Learning to read and write Chinese can be a daunting prospect for Westerners. So the presentation method used to teach the subject should be affable and approachable. This Flash animation concentrates on story-telling and cartoons rather than rote memorization to emphasize the hidden meanings behind Hanzi/Kanji characters. You won't learn the entire Chinese language in one sitting, but at least the subject won't seem as impenetrable after this perspective adjustment.
|
 Niihau-ma? Lei-ho-ma? An yong haseyo? Hajimemashite? |
|
 Buffy, Jody, and Albert at the Cartoon Estuary. |
 One technique for "branding" a website is to create a memorable character who appears on pages throughout the site. Here is such a character, named little albert, in the opening sequence to a regional school intranet site done for SERC, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland. Backgrounds are in Bryce. Cartoon is in a plastic quilting (2 1/2 D) style I've been experimenting with. Click photo at left for sequence. (Intranet {large format} version is at hea-www.harvard.edu/cb/estal1.htm)
|
 Websites, especially educational ones, are often collaborative efforts requiring weeks of prototyping and daily adjustment until everyone involved agrees on the final output. Here is an illustration of that prototyping process - the design sequence for Kidspace, an astronomy site for middleschoolers, done with Kim Dow at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. Click the photo at right to walk through the process.
|
 Hey. Wait a minute. Cosmology? I thought he said cosmetology. |
|
 Got pandas? |
 Interaction is the key to this application which allows kids to learn the practical side of endangered species population dynamics by selecting their own red pandas to breed. Done with Frank Kohn, Species Survival Plan Coordinator for Red Pandas at the National Zoo, it was part of a larger conservation biology project for the Smithsonian. (Very laborious in Javascript. If I were to do it again, I'd certainly do it in Flash.)
|
 One of the more interesting forms of photographic/filmic manipulation is morphing. Here's the Morphing Demystified segment of a larger course in multimedia. It treats the subject from the whole image down to the pixel level. The target morphs are themselves each three-way morphs. Always fun working with the images of people who don't actually exist.
|
 No, I'm not real. I'm an amalgamated composite. |
|