ANDY KAUFMAN

The other day a friend pointed me in the direction of some videos on youtube.com... the videos were of Andy Kaufman, an American performer / entertainer / comedian (even though he didn’t like to call himself a comedian) his videos intrigued me to know more about him and his style of entertainment.

After a little reading up on Andy I discovered that in 1999 a film was made about him called “Man On The Moon” starring Jim Carry. Only having seen a few short videos of the real Andy Kaufman on the internet and reading what Wikipedia had to offer on him, I thought that Jim Carry’s portrayal was chilling accurate. There is something that doesn’t make sense about Andy’s humour and entertainment, but I kind of get the feeling I’m not meant to fully understand… see what you think…

Jim Carry (as Andy) – Man On The Moon



Andy Kaufman – Andy’s Fun House

ONE STEP FORWARD, 2 STEPS BACK

I’ve been wrestling with flash for the past few weeks trying to produce my Tetris TV ident for E4 (the video above ^^) I got bogged down in lots and lots of key frames and tweens and it has sort of distracted me from working on much else over the past weeks.

Eventually after trying out many different ways of producing similar results I came to putting together this version (it isn’t the finished version)
I am planning on getting some help from one of my tutors to lend a hand with some of the transition effects, so hopefully it will look a bit more polished but you get the general feel for it. The sounds used in this were produced from sampling a Nintendo DS and then re-making them using Cool Edit Pro, as illustrated in a previous post.

Any feedback or comments would be much apriciated! Please add yours by clicking the “comments” link situated... below...

CHANGE OF SUBJECT?

This is such a ‘Geeky’ subject to be posting about but, oh well… C*CK IT!
Counter Strike - I have been playing this internet based video game for just over a year (it took over my life for the first few months, but now I play in moderation)

CS is basically a FPS game (First Person Shooter)
2 teams... Terrorists Vs Counter Terrorists.
The objective of the game is for the Counter Terrorists to rescue the hostages… which the opposite team, the Terrorists are defending.
The whole game itself is put together around short 3 min rounds, which quickly makes it a very addictive game and has kept millions of people world wide coming back for more and more since the late 1990’s.

During each round any player has the ability to use spray tags around the games level, these tags can be ANY image that the player wishes. Spray tags is something that has been added into the game so players can establish an identity amongst other players in the same game. To be honest, it is something most players don’t really make use of.

When playing the other night, I was lured into a virtual ambush, I got shot then proceed to die, probably by the hands of some unknown 15yr old sat at his PC somewhere across the ocean. He/She used a sneaky tactic that involved the use of spray tagging. They had made a spray tag of another player/character, sprayed it onto a wall within the level, thus distracting the opposition (and me) for just enough time so they could pick off the enemy one by one with a long distance riffle.

*observe the screen shot below… clever boys!

RECORD DECK

Thanks to some help from my man James I have produced another test sting for E4, but this time its for E4 Music!



Had some good fun doing this one, even got to make a little E4 7'' inch...
(as photographed below along with a shot of the location set-up)



“E4 Record” – Gav Cooper
youtube.com

KITTY KAT

Here is another test sting for the E4 project.
I threw this together in the space of about twenty minutes, from scratch.
I'm not so fond of the final outcome but I really like the bases of the idea... ANNOYING THE CAT – HA!

"Animals" was one of the main answers that I got back from my questionnaire (they make people happy).

“E4 Kitty” – Gav Cooper
youtube.com

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

A friend who commented on a previous post pointed out the issue of copyright with regards to a test animation that I had created, which can be seen... here.

I started to look into this further and discovered a very relevant documentary on the Tetris copyright issue. Most people remember Tetris from the Game Boy but few know the context in which that came about and quite what a chance thing it was.

It covers the rivalries between Nintendo and Atari and the absurdities of buying copyrights for software from a country that didn't believe in property (Communist Russia) The documentary also shows just how vast the gap was between the East and West.

TETRIS: From Russia With Love (BBC4)

An important documentary about a very important game.

SOUNDS

One of the key things that was pointed out to myself and others in my narratives team (group work project) when we presented our design board presentation last year, was that we had not considered the audio at all on our film. So for a change... I've decided to learn from my mistakes.

One of the TV stings that I am making for the Identities assignment and also the E Stings competition is going to be based on a video game...
*please see the previous post

Over the past week I have been looking into video game sound effects (mostly retro/puzzle style games) I hooked up my Nintendo DS through my computer (with some help from Matt) and recorded some sound samples from various games. Using Cool Edit Pro to record, edit and alter the sounds has proven to be lots of fun and very successful in producing the desired effect.