If you were paying attention to my blog a year ago you may remember that a young lady named Olivia Walker and I had all kinds of fun creating goofy images of ourselves using the special effects that come with Apple’s Photo Booth application. (If you’d like to refresh your memory, you can click here and scroll down the page a bit.)

So when I got in the mood to experiment with iMovie a couple of weeks ago and needed some visual raw material to work with (having no "real" video footage as a result of having no camcorder), I decided to whip together a visual soufflé made up of those magnificently distorted photos and a bit of video created by my iMac’s built-in camera, with some animated opening credits made with Adobe Flash.

It was a learning exercise and the result is rough-hewn, to say the least. But anyone who’s curious is welcome to have a look. (Yes, yes, I know that I’m no competition for James Cameron, but I’m sure you’ll bear in mind that I’m an iMovie newbie and be kind.)

Here are two things I learned from this exercise:

1 I should have made the end credits larger; these are pretty unreadable. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t make it easy to insert minor changes once a video is posted.

2 Olivia’s last name is just "Walker," not "Cole-Walker." (This from her parents, Bo and Lynn, who were otherwise cheerful about the indignities imposed on their daughter.) I don’t know how I got confused about that, but I intend to revise Olivia’s IMDB listing accordingly without delay.

And a final caveat: Credit Apple’s Photo Shoot application and built-in webcam for the images in this video. That Canon camera that Olivia and I are bandying about is nothing but a sneaky red herring.

Fooledja, didn’t we?

Today’s Extra Credit

A UAB (University of Alabama in Birmingham) art history student named Stephen Smith wrote me a month or so ago to let me know that Stuck Rubber Baby and I were going to figure prominently in a paper he was writing about graphic novels as fine art. He asked if I would confirm a few facts and provide a few observations on the subject.

Naturally I tried to be helpful. Getting an occasional (like, once every two decades) mention in, say, The New York Times is pleasant, but having my name bandied about in my youthful turf’s halls of ivy (or is that halls of kudzu?) is special.

How well I remember when I was the guy writing papers like the once Stephen’s been laboring over! Lemme tell ya: being the guy getting written about is a lot less work.

I should mention that an excerpt from Stephen’s interesting paper has gotten play in the January 2010 edition of the Birmingham Free Press I learned last week—and there’s even a link to the whole treatise.

Good going, Stephen…and thanks for paying attention to a hometown boy.

And Now For a Little
Something Different…