Just when you think you can't love Jim Henson anymore than you do...

Here is a short film that Henson made for AT&T in 1963. His pacing and rhythm is just astonishing.

We miss you Jim-

Originally seen on FilmDrunk

Minebot

I painted this guy primarily on an iPad using the app Artrage. I took that picture into Photoshop and cleaned it up, added some more detail, and so on. I liked the program on the iPad a lot. It is by no means a substitute for a brush and canvas, or even digitally painting in Photoshop, but it does offer a lot of options and gives the user a nice fluid experience.

TOC 120

I have been making robot sculptures for a little while now. I have had a hiatus for the past year or so, partially due to work we had to do on our house, but I want to get back into the workshop soon. I am going to start posting some photos of the creation process for my bots. This guy was built a little faster than the others I've made. It was a thank you gift for my friend Dave. See the thing about Dave is he likes to collect things. He collects frog photo calendars, banjo books (possible the worlds largest collection, no really!), Altoid tins (this is an old photo of a small portion of his collection on the Altoid Wikipedia page), William and Sonoma catalogs, photos of banana peels found on the street, and so on. He has many collections. When he found out I used found objects in my robot sculptures Dave started picking things up. It started as a rusty bolt here and an interesting plastic piece there. It quickly escalated. Instead of a piece here and there he started stockpiling. So every other week or so he would bring me a big zip-lock bag of, well, trash. This would disturb some people, but I loved it. More parts means better robots. Here is a photo of some of his finds.
And yes I did clean everything; lots of spraying and bleach baths. This is a small percentage of Dave's contribution to my already too large collection of scrap metal and plastic. So I made this little guy for Dave. It is fully pose-able. I made all of the joints by hand, which was a first. The pistons behind the legs move in and out. The button at the bottom twists and winds up the dish at the top, which spins. I think that function has expired, but it was cool while it worked. The bottoms of the feet have strong magnets on them and stick to the base I made for it. Here are some pictures of it before the paint job. Click the photos to see them larger.

Here is a list of the objects used to build TOC 120

Here are some images of the finished piece. The concept here is that TOC 120 is a mapping robot that travels around this landmass (his map is of Pangaea) and double checks the map with GPS tracking. He takes little notes here and there when he finds inconsistencies.

TOC 120 next to the packaging I made for the piece

PETMAN Robot

I have always been fascinated with robots. We had a set of Robotix toys when I was younger that was a constantly being configured into different plastic monstrosities. I continue to tinker with and draw mechanical things (here's the robot section of my site) and was really taken aback when I saw this video posted on MakeZine this morning:



No, this isn't some viral marketing CG creation for a new movie. This is the PETMAN robot from Boston Dynamics, the same group that created the BigDog robot a couple of years ago. It is quite astonishing, and yes, our days are numbered.