This is what I love about the web. On one of my many random search safaris through the maze that makes up what we all know as the internet, I came across the site ICT Inspirations. This is in itself an interesting blog (and I've bookmarked it), but what was really great was how the blog revealed to me the brilliance of The Common Craft Show, something I had never heard about before.

The Common Craft Show is made by Lee and Sachi LeFever and consists of small videos explaining complex ideas in a straightforward manner. They refer to themselves as interpreters which seems fairly accurate. Their simply brilliant (or brilliantly simple) style consists of well prepared cutouts, an equally well prepared voice over all put together by manipulating the cutouts physically in front of the camera and some really tight editing. The final product almost seems like a high-tech animated scrapbook and the effect is quite mesmerizing. Have a look at the below clip and see for yourself:

Common Craft's take on Google Docs

The first time I watched one of the clips I was hit by a hard spell of why-didn't-I-think-of-this-ulosis.

This is truly a brilliant example of visual storytelling if I ever saw one.

Coffe Time

As my former Superanomalies-clip was an outstanding success. (At least in the scope of this blog). I figured it was about time for another one.

Monkey business?

This one is all about coffee and is not recommended for the squeamish coffee-drinker. (Don't tell me you weren't warned). A higher quality Quicktime-file is available here. Any positive sensible feedback is welcome.

Phew, it's hard work sorting out those a's and o's in anamolies anamalies anomalies!

I've been working for some time on the first installment of what I've chosen to call "Pointless Ramblings". No, that is not the new title of my blog. The idea behind this, and hopefully future ramblings, is to make a quick video about uh... something. I prepare a text relatively quickly and get a soundtrack in place based on the text. I then more or less improvise by making illustrations, animate text and put together a visual to accompany the video. In lack of a better term it could be called video-jazz.

Yes it does say superanomalies...

I don't nitpick on every detail, everything does not have to be great. OK is good enough. This is the only way I'll be able to get stuff like this out while still having some time left for more ambitious projects. Now, hopefully this should still mean that the "ramblings" are both watchable and mildly entertaining. I think #1 is, but I'm obviously biased. It has been said that _a picture is worth a thousand words_, so if my calculations are correct this film should be worth nearly 5 millions of them. Happy viewing!

A higher quality quicktime version is available here