LL :: Volume 11 :: LR

Even the lightest breeze sends the ends of a Moorcoat snapping. If the wearer walks at a brisk pace, he will be followed by a trailing, whipping, crackling cloud of black cloth. And a true spring gale will launch the coat into a deafening frenzy.

Once again, their efforts focus not just on customer awareness, but on technologically improved bottles. Last year's attempt -- bottles that disintegrated when empty -- was a notable failure, simply because it was too easy to circumvent; water dealers simply collected discarded bottles before the last few drops had evaporated from inside. (DLR tried increasing the threshold at which the bottle considered itself "empty", but customer complaints soon overweighed the decrease in fraud.)

Their new idea: a bottle which is sensitive to the trace elements that make up the Downcity Mineral and Downcity Pure water blends. If the constituents of the water are off-spec, the bottle discolors. DLR advertisements portray these oddly-colored bottles as a mark of shame and disgrace.

Unfortunately, the company is encountering an unexpected backlash. Every chemical discrepancy adds its own unique color change to the bottle glass. Therefore, people are collecting discarded DLR bottles and filling them with their own water mixes -- trying to collect as many different hues and shades of "discolored" bottle as possible.

Reportedly, DLR is now attempting to design a bottle which will disintegrate if filled with off-spec water. The work is not going well. Customers apparently dislike drinking from a bottle which melts at a trace of saliva.

Salt

Tables

Light

Strings

Tangent

All

What is it about hand-crafted animation? Movie technique eats bigger and bigger mountains of processing power every month, but somehow the most -- moving -- movies are the ones done in someone's basement, with every element arranged, not invoked. This has been true since the beginning of moviemaking, and it's still the case.

Mavri's little (fifteen-minute) animation about a drop of water flowing down the side of a mountain shows why. Her simple, unforced physical imagery -- a droplet pooling behind a rock, merging with another drop, separating, sliding into a puddle, overflowing out the other side -- elicits the shape of a lifetime. And it's all in the motion; every motion-curve sketched, keyframe by keyframe; every rock-surface positioned, polygon by polygon. Thought and care, is all. Modern inverse-kinematic physio-modelling and erosion may be realistic, or even hyper-realistic, but it's the craftsmanship of hand animation that comes to life.