Monthly Archives: November 2007

Child Benefit Data May Fall Into The Right Hands

Let’s look on the bright side.
cd containing child benefit data goes missing from HMRC tax office

Child Benefit Data Loss is Facebook’s Gain

two discs containing child benefit data goes missing from HM Revenue & Customs

Alistair Darling Visits Newcastle – Meets The Angel Of The Northern Rock

New animation for Channel 4 News
Sound and a couple of effects added to the one below which I couldn’t use due to filesize on Channel 4, but, I kind of prefer the silent one which you can see on C4 News here.

Alistair Darling visits Northern Rock in Newcastle

A Message From Northern Rock To Alistair Darling

Northern Rock and Alistair Darling

I’m all in a spin
Move over Darling
I’ve got to give in
Move over Darling
And though it’s not right,
I’m too weak to fight it somehow
Cos I want you right now

The way you sigh,
Has me waving my conscience bye-bye
You can call me a fickle thing
But I’m practically yours forever because…

Lib Dem Leadership Animation Updated

I’m trying out YouTube to post a couple of things before my evaluation period of the new Flash software expires.
To make things easier on bandwidth if folk want to see or share, I’ve uploaded my recent Lib Dem animation. an updated version of my recent Lib Dem animation to display the minor calamity that happened between the leadership candidates yesterday.

btw. It’s not a mistake me tagging this post with Chris Huhne, Nick Huhne, Nick Clegg and Chris Clegg.
The video, before YouTube converted it, looked very clean but the conversion has muddied it a fair bit. I’ve left the original animation a few posts back which is crisper but it doesn’t have the updates. I’ve uploaded the first version (with some minor amendments) to my YouTube account as well.
I would ask that no commercial site runs it, including the larger blogs that seem to provide more advertising (which downloads soooooo verrrrrrry slowly) than sense these days.
I’ve made a few other small amendments to the animation- The swarming birds have been tidied up, a few sound effects added and I’ve tried to sort out the cloud movement in the second half, so when the ‘camera’ becomes stationary, the clouds slowly go in the opposite direction from those in the first half, when the camera angles are reversed.
Note for Flash animators :
Converting so it would work in video took ages because, even in the newest version of Flash, you have to manually change embedded movie clip property settings from ‘video’ to ‘graphic’ and (after checking via Google) set these at ‘play once’. NO! :
Not ‘play once’. If you want it to play once, then that’s fine but if you want a clip to loop during a tween, (flapping wings for example) then set it to loop. That seems pretty obvious doesn’t it, but the advice I found on the web seemed to say that the embedded clips would only work if they were set to play once.
Adobe needs to get its act together on exporting an animation correctly to video without the user having to reset say, one hundred, embedded clips manually. They should also make clear that you cannot export to Quicktime unless you have Quicktime Pro because if you haven’t shelled out for it, Flash works away exporting the damn file and then hangs at 100%.

Coca Cola on Channel 4’s Dispatches, Monday 19th November

at 8 p.m. (and one hour later on Channel 4 plus 1)
Mark Thomas investigates Coca Cola and its business practices. Watch it.
I had a couple of fleeting encounters with Mark a few years ago when I submitted a few images for his Nazi Coke exhibition.
The purpose was to highlight what Coke was getting up to in Columbia and India – Link to Wikipedia..
Mark thought a novel way to focus attention was to bring to light previous Coca Cola indiscretions.
One of these was the ’sponsorship’/patronage of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
So, he and others, including Tracey Sanderswood, organised two exhibitions in London and asked people to submit images. The links shows images from the exhibition on Tracey’s site.
Tracey’s now left an update in the comments btw.
I’ll add Tracey’s site to my blogroll. Mark’s site is in my blogroll already – always worth a visit – I should participate in the forums a bit more.

I met Mark, Plucker and Sam (nutter who had participated in the brilliant Circus 2 Iraq scheme) at the first and helped put a few pictures on walls at both the first and second exhibitions.
The second was at The Foundry, an anarchic pub near Old Street and well worth a visit.
It was there that I saw Banksy, hanging a just-completed painting.
Having had a brief exchange of pleasantries with this legend, I can confirm that she is really nice and has an incredible pair of tits.

Just a thought but it would be good to see Mark host a show similar to The Daily Show. I suppose other commitments would make it difficult but it would provide a focus for his and others’ campaigns and views all wrapped up in a little 30 minute bundle of unpredictability. First show live from Parliament Square. Five minutes of talking and the rest of coppers saying ‘Hello Mum’ to the camera as they shoo the audience away. Maybe a camping shop could get a little product placement by donating Brian Haw some new gear.
Here are a couple of the images I submitted :

coca-cola patronage of the 1936 olympics

coca-cola in Mark Thomas and Tracey Sanderswood exhibition at The Foundry