Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I recently watched a great documentary on philosophy called Examined Life in which Peter Singer tells a sort of a koan that I thought was very much worth thinking about. He asks you to imagine that you’re crossing a bridge over a small pond, and that as you do so, you see that a small child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. You look around and you don’t see his parents or anyone else to save him, but the water isn’t very deep so you could save the child without any risk to yourself. However, you are wearing very expensive shoes and they will almost certainly be ruined (and isn’t time to take them off).

Most people, Singer says, would choose to save the child rather than the shoes when faced with this immediate and first-hand problem. But then he asks, if you’re willing to do that, why buy the shoes in the first place when an equivalent donation to numerous organizations would save the lives of multiple children? I don’t have a good answer.

I also watched a documentary recently called Why Do Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry (a 1999 classic that won an Emmy so you may have seen it) that was very emotionally moving — although I have to admit that there’s any debate over whether animals are emotional creatures… It just seems so obvious to me that they are. That said, there’s strong evidence for emotion in octopi and other animals where I was in the past assuming a more “mechanical” brain.

Anyway, they were discussing emotional problems in animals, and had a segment about the rescue dogs dealing with the Oklahoma bombing. After a while it became clear that they were not going to be finding any more survivors, and it was just dead bodies. The dogs were trained for this, and when they found the corpses they got their rewards and congratulations, but it was taking a toll on them — they were becoming very depressed, “clinically depressed”, and started not wanting to do the job any more. To help the dogs cope, at the end of the day, the teams would stage a successful find, where one of the humans would hide in the rubble pretending to be a victim, and give the dogs a turn finding someone that was actually alive. This seemed to cheer them up and give them hope that what they were doing was worthwhile, and they perked up and were willing to continue the difficult job.

Anyway, I did another quick animation test, as you can see above, this time at 30fps. I figured out a much faster and more effective way of importing and exporting video from Pencil, and did this super quick and dirty rotoscoping test — my third animation so far. All of this playing with the software is giving me a lot of ideas and some time I really want to tackle a music video. That said, I really should put the drawing tablet aside for a while and do some real work on the keyboard instead!