer. And competent real estate agents, carpenters, and videographers suffer, because they lose business to hacks. You could even argue that the hacks suffer – they lurch along in careers they’re lousy at, instead of getting a clear economic signal that they ought to try a different line of work.
I think of StepRep and MyFrontSteps as an alliance between consumers and competent service providers. By connecting with the businesses they know and trust, people can steer their friends toward experts that won’t rip them off.
As you can see, this post has very little to do with health care. But it has everything to do with reform – reforming the way consumers think. We’re no longer powerless, even when we’re sitting in a waiting room wearing a drafty paper gown. The internet has given us amazing new tools for evaluating the quality of the services we pay for. We’ve just gotta start using them.
Originally this post over at the MyFrontSteps blog – which is loosely based on a real conversation I had with a friend this weekend – was going to be done in comic book form. But I realized that the amount of effort involved (assuming twenty or so frames, it would probably have taken me the better part of a week) was disproportionate to whatever promotional value the project might have had. So I contented myself with drawing the first frame and typing up the rest of the post in plain ol’ dialogue style, which only took a couple hours.
A couple weeks ago Brendan and Jeff took off to San Francisco for the Inman Real Estate Connect conference. They arranged for a little demo booth where they would show off StepRep and MyFrontSteps to fellow conference-goers. So before they left, Jeff asked me to come up with a screensaver they could put on their demo laptop.
Jeff told me had nothing more elaborate in mind than a MyFrontSteps logo bouncing around on a white screen. But I had a little extra time on my hands, so I came up with something a little fancier – an animated overview of the MyFrontSteps strategy for changing the way businesses advertise.
After they got back from the conference I snazzed up the 1-minute screensaver with a little musical accompaniment (a 1935 tune called “Every Little Moment” by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra) and stuck it up on YouTube.
But instead of letting you watch it here, I’m going to send you over to a new post on the StepRep blog, enigmatically titled If John Wanamaker were alive today…
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