Ann Vole

07:24 pm: Stupid is as stupid does
Most people who have had North American Opossums as pets say they are real stupid. On the "Over the Hedge" movie DVD extras is a "Critter 411" featurette that shows clips of the movie and clips of the real animals the characters are based on and has pop-up facts about the real animals. It states that opposums score higher then dogs on intelligence tests. It also says squirrels have brains the size of walnuts with Hammy saying "I'm not stupid" so the actual facts might be skewed a bit by the author's biases. My point of this post is to say that intelligence based on tests may not match a person's general assesment of intelligence of that species or individual. Part of that difference is that brains will specialize in certain kinds of thinking to the detriment of other kinds of thinking. This specialization is both based on species and instinct or based on individual interests and experiences. Part of the reason I am currently obsessed with degus is that they are very similar in instinct and wild habits to Richardson Ground Squirrels (RGS). RGS are known to have a detailed verbal language to convey the location, movement, intent and species of intruders to be heard by other RGS hiding underground. Degus are also quite vocal includimg a wide variety of warning calls and interaction noises when socializing. With chinchillas and African Soft-furred Rats (ASFR) living with them, I can compare their different kinds of intelligence with other critters. So far the degus seem just as smart or smarter then the other two species at each kind of thinking that I can compare so I am not so sure that all that language-based thinking has had any detrimental effect on othe kinds of thinking. I am guessing that might be because animals without a communication method have to expend more brain-power to figure out the thoughts of fellow critters making language-based thinking to have a neutral net effect on intelligence. You may have caught the reference in the title to Forest Gump. Forest Gump was a character tested to be very stupid with intelligence tests but he has a history-changing genius as you saw in the movie. Trying to discover objective ways of testing different kinds of intelligence will be a key activity of mine with any forms of interactive communication being very important in the test designs.

04:36 pm: Multilinual puns
I noticed that the movie "Over the Hedge" is called "Nos Voisins Les Hommes" in French. I am rusty on my French but my guess is that title means "our cousins the humans". Because of that, I tried watching it in French with French subtitles to try and find differences between the original and the French version. One difference I caught was when Hammy the squirrel confused the words "Rabid" and "Rabbit"... Zamy (the French squirrel's name) confused "Enragé" with "Orangé". This is a completely different pun but in the same location and about the same disease (I think). I have the first book of the collected comic the movie was loosely based on and in one strip, Hammy made the same rabbit/rabid mistake with his line at that point being almost identical word-for-word so I can see why they included it in the movie but I doubt they considered how that pun would make translations to other languages difficult. A different sort of pun was where RJ the raccoon was describing all the traps they had to watch out for (lots) and then commented that Verne the turtle was "looking a little green"... that pun translated without trouble into French because the pun was the color of Verne rather then the pronounciation of similar-sounding words. Another spot when they were saying "Bear" and RJ thought they said a variety of other words... same idea for words that sound like "Our" (French for bear)... it does not matter what the words are as long as they are similar-sounding.

Off topic but I noticed the words ouch and ow were the same in French... is that sound instictual or cultural? By that I mean did we learn to say that in response to pain or would we say that even if we did not have language? I can recognise the pain sounds and fear sounds of various rodent species and they are usually consistant with species rather then with foster parrents of a different species indicating an instict source. Other sounds like "don't steal my food" or "leave me alone" sort of sounds seem to be cultural in that animals raised by a different species of mother make the sounds the mother would make for that meaning or sometimes the animal will make the correct sound for the species of the animal they are saying the sound to.

12:08 pm: Movie music trends
I noticed that lots of animated films made recently have a popular (but a bit folksy) song writer paired with a classical composer and then hire at least one country singer for part of the cast. This combo seems to work but it is so specific and so common that I wonder if someone wrote that formula down somewhere and film makers are following that directive religiously. They also seem to also hire a pop rock band to make a song that is slightly related to the story and produce a video of that song with clips from the movie. This pop rock song is usually played durring the credits.

11:57 am: Company colors
I wanted to paint all my vehicles and buildings in some sort of color scheme and maybe even get shirts to wear when working in those colors. Most of the vehicles and buildings will be connected to my alternate energy stuff so that is the first consideration for the reasons behind the colors chosen. The key concept is to store heat in the ground so I was thinking of using a "dirt" color and red for heat (and red is my favorite color and my bus -the biggest vehicle- is already painted red). For a third color, white is a good color for roofs and could represent light (as in solar). Yellow is another possibility because the use of oil as a transfer medium is also important and yellow is more "sun-like" then white. For the "dirt" color, it can go on the bottem of the vehicles so they do not look as dirty as they likely are with lots of country road driving. Dirt can be all sorts of colors but a grey-tan color shows up in several company uniform colors so is more likely to be available from work-cloths stores.

01:19 pm: Evil government conspiracy
The city of Regina has been targeting people who own multiple rental properties with required repairs (many of very frivolous nature like painting soffets or difficult to do like painting fences in winter) that must be done within one month or the city will send over-priced workesrs to do the job, add an outragious fine of several tens of thousands of dollars and add it to the property taxes. Then, with a new law, unpaid taxes give the city the right to aquire some of the properties at a very low price to pay the back-taxes. If this does not work, they require gas or electrical inspections and these city-paid inspectors test for black mold and fomaldihyde and radon while they are inside with the express goal of condemning the building. Condemned buildings must be removed quickly or (you guessed it) the city does th job, adds a huge fine and adds it to the property taxes. The city's revenue numbers have gone up substancially due mostly to property taxes and fines (one number) and sale of city-owned land (they have not bought farm land for years so you can guess what the source of all that land they are selling is from). I am writing this as my brother's house (a block from mine and still with my parrent's name on the deed) was inspected for fence repair (5th work reqirement in 2 years) and the house next door is being torn down right now... was condemned last month and gas meter removed so it was likely a gas inspection. One of the other properties of my parrents has a required gas inspection and was required to replace the furnace. I see now why my parrents are anxious to get their name off the house I am buying from them and why they are trying to sell their last 2 properties in Regina (they just sold the one with the new furnace). All this is likely the result of an effort to make "slum-lord" (landlord of low income housing) a dirty word. Along with this effort, rent rates have more them doubled in the last two years and available suites have been less them 1% of rental properties for about 4 years in a row now. This is also another reason I figure my parrents do not want me to rent my house... less risk of health inspectors and renter damage at the time of other inspections. I am curios if my unrented 4 suite building is part of that 1% available or not.

Joseph of the Bible who advised Pharoh to store grain for a coming famine was the start of the first communistic state as the starving people sold their properties to Pharoh to buy grain. The fall of the power of Egypt followed soon after. Some say it was the lack of slave labour but the Israelites were only a portion of that slave force... I think instead it was a failure of central planning as we seen more recently in the former USSR. The key problem I think is lack of incentive to provide services or products if government controls eliminate a means of improving one's income by satisfying customers better. Free market competition and more specifically anarchy (as defined as a tendancy toward lack of government and government controls) seems to be the best way to allow individuals to profit from doing a better job at serving the customers.

12:32 pm: Write lines or draw them?
I bought several used DVDs at a place near the cheap theater ("second run" movies that recently quit showing at the other theaters) with a sale on: 6 DVDs for $20 including tax. Because I only wanted 4 particular movies, I grabbed two that had me curious, one of which was "Ace Ventura Jr". It was a fun movie if you remember the original "Ace Ventura, Pet Detective" movie but otherwise a poor movie based on my "gut reaction". I could not see anything specifically wrong though, just lack of ... something. On the DVD extras were several "extended scenes". Watching those, I saw even more of this missing something. I found all th
e stuff funny and entertaining and even well acted and directed so the problem is what the contained rather then what they forgot. My conclusion is that there is too much writing... too much witty statememts, too much great story arcs, too much fun dialog... the problem is not the quality of the content but rather having too much content, the quantity.

I took three script writing courses (two by people who wrote scripts of Oscar-winning movies... but neither won "best writer" -hehe- but big-time movies) and they all said to only write dialog and leave the movie making (actions, camera angles, emotional cues) to the directors and actors. The third script writing course included hands-on directing of your own script. At the time, I was intent on making a half-hour movie based on a children's book "Robinson Rabbit, What Do You Hear?" with an important scene that was not in the book (but still true to the book). I chose to do that scene for my director part of that course. The 5-minute scene had only three words of dialog and I wanted it to be said by an off-screen character. This meant 5 minutes of script writing with no dialog. I must have been a bit crazy to do this as well being that the main character was a rabbit who was ashamed of his big ears... produced by professional actors, lighting crew, camera people (shot on broadcast-quality video). The set designer made the ears and the actor did a wonderful job but... he was used to memorizing dialog rather then my pages and pages of actions and emotional cues and camera angle suggestions. I realized then and there that I was truly an animator at heart and should have story-boarded the scene. My goals have changed in terms of what sort of movies I want to do... realistic animal acting stuff rather then cartoon characters (even if the animals are completely computer generated characters). What I need to perfect is my story-board skills rather then script writing.

The key difference between script writing and story-boarding is that of jobs two of the most important people on a film, the DOP (Director of Photography) and the editor. A good script should be free of any cues for those jobs but story-boards are almost purely the work of DOPs and editors. Script writers expand a film with content but DOPs shrink films by using "film language" to convey ideas and emotions in parts of a second without anything being said and obviously an editors job is usually to make a fim shorter (but that is not the real job of the editor). Script writers do not deal with time (although a well writen script will generally have a certain page-to-film-time rate) but DOPs and editors key jobs are to manipulate the audience's sense of time and pacing. Animators and musicians -and good storyboard artists- deal with movement, syncronous micro-second timing, and emotions.

The animator, the mucician, and the story-board artist in me are all saying to start drawing storyboards.

I fell asleep while writing this and was puzzled that it was dark outside in the middle of the day. I finished the post and before sending it, had another dream that happened in a movie set... the lights are only on the scene outside of a window if the camera will see out that window.

07:06 am: Enchanted, Heaven, badger, badger, badger
There are a few movies and TV shows mixing animated characters and live action characters but the movie "Enchanted" seems to have one aspect that is unique; all the characters are one way or the other (animated or live action) based on the world they are in. It does not matter which world they are born in, they match the world they are currently in. The only exception was Pip's ability to "tip the scales" (rather a "cartoon logic" thing) in both worlds.

I figure Heaven will be like that... a different dimensions so-to-speak with different physical laws and we will have different bodies to match. Some people object to that idea because they feel (rightly based on quite a number of verses) that our physical bodies are reserected when we go to the afterlife. The idea that our reserected bodies match the logic and physics of what ever world the person is in allows me to believe in a physical reserection because I feel the physics and logic do change in heaven but also angels can show up on earth as normal humans.

A funny thing I just noticed in "Enchanted"; the animal lineup handing possible lips for the prince-maniquin to Giselle ended with a badger and the next item the badger would have been holding (before the cut of that shot) would have been a red-with-white-spots mushroom. I figure that was a nod to the "Badger, Badger, Badger" Flash animation (internet meme).

02:22 am: Could you be a killer?
My brother got beat up by a gang of teens (and my brother is built like an ox). What shook him up was the knowledge that he knew how and was willing to kill them but refrained from doing so. I have been more emotionally attached to pet rodents than any humans I know yet when life forced me to, I killed those animals (humanely of course) but it was at that point that I realized that the only thing keeping me from murdering humans were external things... against the law, would cause emotional suffering of other people, against one of the Bible's 10 commandments, etc. On the inside, humans and the irritating pest wild mice I kill are on the same value level for me. Of course I know all the possible consequences and am a nice guy who never thinks of revenge and never contemplates harm to others so murder would never happen but ... my lack of internal inhibitions is a bit scary to me.

07:24 pm: Poker face and body language
With small animals, facial expressions do not display well but instead, tails and ears usually show all the emotions. I figure this is a result of how far away the animals are away from each other when conveying those emotions to each other. While watching the film "The Wild" (Disney film with zoo animals vs wildebeests) I was amazed at how close the CG character designs were to the real animals but also noticed the biggest differences between CG and real were tools needed for facial expressions. The joke that Benny (the squirrel) admiring Bridget's spots (the Giraffe) and she saying "my eyes are up here" tells a lot in that as humans, we see each other's faces more then other body parts (except maybe boobs). For animal actors and animated animal characters, the key to making the human audience feel for the soul of the characters is the expressions that are visible in the eyes and face. I have seen rodent faces up close showing that they have a lot of control of facial muscles but just rarely use that control to make facial expressions. Maybe that facial muscle control and facial expressions us humans are used to can be taught to animals to advance animal acting to the level that we saw in Bolt in the "Bolt" movie where facial expressions were seen on real animals by the audience. My idea of developing a computer program that displays an animated character to interact with human computer users was originally to imteract with real animals using animal body language cues to speed up the lamguage learning process for the animals. Of course it can also be used to teach human facial expressions to animals too.

10:20 pm: Weather is a month late again
All year the weather we have been getting here (Regina) has been the weather we would have expected a month earlier. Normally we get snow that stays still spring sometime in early October but it is only tonight that we got our first snowfall (and it is melting when it hits the ground still).

11:04 pm: Near death experiences
There is a bit of a debate about the source of the experiences people have when cheating death... is it just an oxygen-deprived brain? is it a state of mind that happens at such times? is there really an afterlife? Another debate is whether or not non-humans have an afterlife too or have a spiritual component. There have been several times where I have revived an animal that was essentially dead including my female blue degu. By the way, she seems almost completely normal (only difference is she does not run quite as fast as the others). If I eventually get two-way communication with my rodents, the opportunity will be sure to arise where I will revive one of them and ask what their experience was like. I am not sure if any of the above questions will be definatively answered but they may be partially expounded upon enough to spark more revealing questions.

10:32 pm: Dry curd cottage cheese and alien life forms
My dad has recently been diagnosed with diabetes and his study on the subject showed that the disease state can be avoided if the would-be diabetic kept their diet to low-glycemic-index foods. The glycemic index is a measure of how high your blood sugar increases when you eat the particular food. 1% and 2% cottage cheese has a fairly high glycemic index but dry curd cottage cheese is much lower (and high in protien, low in fat, no lactose etc). I cannot stand the taste (or more specifically, lack of taste) of dry curd cottage cheese so I have to figure out new ways to get flavor it it. Because of this, I sometimes have a container of dry curd cottage cheese hanging around for a few days and it gets mold on it. Regular cottage cheese never gets moldy except sometimes a spot on the surface but dry curd will get spots anywhere in the container due to air getting everywhere. With all lifeforms we see like plants, animals and fungii being in one genetic kingdom, it shows that one unique thing of this kingdom is the reliance on air including the highly reactive oxygen. All other lifeforms that we know of are microscopic and simple. I am wondering why. I can see cel designs that need oxygen or easy food can have a great advantage by living as a multicellular organism but for a multicellular lifeform to develop without those needs, I think there needs to be some other shared advantage to have a reason to congregate and form specialization of cel function. I also wonder about the "ancient" types of bacteria that can handle extreme temperatures, why change? Basically I see no reason for them to be the source of other lifeforms. It did cross my mind though that these lifeforms may have populated the galaxy with the basic blueprint of life as we know it. Back to the topic, I want to "design" lifeforms for my science fiction but want them to be as different biologically as possible while showing the resulting creature to be as close to human as possible. Basically I want to emphasize how close animals are to us humans by showing how something very unlike earth life can be very human-like.

01:15 pm: Broken families in fiction
Someone recently was lamenting how modern fiction was so full of broken families. Everyone in "Enchanted" seemed to be in some sort of broken family with many references to step-mothers. This is of course strongly influenced by Cinderella and Snow White but it does not stop there, Grimm Brothers and other tale chroniclers show that broken families are th main staple for fictional character backstories. Orphans are common too but I see making the character an orphan is lazy, cheating, etc. Dealing with loss and betrayal while still trying to maintain the remaining family ties is where a characters soul is really rotated so we can see all sides of the character in action.

12:41 pm: Character design in Enchanded and Chicken Little
The new tools with 3D character design can actually save a lot of animator time for getting the movement and poses perfect but when it comes to finished art in the film frame, there are a lot of departments and technical artists involved to get the hair, clothing, lighting, texture, etc to work. Kung Fu Panda spent great effort just on the aspect of clothing interacting with the fur of the characters wearing that clothing. I have been waiting to see the movie "Ugly Duckling and Me" for years now so was willing to settle for some episodes of the TV show based on the movie. These characters are rendered like video game landscapes when the computer is too slow for the game... large panels of texture and lots of stretching of shapes to make the animation. It looks crude at first but quickly (for me anyways) I forget all that and enjoy the story and the crazy (but perfect) facial expressions for the characters who really seem to think on multiple dimentions. Chicken Little took 3D animation to new places at the time but what is overlooked I think is the character design. Each character took a concept of character design and took that concept to absurd proportions then made the character work. They also tried to make the whole world seem like a cartoon with bright solid colors like cel animation. Part of that process took some aspects of the character's body and turning them into simple shapes including some fine negative space shapes (negative space is an art term refering to the shapes of nothing created by the surounding objects). The 2D animated parts of Enchanted had a unique (as far as I know) way of creating furriness of these 2D characters. Moon-shaped clear spots were placed all over fluffy areas like tails and the top of heads. These shapes should be easy to make and animate in programs like Flash. On Chicken Little, they developed a bit of programming to adjust the rigging of the 3D character to match a 2D digital sketch of that character making the animation process very close to 2D drawn-on-paper animating. I would like to set up an automatic process stream where rough drawings can manipulate a simple 3D character rigging which will be used by programming to manipulate or create a 2D Flash character similar to the design ideas in Enchanted. The same can be done for turning 3D sets into 2D matte painting images to place the 2D Flash characters into.

11:44 am: Animal sounds and pet culture
I have had lots of ferrets and seen lots in pet stores here in Canada and have never heard one make a "dook" sound like I keep reading that they make. Recently I finally did hear such a sound from a ferret recently... a ferret who was originally from Texas. What inspired this post is the menu animation for "Enchanted" (the live action with animation with Pip the chipmonk) where they have a raccoon running past and give it a bark-like noise as it runs past. I don't recall ever hearing a raccoon make a bark sound but with all the noises they do make, I would not be surprised if a bark is included in their "vocabulary". Of course there is always sounds added for animals in shows even if those animals never normally make any noise (like the squeaks for all the rats and mice). Degus make loads of sounds and also imitate the sounds of other animals. Every group of degus I have ever aquired over the years had sounds unique to that group. While interacting with my degus (and making sure the squashed girl is OK), I noticed one earlier degu teaching a new degu the sounds chinchillas make for that situation. With several small animals now known to have specific sounds for specific reasons in the wild, I wonder if the way humans raise animals destroys any chance of cultural things like language (or at least specific sounds or movements with specific meanings). I keep hearing that cats only "meaw" to humans but I know all the kittens of various wild feline species I have ever had the chance to meet (bobcats, cheetahs, ocelots, cougars) meaw to everybody including each other. Mother cats also meaw to their kittens too. Whether these sounds mean anything deaper then the obvious is debatable but they might in a wild setting in a world where the animals are not hunted by humans limiting interation and population density.

I will keep this part short as you will have read it earlier in my blog: I hope to figure out how to foster and encourage the passing-on of any culture a pet species might have and maybe try to aquire such culture from wild stock of that species so it can be studied and so the life of the pets will be more interesting mentally.

Off topic but I just noticed that Prince Edward in "Enchanted" knew Pip by name (although Pip did get the Prince and show him the portal) so I was thinking of the backstory of Pip including a deleted scene where Pip aquires some of Edward's real hair for Giselle's prince maniquin. Seems like Pip was more of a matchmaker (known by both Giselle and the castle staff and royalty... doing the opposite as Nathaniel making the essence of the film being the opposite paths of these two characters clashing rather then any evil or good maxiums at the ends of those paths. Making the story about the paths of good and evil clashing rather then actual good and evil characters clashing is an interesting twist (and more real) then the classic good vs evil thing.

02:35 am: Squashed dreams
I hope to breed blue degus so bought 2 males and two females (double recessive gene so both parrents need to show the gene for blue babies) but I was shipped three males and one female. I figured that would be OK as long as the one female produced some male babies. The rest will be out-bred with regular degus where 1/4 of the grandchildren will show the blue gene. Tonight I accidentally laid on top of the female blue degu and found her not breathing. I gave her CPR and managed to revive her but she was unconcious for a few minutes and then unable to walk right when she awoke. Now she is almost back to normal but I sense she is still in a bit of pain with one of her arms. None of the major bones feel broken but small bones like ribs or shoulder blades are hard to feel on a degu.

12:05 am: Richard Rich and the life of Christ
There was an animator at Disney studios at the time when Don Bluth left the studio and took a bunch of animators with him (to produce Secret of NIMH) named Richard Rich. Richard kind of had a lucky break with staying as he moved into senior positions including director of some films. Later Richard made a few non-Disney films (I believe the Balto film series are included in that catagory). The public Library here sells books and DVDs it gets donated and some it chooses to take out of circulation. One of the donated DVDs (has no library stamps or lables so was not in circulation) called "The Animated Passion" was on sale so I bought it for a buck. The images on the cover are quite cheesy-looking so I was expecting the worst. Looking at it more closely, I saw that Richard Rich was both producer and director so I knew it had to be at least OK for content. I was pleasently surprised at how well it was edited and layed out. Even the animation was well done but the flaw was poor quality between the drawn images and the final film, mostly in cel coloring and cel registration. The only things that bothered me were assumptions made such as Judas (the one who betrayed Jesus) who was in charge of the deciples' money, must have been stealing some of that money. That may be likely but it is not specifically stated so. I am going to have to look closely at other things made by this Richard Rich guy.

11:41 pm: Strange movie ideas
A business guy fears someone might be putting a keyboard on his office computer to save what he types so he keeps buying new keyboards and tossing the repacement in the dumpster. Some criminals were indeed trying exactly that in an attempt to get some way of blackmailing this office worker and rigged the keyboard to email the info as soon as an internet connection is made. Some "sleeper cell" would-be terrorists found one of these bugged keyboards in a dumpster and used it while emailing and texting each other to plan their attack. The would-be blackmailers find out about these would-be terrorists and proceed to blackmail the terrorists. The office worker was involved with corporate crime which is why he was so paranoid about the keyboard possibility (and many other measures he took) and the FBI or CIA or other such intelligence agency was proceeding to investigate him. They find out about the would-be blackmailers and start sniffing around with the mistaken belief that the would-be blackmailers were another intelligence agency also on the corporate crime case. I don't know how this story will end but I like how it is unfolding.

I already forgot the other two ideas I had in mind when I started this post but they were the strange ones

05:48 am: Villains and heros
On the commentary track for Kung Fu Panda, they mentioned a phrase that struck a chord with me: "A villain is the hero of his own story." Every character, no matter how good or evil or crazy, has a logic of some sort that convinces them that their actions are justified. The problem with that is inaction can very much happen beyond the will of any character.

09:50 pm: Traitor vs sinner
I just bought the DVD of Narnia TLTWATW because I wanted to see the beaver animation. Watching it I realized that Edmond was claimed by the White Witch because he was a traitor and Aslan was the replacement sacrifice. This got me thinking about salvation and "works". Maybe the "sins" of breaking the 10 commandments and other aspects of the law are not what Christ died to forgive but rather for being a traitor and part of the anti-God camp. Of course following the law shows respect for the one who made those laws and thus a willingness to be on the correct side of the battle. Of course this is just a thought rather than anything I currently believe.