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Dinosaur Stop Motion Test Footage

Demonstration of Stop Motion for class

Tape Man!

Tapeman is something of a legend which we did last summer. Copying work we saw in JUXTAPOZ magazine, ace student Keenan Cassidy and I (along with Nicole and Melissa) made a tape man last year and brought the local police to visit the display.

A tapeman is simply a tape sculpture of a person which you then cover in clothing and display somewhere. You use so much tape that the figure is strong enough to stand on its own.

The picture is from this year's TAPEMAN, and we had Number 3 son Adam as our model/victim; you can see Emily giving him a sympathetic look while Keenan (in yellow) and I are absorbed with making it impossible for him to move his legs (which it was).

You do the figure in segments, lower body first -- build it up and then cut it off (carefully). Then the top half and you assemble the two parts. The result is a near perfect replica of the original.

The figure is then dressed, and since he has no face you use a sweatshirt with hood or a wig to cover this-- and then you stand them up or sit them in a public place and watch the reaction from the public. Successful displays usually result in a stop by the local police to make sure the victim-- and remember every statue should either be sitting or standing so that there is no concern that this is someone in trouble, it would be bad karma to make the figure lying down and then tie up emergency response personnel.

TAPEMAN lives again-- and you can find him displayed outside the museum somewhere.

Now, stop reading this blog and get on over to my active BLOG.

Where are the Updates?

If you're starving for Andy Fish news and rambles, you gotta go over HERE. It's my daily blog log for the time being.

Andy's Page on UnderCoverFish

Well, that's it.

I've been posting blogs about nothing here each and every day to entertain you with your morning coffee dear reader, and it's time I bring the curtains down.

It's been fun, but tough at times-- contrary to appearances I have to actually think about what I'm going to write, and committments to my commercial art career have made this blog harder and harder to maintain.

So FISH WRAP will take over as my main blog-- and I'll hopefully keep that entertaining as well. I'll still post here once in a while, but it will no longer be the primary source of my lame wit.

So thank you to everyone who has been reading and sending me emails-- I sincerely appreciate it.

Aliens - GAME OVER MAN!

Every once in a while there is a movie which I've heard great things about and yet just never found the time to watch.

ALIENS (1986) is just such a movie; I've seen about 90% of Alien (1979)-- possibly even more, but enough to know it's pretty good. I've heard that ALIENS was even better, so it was with much anticipation that I sat down with Veronica and watched this absolute piece of crap.

Might have given away my opinion on this.

Sigourney Weaver is back as Ripley, this time along comes Paul Reiser who plays a slimy business guy who only thinks about the corporation so you know for sure he's going to do something to sell the rest of the team out and die a horrible death at the end of the movie.

This is set in the future and we know this because all the guys wear their sport jacket collars up. That shows the advancement of fashion.

All right, here's the story (I guess SPOILERS but the the biggest one is if you sit and watch this you won't get the two and a half hours of your life back).

Aliens have invaded a new colony on the planet-- the people on the planet aren't responding to communication so Paul Reiser has to get a team together and go see what's wrong. Ripley has been charged with the loss of her spaceship from the previous movie so she's lost her pilot's license. Reiser convinces her to come along as an advisor telling her she'll get her license back if she helps them.

They aren't going alone, though-- they are going with Space Marines-- so far removed from REAL marines they behave more like a group of boyscouts on spring break than an elite military unit.

Bill Paxton is one of the marines. He delivers great dialogue like this (as they head to the planet's surface);

"We are total bad asses!"

We know this is true because he tells us (and Sigourney) six or seven times. He's not the most obnoxious of the stereotypical marines either, there is a street smart puerto rican woman with a red bandana who is the machine gunner-- the tough as nails drill sergeant who apparently stayed on past boot camp, and a couple of nameless chiseled pretty boys who look like they stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad.

The second they land on the planet they get their asses kicked by the ALIENS and Bill Paxton runs off crying "Game Over Man!" as he retreats for the ship.

Sitting through this, I kept waiting for it to get good. I even went so far as to check it out on IMDB and was shocked to see it got an 8.5 rating and non stop rave reviews-- did I watch the wrong movie?

In the same day we also saw UP! (fantastic movie) and TWISTER-- which is a perfect example of a mindless fun summer movie, but this thing is just a total mess-- but it did deliver a line I'll use over and over;

GAME OVER MAN! -- best if delivered in a high pitched nasal tone. And that's the word on this blog-- at least for now. I made six months plus of NEW posts every day, but I want to streamline stuff so head on over to FISH WRAP starting Friday for your daily fix of Fishisms.

TOMORROW; The End

Opie Retailer

In addition to being an artist and writer, I used to be a retailer.

I worked my way up from bag boy to upper management, studied under Paul Chila who was himself a disciple of Paco Underhill (More on Paco in a minute), and took stores that were underperforming and made them successful and it wasn't all that hard.

So occasionally here on the ol' blog I'm going to offer some retail insight-- especially valuable in these turbulent economic times, but mostly because there are times I miss retail (which I honestly can't believe I just said).

Paco Underhill wrote the book on retailing and merchandising called WHY WE SHOP. In it, Paco approached consumers the same way an anthropologist studies monkeys out in the wild. This book was my bible after working with Paul Chila who taught me more in the five months we were together than anyone else in my ten plus years in retail.

It's funny, because I see this stuff employed everyday in stores, and I see so many missed opportunities as well;

1. A customer is not an interruption of your work, they are the reason for it.

Read that again. Without the customers in your store you have nothing-- are you treating them like a friend you're glad to see, willing to work to solve whatever their problem is, or are they intruding on your otherwise busy schedule? If the answer is the latter than you should probably be doing something else.

This doesn't mean there aren't a fair amount of crackpot customers, I've seen them firsthand, but I'm talking about the meat and potato customers who are regulars and who aren't asking for anything other than good service.

Veronica was recently in a Forever 21 Store, which as a policy seems to hire only the most unpleasant clerks available, and she wanted the skirt that was on a mannequin because that was the only one in her size. She asked and offered to switch it with a different size skirt and the clerk's response was she couldn't do it, and not only that, if Veronica did it then the clerk would get in trouble with her boss.

Are you kidding me?

Target recently has implemented a program where floor walkers are instructed to greet "guests" as they are in the store and ask them if they need help finding anything. Any readers working at T'get can confirm this if they'd like-- and I have no official knowledge of a policy, but I've seen it in action everytime I'm in the Big T now.

2. Respond to guest questions via email. There are a couple of local business I deal with on a regular basis and my preferred method of communication is email if I'm not in the store. I don't expect a response within minutes, but I do expect a response. One in particular told me they don't ever check the email on their website! Maybe you should install a phone that doesn't actually ring in the store either and let people call that too.

How blind can someone be? In the commercial art world, about 90% of my clients come from email contact-- and I respond to each and every one.

3. The store hours should work for the customers not the employees.

Yikes, this one wasn't popular with my team when I implemented it at my store. But it drove business up. In the Big Woo here we have Shrewsbury Street-- which is sometimes called Restaurant Row-- along said street are several clothing stores and misc retailers that can't seem to make a go of business along this heavily trafficked street-- but it's because they all close at 5pm when the foot traffic is just starting. I guarantee you if you changed your hours to nights along this street you would do a killer business.

4. Employee morale and training.

Price Chopper is a perfect example of this. There are TWO Price Choppers within 2 miles of my house, if you spend $50 at PC they take 10 cents off a gallon of gas which can actually add up to quite a bit-- it's a great promotion-- yet despite all of this I drive past these two markets to Big Y. Why is this?

Professionalism-- Big Y has better customer service. Their cashiers are better trained. They are able to get me out of the store quickly, if you go to PC after 9pm you are LUCKY if there is more than one register open. Countless times I've waited in line and listened to the cashier tell the bagger about their plans for the weekend, or worse, how much they hate their job and other stuff I really don't care about and I'd rather you just ring me up and get me out thank you.

This is all faulted to the management team who are just being lazy about training.

There are people who shouldn't be in retail. Plain and simple. You need to take a good hard look at your staff and re-evaluate your level of service, if you don't do it, your customers will, and if it's bad they will go somewhere else.

In this economy no one can afford to not offer full quality service to every customer in their stores, because this is where survival of the fittest will wean out the weak and the underserving.

And we the consumer will be better off.

TOMORROW; UNDERCOVERFISH PLANS!