Guest of Honor


Lookie who jumped in a box and traveled all the way here... It's Sven Bonnichsen's first-made ball/joint armature!!

Yes, unbelievable kindness comes to the interweb and reader/blogger Sven (http://scarletstarstudios.com/blog/) took pity on my dearth of grown-up frameworks and wanted to help a brotha' out.

I feel honored that he would trust me, essentially a stranger, with such a precious, valuable creation for a visit. (And I really knew that I was dealing with an immensely caring person when I opened up the packaging to find a pair of neoprene gloves to protect me from exposure to the lead solder that's used in it's making.)

I gleefully moved all the joints around and was chilled by the life-like movement. How human the assemblage of metal findings are. It fooled my primal mind with its illusion of life. It felt luxurious, like driving a Rolls Royce, such smooth and precise handling metal.

Look for a wee (mind blowing?) clip of him tomorrow. Thank you, Sven, for letting me test drive this baby of yours!

It beHooves (heh) me to also keep working on my foamy Rana finishing too.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:13 AM

    Hi,

    The link would be:

    mailto:nobledesign@sbcglobal.net

    I don't know how you add links in blogger, bu in html it would be something like < a href='mailto:nobledesign@sbcglobal.net'>E-mail< /a>

    And then without the spaces before the a's. But you can make links, so that wouldn't be a problem for you.

    Huub

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  2. Hi Huub! Thank you for this information, I republished using your suggested coding, so I'll see if it'll work after my site updates... I can link to urls but to an email address it takes me to an unknown server message. Perhaps the "mail to:" prefix will work.

    I hope you'll use it to send me a mailing address, your button awaits!

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  3. Hmm, nope, still getting "The requested URL was not found on this server. Please visit the Blogger homepage or the Blogger Knowledge Base for further assistance." Which of course, I couldn't locate an answer I could understand there, my fault, NOT theirs. I even posted the question to a couple Blogger hack sites, no answer yet. I'm sure it's just a matter of the right code for blogger. Either that or one can't link to an email on Blogger sidebar's?

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  4. Anonymous11:25 AM

    Well Hiya,

    That's pretty weird, mailto: is a prefix just like http://, so if http:// works on the sidebar, so should mailto:. (You wrote 'mail to:' it's ofcourse without the space, is that the problem?)
    E-mail
    Well, if it doesn't work it doesn't work. You could also just put down your e-mail in plain text, that's more handy for the people who aren't using an email program, but have a webbased email (like myself).

    Anyhow, thanks for your comment on SMB, it's nice to meet you too :).

    Huub

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  5. Hi Huub, from the Netherlands, yes I put in "mailto:nobledesign@sbcglobal.net" in place of url links and this time my browser Safari couldn't locate the sbcglobal.net server. At least I'm getting closer? In the meantime, I'll simply post the email there. Thanks for your help.

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  6. Whoa! Talk about a stab in the dark! I, who know less than nuttin about html code, figured it out! (Huub's keeping up his feedback hinted enough to scoot me onto the answer)

    Duh.

    Yay.

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  7. Anonymous3:38 PM

    About your armature guest... What would happen if an armature puppet with some small props were to be mailed around the world, stopping off to visit various animators who would bring it to life in a short clip and then mail it to the next person? Perhaps the clips could be uploaded to stopmoshorts.com or something as a running series? No rules but only the creative imagination of each animator to do something with the character. Would that be an interesting experimental project?

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  8. K-a-HILLER idea DG!!! I love it! That's kind of what the Darkstrider Unibrain Webcam Patrol of Joy was all about. It was Mike's first stop motion cammy and he generously shipped it to me to learn my chops and then when I graduate I'm to send her on to the next newbee deemed worthy. But I love your art experiment concept. It would be a real creative challenge and exercise in collective creativity.

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  9. That is a great idea... sort of like animated garden gnomes - you know, how people take a gnome all around the world and take pics of it in various exotic locations.

    And Shellsters - so freakin' COOL that you tuned in and tied down!!!! Dig it!

    Oh, and I gotta have a button! Maybe a few so I could hand em out to peeps? Entirely at your discretion of course. But I'll put one on this neato keeno Fund My Short hat I got sittin' here....

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  10. Blogger seems to automatically precede the mailto link with an "http://www" .... that's why it treats it like a server.

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  11. Anonymous11:36 PM

    Oh, I checked your link in the sidebar and it works fine there... congrats Shelley! But I urge you posthaste to remove the visible link to your email before the SPAMBOTS find it and you start getting hundreds of spam emails everyday! Not fun, let me tell you. It happened to my Earthlink account, and trashed it.

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  12. Woo. Thanks for letting me know that!

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  13. Oh and Mikee, you got sent the FIRST EVER button, ;º> and I've ordered a second pressing of the first design, so I'll have more to send you next week. And THANKS!!!

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  14. Wow, I feel so special! Shelley, you da BOMB!!

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  15. One more thing I'd like to mention....

    Please don't entirely give up on wire-atures. I suspect the steel in the Mach 3 is causing problems. A pur almaloyature will move as smooth as... well, maybe not butter exactly, maybe margarine. But there are things you can do with wire that no machined armature can do, like Buster's sphaghetti arms. And it's great for those extra characters that don't demand to be fully machined.

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  16. The pliability of the Almaloy frightened me. I shall heed your wise advice in the future. Trying to think these matters out for myself has proven to be a total waste. :-*} Thanks Mike!

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  17. Anonymous10:14 PM

    Oh -- btw, I sentchya nitrile gloves, not neoprene. I picked up a box at a surgical supply store after a bevy of research finally revealed that nitrile's one of the few things that's going to be really effective with epoxy putty. Word to the wise: latex gloves don't protect well against epoxy.

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  18. "Trying to think these matters out for myself has proven to be a total waste."

    On the contrary, I think you've been doing excellently! It's sometimes frustrating/scary to me when you set out to try something that I've tried and seen countless newbies try on the message board against the advice of all the pros and semi-pros, like for instance all the strange devices/techniques people always attempt to avoid making tie-downs. for some reason people fear the tie-down. I can understand it... it seems weird. Most people never know about them until they hit the message board and post these desperate threads with titles like "My puppit cant balence hw do U mak dem balinc in of centr pusishunz??!!"

    It was so hard to watch you go through all that, but then I realized that along the way you were learning invaluable things about support rods etc (which you can use for all sorts of things), and there's just no substitute for actual experience. It sucks that having been through it and learned the lessons yourself, you can't pass on the wisdom to others... they have to go through the experiences themselves. But you came through with flying colors and ended up making the right choices.

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