Readit NewsThe current list of what it can do with FPGA is listed here - https://openfpga-cores-inventory.github.io/analogue-pocket/ and the inevitable sub-reddit is a good resource. https://old.reddit.com/r/AnaloguePocket/
Word Crimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
"Word Crimes" is Weird Al's spot-on parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with T.I. and Pharrell Williams. I think Weird Al's version is better and more educational than the original -- smart and catchy like a modern Schoolhouse Rock.
Blurred Lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU
Weird Al contacted Jarrett Heather after being impressed by "Shop Vac", his previous work with kinetic text (typographic animation), which he made using animation tools like AfterEffects.
Shop Vac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sOfO8Ei1g
This page on Jarrett Heather's web site tells the story and shows the art and technology behind the "Word Crimes" video. He's also published the Animatic storyboard-in-motion that took about 100 hours, to Weird Al's original home-made demo of the song! It's fascinating to compare them, and see how their ideas evolved from storyboard to final video.
Jarrett Heather presents: Word Crimes: https://jarrettheather.com/wordcrimes/
>The Completed Music Video: In November 2013, "Weird Al" Yankovic asked me to direct an animated video for "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" about the supposed abuse of proper language.
>The result of 500 hours of work in After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere goes by in 3 minutes, 44 seconds. I hope you find each one of them entertaining.
The Animatic: https://vimeo.com/102959171
>This storyboard-in-motion took about 100 hours. Al signed off on this design on January 25th, 2014, only 3 weeks after he gave me his homemade "demo" for Word Crimes, which you can hear on the animatic soundtrack.
>If you watch very closely, you might notice a gag or two that didn't make it through to final animation or some very subtle changes in the lyrics.
Jarrett originally designed the Live Journal logo back in 2000 or so, and parodied it in the video, with a broken pencil tip.
https://jarrett.livejournal.com/208198.html
Here's a great "Local Boy Makes Good" article and TV interview about Jarrett Heather from around the time the video came out, that was previously posted to HN -- I love his down-to-earth advice:
Elk Grove animator thrives as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s partner in ‘Word Crimes’:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140725043615/https://www.sacbe...
Common Ground - Jarrett Heather “Word Crimes” Music Video Artist
>"If I did fail, it would have been Al's fault for hiring a software developer to make a cartoon."
>Word Crimes is 244 seconds long. Each second took two hours at the computer. 500 hours work, in all.
>"Yeah, no classes, just, you know. I think people really underestimate the value of just sitting down and reading the manual."
All of the crimes outlined in the video are common, annoying, and clear except one: "well" vs "good". Even in the video, the "correct" usage is ambiguous.
IME people who care about grammar use (and correct others regarding) "I am well", but when I diagram the sentence, it seems like "I am good" is actually correct.
I'd really like to know the right usage, and what Weird Al intended here. It's funny, because all the other examples are really explicit.
In my mind the joke is that the song's narrator is a know-it-all character that shouldn't be taken entirely seriously. But on the other hand, a lot of educators have contacted me to tell me they use the song as a learning tool.
Can I ask how much one could hope to earn from such a project?
First I thought... $5000 on the low-end, as an after-hours hobby project for beer money, beats burger flipping.
Then I thought, well, this is equivalent to a one-time three-months full-time highly specialised consulting gig, has an audience of 50 million people, probably a highly integral part of the success of Al's song, included some subcontracting (to his brother), not a lot of people can do this... so this gotta be worth at least $50k (coming to $100/hour which again, seems just about right or again on the low-end for something like this).
He clearly massively overdelivered, I mean you can watch this thing frame by frame a dozen times and still discover tiny little details and jokes he included in the graphics, that's insane (in an awesome way) and you probably can't expect anyone to do that in a project spec up-front.
But then again, he's not doing this full-time, he's not a specialised business with a dozen GFX artists and if you'd quote $50k on this to a major corporation, they'd probably outsource it to a guy overseas (...) who'd be happy to try his luck for a thousand bucks or so.
What do you think? I'm just curious.
If we figure two-fifths of cash transactions need to be rounded up and the store is losing an average of 1.5 cents each time, their expected losses would be around $2,000, yeah?