Little turtle – R.I.P. 2006 – 2008.

One of my little turtles had died this morning.

This is not about Halloween. It is about a strange world with a bizarre copyright system and record industry: Your own work can be used to compete with your own work.

Here’s news: It’s Radiohead versus Radiohead! While Radiohead had previously announced to release their new album “In Rainbows” on their own on December 3rd, their previous record company decided to release all the previous Radiohead album, which they own the rights of, as a box-set just 7 days later, as an aggressive response to the fact that Radiohead decided not to continue the contract with them.

Can an ordinary person tell the difference? Can even a fan tell the difference? In fact, can a fan even be zealous enough to follow through the band’s principles, i.e. not support their previous record company by not buying the box-set, instead of succumbing to their own desires?

Of course, it’s not like Radiohead will lose money in this case. It’s still their work. The difference is, in the former case they earn 100% of what they created, while in the latter they earn perhaps less than 10%.

A record company is supposed to be simply a company that helps an artist to advertise, reproduce and distribute his work. Back in the days, it was necessary because it would be impossible for an artist to raise money to get their own record reproduction equipment, and to get a crew to advertise and distribute their records. And of course, after decades of lack of negotiation skills, artists lose their grounds to entrepreneurs, and nowadays artists only earn less than 10% of what they created, and get locked into long “six album deals”. Six albums is most band’s or singer’s lifetime, if they are lucky enough to release two.

I can foresee this happening to anybody, including myself, because I hardly own any rights to my current works either. Say, if my company were bought, I would own nothing more, despite 100% of the artwork and user interface design comes from my hand.

It is essential for an artist to get out of his own realm and look for something that will excite him. Taking a break from all the tech talks, here are some of things I am helping out with recently in real life.

I always have a passion for creating an actual object in reality. Back in the days in Hong Kong, I had hardly any access to tools to create my own objects. The only choices are paper and Lego. RISD was heaven to me because I could access all these wonderful tools for creation that I had never seen before: table saws, metal molten casts, and all sorts of carving tools.

After graduation, my access to such machines were gone. My current job as the designer of Trillian is good and challenging, but I hardly have to leave my computer. There wasn’t a lot of places for me to work on projects unless I rent my own shop (expensive) or go to an artist colony like 3rd Ward (far).

But, anyway, let’s get into the gist of what I had been helping out in free time:

This is “A Cavallo“, an art piece designed by Quill Hyde for Burning Man 2007 and beyond. I had been a lot happier since I was working on this project. The exercises involved in the welding, grinding and transportation of steel, the friendly and vibrant work crew (We meet often!), the smooth planning and management by Quill, and of course, the fresh air outside an air-conditioned office, are all refreshing.

The ‘machine’ is a very well-designed carousel, including a 2nd-level catwalk allowing the control of 6 rhythmic fire torches, a live music stage with custom sculpted speakers, and 6 steel horses circling up and down gracefully. The horses have an interesting origami folded look, that balances nicely between geometry and organic forms. They all have a different character, as portrayed by their surface finishes and a symbol on their heads.

The art piece was prominently shown in Burning Man, as we cruised around the desert every day and night with our wild music and carnival-esque faire. It was well-documented by a lot of participants in the festival, and it was also featured on New York Magazine. But this is not the end! We are trying to find more ways to show the carousel outside Burning Man. A ride in Halloween Parade would be cool, but some city ordinances prevented it from happening…

If you live around New York City and are interested in these wild horses, feel free to stop by our fundraiser in Red Hook next Saturday (Oct 13) night! We are giving out a quarter-sized steel horse in the raffle.

For more information, visit http://www.acavallo.org/!

Here’s a funny:

It’s almost two years I had been working at Cerulean Studios. Only a few things had changed since then, I don’t feel I had grown any more mature, but perhaps I had grown older as exposing my bare flesh in the open and wild world.

I had learnt that everything is unstable, but I need to feel stable while I can. I had moved twice, by myself or with the help of lots of dear friends. I had dealt with numerous legal issues and I learnt how to get help from lawyers. I learnt how to juggle my finances, while saving money and earning credits. I finally understood the importance of networking, and still striving to make new friends (or occasionally one or two enemies, unfortunately). I had been slowly learning how to manage my time, and be more responsible and responsive.

These are a lot of things that you don’t learn by putting yourself in the greenhouse of colleges. During these two years, not much significant artwork had been made, but a pile of letters, whether business or personal, were read or written.

Finally Adobe Creative Suite 3 is released! The folks in the office can finally use a reliable copy of Flash Professional to develop the software for Flash Player 9. Conversion between Illustrator and Flash is good, but just good enough, not over-the-top like Arcade Fire.

Most things import easily, especially uneven gradients and radial gradients, which used to just splat itself on Flash as a bitmap, and now they would try to mimic the closest gradient fill possible. It’s not perfect though, since Illustrator still does not have alpha values for its coloring system, and that means you will need to use the Opacity Mask trick in Illustrator to preview, and remove all of them before taking the objects to Flash.

Other features are good but not especially exciting. Live Color is a good addition but since I ‘think’ I know color so I probably wouldn’t like Illustrator recommending me what color to use all the time. It’s similar to but more focused on experimentation than the excellent Phantasm CS plugin I bought a couple months ago when I was working on the Trillian icons.

The new panel system is great. The panels don’t flicker in Vista anymore, and everything loads nice and fast. There’s a little bug concerning the saving of the panel position. I hope they will fix it soon.

If you apply the “every two versions” rule, this upgrade sounds about right to be a great deal when compared to Adobe Illustrator CS or 10. You’ll gain a lot more features besides Live Color, new UI, Flash integration and Vista support; but also Live Trace and Live Paint from CS2, which makes great companion to the new Eraser tools in CS3.

I’m a long-time Illustrator user now since 2000, and I’m pretty satisfied.

By the way, last night I finally couldn’t tolerate the icons and made this.

Hello all, thanks for your continuing support of this site! From time to time I received messages from new readers through the new Trillian Astra messenger.

Sorry I have not been updating the blog lately. I was in Hong Kong for two weeks to stay with family for Chinese New Year… (though that is not an excuse anymore now that I had sorted out most of the disasters (DMV horros) since I got back to work, I just needed to move my ass.) Highlights include visits to relatives, body check, dental cleanup, a great night with best friends, and a visit to… Hong Kong Disneyland – Hong Kong people’s very own theme park with fireworks blasting every night. We stayed for two days so we got to see the fireworks twice.

The song “Disney Time” (MP3) by Jarvis Cocker sounded sarcastic when I first heard it in a Brooklyn Industries store, but after I went to Disneyland it turned out to be quite an honest song. Going to Disneyland is ‘an awkward insight to be reminded about’, and I was skeptical at first as well. But then, since my home city got its own Disneyland, why not pay a visit?

Perhaps it really contained something you don’t want to be reminded about. Unless you are a hardcore Disney fan, which is much harder to find than a Star Wars fan or Japanese Anime geek, you will find a sense of resistance towards Disney stuff in the Generation-Y population. I am not sure why, but to me at least when I was a teenager, I was more indulged in saving the world with my robots or Final Fantasy Ultima Weapon. Or something ’serious’. Disney in the late 90’s did suck, with its anime all trying to be hip and cool (e.g. the Pikachu rip-off known as Stitch), and Pixar producing the better crop but with characters not as memorable as the Disney princesses.

The games in Disneyland were fun and there were virtually no lines of waiting at all. All the crew spoke Chinese so it was quite intimate. The musicals ran hourly and brilliantly performed. And the best was the fireworks. Fireworks was, perhaps of its sound, blood-pumping by nature, and Disney knew it very well. Combined with lots of strings in the background music, classic scenes from the movie, and high-spirited quotes from the characters, I got a great tear-jerking experience. Yeah, it’s gaudy and cheesy, but you know what, it worked. All those ‘dreams’ and experiences flashed back in my mind, my adolescent soul, ‘deeply tortured’ by reality, was rejuvenated with motivation and spirits once again.

There was something very positive about the animated movies from America between the 80’s and 90’s, such as American Tail or Beauty & the Beast, that is lost in the animated movies these days. There was a crap load of animated movies last fall season, I watched plenty of them on the plane, and none of them were particularly interesting. Some were like a fun roller-coaster ride, some were 3-d showoffs, and some were plain and without substances. People seemed to be more uptight these days embracing positive values, but much more paranoid about the negative things that may do harm to their illusion of their positive world; and the animated movies showed just that. It does not feel honest to people to be upright positive these days, or when it comes to positivity it always is mis-represented by overdosed laughters from characters with A.D.D.

So next time you decide to go to Disneyland, forget how badly they treat their workers, how environmentally unfriendly they are, or how your kids should be happy since you spent so much money flying there and staying at the resort, and how all fantasy elements are just man-made animatronics and made-up folklores… but simply embrace their modest side: It is ok to be gaudy about a dream.