Silly side project: The Song of Newt

So Newt Gingrich’s spokesman sent out a really nutty press release last week, one that was far closer to epic poetry than political discourse. Turning it into an overdramatic German opera was the obvious thing to do.

Kevin Clark set it to music, Jason Buckwalter and Andrew Stewart performed it, and I did some quick color FX and titles. Super-fast turnaround! Here it is:

Great News: AEFlame for CS5!

Hooray! The fine folks over at AEScripts are now hosting a beta release of AEFlame for CS4/CS5. Best of all: it’s still free, so there’s nothing stopping you from spending the afternoon making big swirly fractal designs.

If you need a refresher on how exactly this (admittedly rather baffling at first glance) plugin works, take a look at my tutorial.

A cat-bunny-thing(?) for your health

I’ve been sick. (Achoo!) I doodled this little guy bringing me tea on a napkin, and he was cute enough that I decided to trace him in Illustrator and turn him into a vector:

He needs a name! Best suggestion so far is “Schroedinger”.

Off topic: Corn Pudding is AWESOME.

I made corn pudding last night. Oh man. Amazing. It’s, as you’d expect, somewhere between cornbread and pudding, and it would go well with many different dishes both sweet and savory. It’s super-easy, too — one of those “throw it all in a pan and bake” recipes. You end up with a ton of the stuff (original recipe I started with claims 12 servings), so it’s nice and shareable. And frying up a leftover slice in a pan for breakfast? So good.

Ingredients:

• 1 can corn, drained and rinsed
• 1 can cream style corn
• 1 (8.5 ounce) package dry cornbread mix (I used Jiffy — if you don’t have mix here’s a substitute)
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup butter, softened

Instructions:
Mix everything together. Pour into a big greased casserole dish. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees. That’s it. Don’t expect it to turn golden brown… my batch came out a very pale yellow but was definitely baked through.

Go Go Gadget Brass Knuckles!

Our new video is up and making its way around the intertubes. It’s a trailer for an imagined film noir reboot of classic 80′s cartoon Inspector Gadget. Give it a look:

We’ve been featured on Urlesque and The Daily What. It’s all very exciting.