my name is mwd

Yesterday I watched this very funny (and full of rather strong language) short about the relationship between graphic designers and clients (thanks to Andy Field):

It’s all quite funny and I suspect very sadly true (I know I’ve tried the future work thing before, oops!), but what’s really amazing is that the video is made just using a website, xtranormal. You simply select a style, enter a script, specify a few simple expressions and camera angles, and you can produce fairly professional looking CGI animations.

It’s really amazing – and they’ve achieved what I think is the key to any good technology, you don’t need to be at all technical or skilled in the arts to produce good content – you just need an idea and you can get on an execute it.

The quality of the example content is variable as you’d expect, but some of the things people have produced is very funny. Like all good machinima, a lot takes advantage of the medium rather than just ignoring it, like the adventures of Pete and Barb, which had us in stitches: