The Week Ending Today 181209

Saturday November 28 13:30

Some old-fashioned augments — I think that’s some Mario and an old-fashioned, chemo-tech *wheat paste* post-up — found in Paris, France over the Thanksgiving holiday — which means nothing there in France.

Last week was maintenance and tidying-up. Like returning from a long trip and sorting through all the stuff, experiences, dirty laundry and receipts. There was mostly a bit of cataloging and filing of material related to Project Trust (aka *Project Foghorn*, a.k.a. *Project Firefoot*), which has tipped into a nice swirl of spin-off explorations mostly related to the power of sight/speech and signaling. Very exciting futures yet to be had.

Over the last few weeks we sluiced quickly and excitedly into the world of *match moving* production for the purposes of exploring some of the background challenges of designing and communicating design concepts in a way that avoids the dreaded *PowerPoint* ((cue blood-curdling scream)) — there will be more to say to this point when we can cue up some examples of why and what-for this approach to designing and communicating the designing (in-process, in-final form, &c.) All 12 people who read this blog will know why this is important and, indeed — significant to doing what we do. In the meantime, take it on faith that this will be a cornerstone of the design fiction idiom. Visual communication + story.

To this point, we have been adding to the design quiver — Mocha, Syntheyes and a rough competency with AfterEffects, Maya and an ongoing leveling-up of Catia and Bunkspeed’s Hypershot. (Sadly, the new Bunkspeed Hypermove animation package — while perceivably as easy to use as Hypershot with the addition of *time* has no integration with fbx animation throughputs so the tool basically sits on its own in a big world of scripted or programmatic animation. We’ll keep an eye on it for future editions that would allow camera moves to be integrated properly.)

It was pre-holiday time in the Nokia studio with lots of people drifting off for their vacations, which the laboratory will do *as well* starting presently. Vacations are vague in the Laboratory. I expect to see lots of ongoing dips and dives in and out of what we do.
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