Cran or Crayon?

Last weekend I headed over to Indi and picked up my first laptop. I can't tell you why I decided I needed one all of a sudden, but I had been doing a lot of research on them and finally decided to make the plunge. Maybe a part of it was peer pressure. For example, for a long while I slept on an air mattress that I was perfectly happy with. Then when it got a few holes I slept on the floor until I figured out a good way to plug them up. And I was fine with it, but everyone kept yelling at me that I needed a proper bed. In the end, at the end of last year, I broke down and got one. I figured I should have one for my parents, when they come to visit, and while I didn't have a girlfriend then or now, I suppose not having a bed to girls is almost on the same level as being my age and calling my parents "roommates".

So I got the laptop, mostly because everyone said I needed to have one. I went with a Sony Vaio, which is why I drove to Indi because that's where the closest Sony store is located. The computer is pretty impressive spec wise. It's got a 16.4 inch monitor with 1080p resolution, 6 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive at 7200 rpm, a 1 GB dedicated video card, the Intel i7 hyper-threaded quad core processor (you're welcome Gurney), and a Blu-Ray player/burner. There are 3 small problems with it. First I have a dead pixel, but I can only see it when there is a black background behind it. So I'm living with it, I don't think it warrants a return. The next is that the screen is glossy and not back lit which means that it's both very reflective and hard to see in very bright areas. Finally the screen is about an inch bigger than I would have really liked but at the same time the computer isn't so overbearing that I can still take it anywhere.

Right away I installed Matlab and the Adobe Master Collection (old readers may remember). I'm just now getting around to installing it because I was told that I can only install the software onto one computer, so I was waiting to get a workhorse that should last me several years before installing it. The Adobe suite is pretty cool and runs great. Lately I've been working on a new Flash movie. I had started this a long while back but unfortunately my old computer's hard drive crashed on me and I lost all my work. The animation was made using 4 drawings that I did in crayon and then scanned into my computer.

Most of my flash projects are small studies that I like to do for fun and are not really meant to be shown off. My website, linked at the side of the blog, was made entirely in Flash. But that was about the biggest project I've done. So this crayon animation was also a small study. I wanted to see if I could bring that type of drawing to life. All that white space in my drawings had to be dealt with. For example, the inner area of the wheel spokes had to be specifically treated so that you could see through them rather than just see all white. And unfortunately Flash doesn't have a nice transparency feature like some more dedicated art programs. But here it is. Just click once on the tree. You may need to install the latest version of Flash to watch it. If nothing works you can go here and watch it just fine.

And just in case you're wondering, where I come from it's pronounced cran.