Just to let you know, I'm not one of these guys that installs every single add-on or extension out there to my browser. I'm very picky and only like to add things that are practical. Well, I've found one recently that has been a HUGE help and best of all, it's very simple. It's called Screengrab! and here's what they say about it on their site:

"Basically Screengrab! let’s you take what you want from a web-page: the entire scrollable document, just the visible bit, or a draggable selection. Screengrab will even save just the contents of an individual frame."

It actually does what it says, it allows you to take a screen shot of just the browser contents while eliminating the surrounding browser. It has basically three options under two categories. You can copy the complete page or frame, just the viewable area or select a specific portion of the page to copy by drawing a simple box. The other section gives you the same options but instead of just copying, it saves them straight to a .png so you can skip pasting them into Photoshop altogether!

My old trick was using "ALT+prt sc" instead of just plain old print screen. In case you didn't know, that allows you to copy just the active program you are in instead of the entire screen. It's pretty helpful, but you still have to go and crop out the browser window or whatever. I got frustrated the other day and thought, "You know, some dude out there has to have made some kind of plug-in or something to let me just copy the content of the browser instead of the whole dang thing." Sure enough, the people, or person at Screengrab! made my day.

Give it a shot, I highly recommend it. Here's the link again: http://www.screengrab.org/home/
 

So basically I was interested in adding some services to my phone this morning. I've got a Treo 755p and have been interesting in using Google Maps on it. So I go to Sprint.com to check their rates and a little chat window opens up and I'm greeted by a person or robot named "Jessica". All I want is a price - what does it cost to add the features I'm interested in. Seems like an easy question. The whole conversation took about 30 agonizing minutes. Some of my responses may seem pretty harsh, and I probably shouldn't have taken out my rage on poor little "Jessica". So if "Jessica" is reading this, I apologize, you were probably trained wrong or were, in fact, a robot. Those of you who appreciate the great customer service at your local mobile provider may appreciate this conversation. Enjoy.

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Jessica says: Hello, I'm a Sprint products and services EXPERT (emphasis added). May I help you pick the plan that is best for you?

You say: I'm interested in adding Vision services to my phone and was wondering what the price would be?

You say: I'd just like to get Email and use google maps. I have a Treo 755p.

Jessica says: I can help you with that (I wonder how Sprint defines 'help'). First; may I move this chat to the top of the window? It will be out of the way and I can stay with you in case you run into any problems or if you have any questions, okay? (That's reasonable, thanks Jess)

You say: sure

JESSICA SENDS A PAGE

Jessica says: Can you see the page below?

You say: I don't see anything below, all I see is the chat section. (The page was gray for about five minutes until she replied)

Jessica says: I'm going to send a Web page to the bottom of your screen showing our great Sprint Wireless Plans. OK? (If at first you don't succeed...)

You say: sure. (I'm still trying to be reasonable)

(about five minutes passes)

You say: You there? (did you fall asleep, Jessica?)

Jessica says: Yes.

JESSICA SENDS A PAGE

Jessica says: Are you currently a Sprint or Nextel customer?

You say: yep

Jessica says: Would you like to upgrae your phone, add a new phone to share minutes, add a new phone with a new plan, or modify your services?

You say: well, I'd like to just use the google maps feature on my phone and maybe receive Email

Jessica says: Yes yu (not a typo) can do that. (DUH)

You say: ok, how much $$$

Jessica says: How much for what? (Uh, Star Wars collectibles on Ebay, what do you think?!)

You say: ok, do you understand what I am trying to do here? I am a customer. Customers pay money for services. I would like the features that I mentioned. There is a price you company charges for the services. I, as the customer, would like to know what they cost. (This was probably a little harsh)

Jessica says: Would you like to upgrade your phone, add a new phone to share minutes, add a new phone with a new plan, or modify your services?

You say: Look, am I talking to a computer, or someone who doesn't speak English? (This wasn't harsh, I was serious)

Jessica says: No you are not. (Well, that's a relief)

Jessica says: The Sprint website currently allows customers to modify their existing plans and services online by logging into your account.

Jessica says: I'm going to send the Sprint home page to the bottom of your screen so we may begin this process, OK?

You say: I tried logging in before I started this chat and my account said that it was currently not available. This happens a lot. (This is true, my account is unavailable about 80% of the time)

Jessica says: Unfortunately, we're unable to do that online. You can either visit a local Sprint Nextel store or contact Sales Support at 1-800-777-4681.

Jessica says: Is there anything else I can help you with today? (I swear Jessica is a robot)

Jessica says: Again, my name is Jessica. Thank you for visiting Sprint.com today. We appreciate your interest and look forward to meeting your wireless needs in the future. Have a great day.

You say: Wow, I can't believe what a waste of time this was. No offense.

Sprint: Thank you for your time.

(No Sprint, thank YOU)

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So there you have it. It doesn't look like I'll be adding any services soon, so I'll probably just wait until I get to the office or home to check my Email. I'll probably just use a real 'map' in the mean time as well. Thanks, Sprint!

 

 

 

This is a really great idea for a carry on bag that you can take with you to the airport. I'd love to get one and just see what the reaction is. Although I'm not sure I'd want to risk the cavity search. Get one for your friend and see what happens to them next time they fly the friendly skies.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/interests/giftsunder20/9856/

Ok, so I'm pretty stoked about the new Transformers movie. No, I was never really too 'in' to those crazy robots as a kid, but seeing how they are going to pull of the special effects on this one should be impressive. The theatrical trailers look cool; I'm sure the plot will stink, but hey, you get to see some crazy computer animation, and hear that awesome, classic mechanical transformer noise (it's no "Life of Guy" but it'll probably be alright). I'm a total special effects guy with movies. A good plot helps, but man, I want to be blown away. Remember seeing Jurassic Park for the first time and how real that T-Rex looked? See, that's what I'm talking about. So this is one I'm kinda looking forward to, and maybe I'll write a review about it after I see it, but don't hold your breath.

 
Manatees Are Weird Things
So I recently went on a vacation to Florida and we took this little boat down the Weeki Wachee river. As we were floating along we saw these signs, "Watch out for manatees" everywhere. To tell you the truth, I really wanted to catch a glimpse of and snap a shot of one of these elusive and rare creatures. Several folks floating down the river were telling us there were some up ahead, but we didn't see any; plus we thought they were messing with us. Maybe it had something to do with me looking like a freak standing up on the bow of the boat with camera-in-face looking for manatees. But then, all of a sudden, we saw a big grayish blob floating along in the water...'twas the beast! We floated by and got some good shots of the weird-looking tuskless walrus-type critter. So that's the story. I badly wanted to go and ride it or something, but that's pretty dang illegal out there. Floridians love their manatees and they'll have your hide if you go getting 'em all riled up.

So I've decided to give away all of our secrets on how we make cartoons. Just kidding. I won't give them ALL away, but I thought it would be interesting to some of our toon fans to show how a cartoon is made  from start to finish. We're going to use "The Holiday Hijack" as our subject for today. The first thing we do is form a gathering between myself and the PTB (powers-that-be) which is usually done online or over the phone. At this point, we basically brainstorm and come up with some ideas that we think will make a really killer cartoon. Usually one or more of us will throw together an initial script in a Word document. This document is then passed around and we do a little tweakin' here and there and the final result is usually pretty close to what the final result will be. You'll notice in the screen shot to the right, that there's mention of Thanksgiving instead of Christmas. Well that's because we couldn't get it out in time for Thanksgiving so we made a whole new Thanksgiving toon and re-wrote this one for Santa.

The next step is usually character design. If we have any new characters or anything, I'll sketch some mock  ups and we will determine if they'll do or not. This is a pretty fun stage because I get to go a little nuts and bring these characters/creatures to life and give them a little personality. These sketches are usually kinda messy and are pretty much the equivalent of a doodle.

Once we've got a general idea of what everyone is going to look like, I move to the storyboarding stage.  This is done in Illustrator and I sketch the scenes out right on the screen of the Wacom Cintiq that I use. This makes the process so much easier because I don't have to deal with eraser crumbs, scanning and having to redraw whole scenes. Every storyboard looks different and I use all different kinds of techniques to produce them, so the process is still pretty laid back and sketchy at this time. The storyboards are not very detailed and basically have the general elements of the storyline.

Next is the creation of the characters. In this case the LoadGremlin sketch was pasted into Adobe  Illustrator CS2 and placed on a lower layer and locked. Next I basically trace the character using the pen or pencil tool. Color is added along with shading and anything else necessary for the character. If the character is going to talk, walk, give a high-five, blink, or drop kick a dude, then all of the extremes or details need to be produced. Some of these things can be done later in Flash, but I prefer to do them in Illustrator so I have everything safely tucked away in one file and plus I can work faster in AI. The color profile needs to be sRGB so the colors don't get jacked up when you export the characters in swf format.

Now a cool part of this process is the creation of the backgrounds for the scenes. Since I sketched the  backgrounds in Illustrator, I can copy those sketches onto another file that I will use to eventually export to Flash. I trace the backgrounds just like I would a character and export them all as swfs. Now we've got all the building blocks to create the next toon! This next part is fun and fun-ny! This is where we record the voices for the cartoon. It's actually a pretty  amazing process, no one is in the same room when the recordings happen. They're all recorded from different locations depending on who is doing the voice. I will usually do all my voices first. I do the voice for Guy, the Boss, all the Gremlins (oh yea, that's me) and any other 'made up' characters that no one else wants to do. All of the other people who appear in the cartoon do their own voices - and, they work for Load! The only three fictional characters who are Load employees are 'The Boss', 'Guy' and 'Eva' the LoadGremlins and LoadGnomes are real and do a fantastic job. I do all my voices when I am alone because it is highly embarrassing and ridiculous. We use a nice little app for voice recording called Goldwave, it's pretty cheap and does a really great job. The resulting sound files are imported into Flash and a soundtrack is born. For special effects I use my voice and whatever stuff I have laying around my office that I can clunk around or make noise with. In the Easter Toon, when Adam eats the Easter egg; I actually was eating a real chocolate Easter egg. And because of the exceptional quality we strive for here at Load.com, I ended up doing 32 takes because that's all the chocolate - I mean I wanted it to be right.

So once all of the images and sound are done, it's time to throw this bad boy together. The entire process to create a toon can take from three days to around two weeks, depending on the final length of the toon. There's a lot of hard work and painstaking animation that has to happen to get everything just right. We make it look easy here at Load, but this process is finely tuned and we can pull these toons off in a relatively short amount of time. The rest of the animation process is very detailed and would take way too long to discuss here.

Voice synching is one of the most time consuming parts of the process. This is where you need to match the mouth of the character to audio track in Flash. There are software applications out there that can do  this on the fly, but I am not that impressed with their quality. I think the best way to do it is to go old school and match the mouth to the audio, one frame at a time. This is the best way to ensure that every syllable is exact. For example, Guy has over 14 different phonemic mouth shapes to make him say pretty much everything. If he is angry, upset, sad or his expression changes, an entirely new set of these mouths must be constructed. Is it a total pain in the rear? You bet?  Since we animate at 30 frames per second, each second of animation can feature up to 20 different changes in the character's mouth. My technique for animating these characters is to animate the entire head first. The head, each eye, eybrows, eyelids, hair, the mouth, everything that moves is on it's own frame and is animated indepentently and synched with the soundtrack. Every head is placed inside of a Flash graphic and not a Flash movie clip, that way I can see the actual animation as I scrub the timeline when outside of the graphic and so that we can more easily convert these cartoons to other formats other than Flash, like for TV, DVD and other media.

After a head is complete, then we move on to animate other body parts. I nest all of the body parts inside eachother for convenience. For example, let's say we have three main graphics, Guy's head (Guy_head),  upper torso (Guy_uppertorso) and lower body (Guy_lowerbody). These are all nested inside one main graphic called "Guy_body" inside this graphic, you will find a new timeline and two graphics, the upper torso and lower body. "But Steve, what about Guy's head???" Don't worry my friend, Guy's head is nested inside the upper torso, I'll explain why. Since I've already animated the facial features of the head, the head needs to move now, since in real life, we don't all talk with stiff  necks; we move around. So, you double click the upper torso and you now have a new timeline on which we move the head around, back and forth, up and down to create further expression. then we back out of that graphic and move the entire torso around so as the whole torso is moving, the head is bobing and the facial features are moving at the same time, tadaaaaa. If that wasn't enough, we back out of THAT graphic and are back to the main time line. Now we can move the entire body (Guy_body) around slightly so that some of the movement appears on the legs as well, thus creating the illustion of life in a 2D character. It works pretty well.

Usually, at the end of a cartoon, I'll throw in some Easter Eggs just for kicks. They are usually outtakes of  our recording screwups or Adam Rogas singing hip hop songs in his George W. Bush voice, and it's pretty dang hilarious. When we're all done, the final cartoon is then put live at LoadToons.com which you can get to by clicking on the LoadToons link, right here at Load.net. The entire process is really fun and we get quite a kick out of producing our own custom cartoons, right in house. Most of all, we love to share them will all of you and hear your feed back. We have some great stuff planned for the future so keep checking back and drop us any funny ideas if you have them, we love to involve the input of others in the toon-making process.

The main Load characters have had some upgrades throughout the years and I thought it would be fun to post some of the progress here for you to see (and laugh at). The original characters were commissioned to be static characters that just sat on a page or the web and point at things of importance. So I was into gradient meshes at the time, and decided to create Guy (known at the time by the code name ‘TechGuy’) using the gradient meshing capabilities of Illustrator CS, at the time.

After the success of a tech guy character whose name was creatively changed to simply ‘Guy’, it was decided by the powers-that-be (PTB) that a girl character needed to be developed. We originally wanted to pattern her after that famous queen of istockphoto, Ewa that we used so frequently in our advertising. So now we had two little illustrated office workers who could point out the coolness of Load to you all day long.

But it wasn’t enough, the PTB then decreed that these two needed to be animated; we need toons. So the first toon was actually a version of the Steelers toon created a year before it aired online (we just never got around to putting it up). After a year, my flash abilities had significantly improved (the first Life of Guy cartoon was actually the second or so thing I’d ever made in Flash), and I updated the cartoon for the superbowl since our client the Steelers had actually made it and won! Go Steelers! So that worked out perfectly.

I originally was trying to animate the characters in Flash in their gradient mesh form. As those of you who use Flash know, you can’t do that very effectively at all because the meshes are converted to raster images and they animate like crap in flash. So Guy and Eva went through their first evolutionary phase and became straight up solid vector people. This worked out great and gave the toons an awesome new look.

After a little while, Guy and Eva seemed a bit homely looking so they received a newer look that brought them to where they are today. Eva probably had the most drastic changes, she went from blonde, to redhead, and a little stocky to a more slender build, and pasty I-work-indoors-all-day flesh tone to a nice tropical tan. In this new upgrade, radial and linear gradients were implemented instead of the old gradient meshes. After finally feeling comfortable with the use of gradients in Flash, the Life of Guy characters got that little added zing that makes them what they are today.

As the toons gained a popular following of kids, adults, geeks, total geeks, uber geeks and other demographic groups, the PTB suggested a radical new idea which had never been done before (I can't prove that, but I'll put $5 down). The idea was to implement new characters that were based on real people: The actual Load employees. I imagine other companies who realized they can be sued into oblivion by even risking this drastic new move have not taken the leap to something like this (probably smart - probably). But we here at Load, love each other and would never do anything like that. So the 2006 Thanksgiving toon "Turkey Trouble" became the first toon to feature every employee of Load, each character using their own real-life voice. The 2006 Christmas toon "Holiday Hijack" featured Jan, Adam, Nick, Christopher and Pat. The 2007 New Years cartoon featured everyone again as little mini baby versions of themselves (No risk of a lawsuit there). The Easter cartoon, "Road Trip" features Adam Rogas and Guy (who's voice is done by your's truly). Eva's voice is provided by the incredibly talented Evana Frederico, who just happens to have the name Eva in her first name!

So as for the future of the Life of Guy there's alot coming down the pipe. We hope to have some more exciting toons for this summer, t-shirts, figurines, DVDs of the toons, assault weapons, hats and a marshmallow cereal. Stay tooned, there's good stuff on the way!