Josh Leblanc's blog

I’m working on a new animated series called Silver Dragon, a d&d4e adventure. I used the animation program Fliponote Studio to make it. It’s pretty good considering that I can only do so much due to my limited drawing skills. Here’s the vids:

Today’s assignment is to write about a person or relationship who has steered our life in one direction or the other.

My person would be my friend Colin. We met in sixth grade and ever since we have understood each other and basically have been co-conspirators in almost every non school related of our lives since then. For example in sixth grade I introduced him to animation. He immediatly took to it and since then we have worked on almost 20 different videos together. Another thing we have done together is Dungeons and Dragons. (definetely one of our nerdier pastimes) we started playing about a year ago and are now taking turns DMing for our campaign. If it weren’t for Colin I would’t have read The Lord Of The Rings books, and I probally wouldn’t want to be an animator when I grow up. And if it weren’t for me Colin wouldn’t be an animator and he would be very bored on weekends.

This is my new favorite song. It is by The Bare Naked Ladies. Enjoy!

We were supposed to make a wordle of what the American flag means to us. Here’s mine! You can also see the rest of the class’s by going to moranmustangs.org and clicking on the names on the sidebar.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2179842070/

Today’s assignment was to translate the Star Spangled Banner into words that people can better understand today. I’m going to try my best not to sound sarcastic with this. Don’t judge me.

Oh! Hey look at that, by the early morning sunshine.
That thing that we looked up to last evening.
Whose red sripes and shiny stars, lasted the entire dangerous battle.
And we could see it over the defensive mounds of earth waving in the wind
And the red hued explosives, and bombs going off in mid-air
Illuminated the flag every time they exploded
Look now! The flag is still waving!
Over this great country we call America

This a video by keshen8. He is kinda of like the person I try to Emulate with my videos. Check out his stuff!

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v496/maproomsystems/uspresidents/warof1812washdcburn.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.historycellar.com/2008/12/1815-washington-dc-needs-firemen-now.html&usg=__YVq9URwv1FezB34tA7R5DisSdSE=&h=277&w=400&sz=29&hl=en&start=8&tbnid=esObNAYpSbSvaM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Bburning%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bwhite%2Bhouse%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den

American’s are surely the luckiest people on the planet. More than once we have been saved by a freak of nature or some weird accident. Take for example the war of 1812. The american army was a complete fail. We had almost all our regular troops fighting a pointless battle up in Canada, leaving our capitol to be defended by highly untrained militiamen. For example, in the battle of Bladensburg we retreated and surely would have been eradicated if it weren’t for the british suffering heatstroke, which prevented them from running. If they had been able to keep up with us, every single American would have been pickedoff before we even reached the capitol. Also once we fled the capitol and the British had captured and occupied it. A freak storm prevented them from burning the library of congress. And a random tornado inflicted more casualties than the american troops. Sometimes you have to realize how lucky you are…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/benheine/3904152560/

What are symbols? What do they mean? Why are they made? And why are they so important?

<—- See that? What does that mean? Sure it’s a smiley face, but what does that mean? What does that piece of abstract punctuation represent? What is it a symbol of?

Symbols are created to represent a feeling, cause or action. For example when Obama was elected president of the United States he became a representation of our country and what we stand for. He became the image in our heads that we associate with freedom rights liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He became a symbol.

Human beings are visual creatures. Our strongest of our five senses is eyesight. It’s a scientific fact. Therefor it is only natural that we associate words with images. Maybe if our strongest was smell our symbol wouldn’t be a vision but a smell. Maybe instead of an american flag we would use the smell of eagles and american soil to represent our country. If we had amazing hearing instead of great eyesight the Star Spangled Banner would have a lot more meaning. But since we see best it is a picture that we choose to represent us. Our brain can process images 80,000 times faster than a word. A picture is worth 80,000 words.

This post idea came from a post assignment from South Paris Collaborative in Long Island

 For more from me on this topic click here.

A big passion of mine is film and animation. I love to make videos. Especially animated ones. I find a unique thrill in creating a video that I know will make people smile. My favorite types of videos to make are animated ones. Especially stop motion, which is when you take a  picture of an ordinary object (usually something that wouldn’t normally move) move it a little, take another picture,  move it a little ect. It takes forever but the final product turns out to be something amazing. A few types of stop motion are Claymation (stop motion using clay) and Lego Stop Motion. I haven’t done very much Claymation because I can’t sculpt to save my life, but I do a ton of stop motion videos. You can see some of them at my youtube account. I also do animation on this site called Hatena.

In my life I hope to keep animating. I intend to keep animation as a hobby and I don’t expect it to develop into a major aspect of my career later in life. (I hope to become a teacher) Maybe I can use animated videos as a teaching tool but that is it.

One thing that really holds me down with my animation is my parents. They only let me have an hour and a half of computer/video game time every day so most of my videos end up not getting finished because I don’t have sufficient time to finish them. More than 50% of the animating process in in the editing for stop motion and 100% of it for all other types of animation. I usually take five minutes here and ten minutes there to do these videos and that makes the already tedious animating process take even longer.