My GIF leaks!

Editorial GIFs


Lately I've been doing animated GIF files which reveal my day job (i.e. doing opinion-editorial cartoons for a Sydney newspaper) and found it energizing and empowering albeit the time-consuming process; but practise helped flatten a steep learning curve. Image above based on op-ed illo in today's Sydney Morning Herald (print & online) with written article by Miranda Devine. Theme was about our new Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard; in hot water due to "damaging" leaks purportedly coming from her own party!

Like most of you guys out there, I read the news first thing in the morning with my barako coffee sweetened with pure Bathurst honey. Don't know why but my steaming cup buzzes down stress of reading unsettling headlines, both local and international. Then somehow my mind tricks me to comment via a mental op-ed doodle (and for a while trapped in the editorial world of visual commentary).

Ah say, ah say! Expressing ideas in this new digital world is always something of a challenge. See how young (and even master) artists are getting high doodling on their iPads! I like to think that our own body electricity has found its allies with all these electronic gadgets that surround us today. Fear the day that during a power failure we'll all be looking like stranded aliens on earth, dazed and staring at flying saucer to be written off by our Martian insurance firm.



GIF is different (as also to Flash animation). Its limitation is the very challenge to animators, stuff like how to seamlessly loop the animation (call it a poor man's animated short film that plays forever:); or to manipulate time without warping space while considering the message within. I guess I'll be doing more GIF animations as major news headlines come and go and when the winter rain traps me home, where once and poignantly I did a GIF self-portrait (above image, 53 frames at .02 second speed), taking on mental states in peak and in chaos, elements of bright, dark, mean, cool, Christian and Indo-Malay tribal values, a virtual self-imposed limbo where an empirical and digital soul can go through wormholes and play ball with quarks because afterall everything has sense, in its rightful place as mathematically and digitally organized as the Fibonacci sequence and equally luminous as the Golden Ratio.

2010..Year of the Leaks?

First there was that appalling BP oil leak at the Gulf of Mexico which I couldn't resist doing a knee-jerk GIF op-ed. (image below). Glad the CEO was sacked, I just hope the scapegoat-hunting company use him to cap the leak (he'll wedge perfectly owing to his huge ego and lifestyle:) I actually did 2 GIF op-eds about this issue (the first one in an earlier blog entry, 2nd image).





However there was another major leak that sprung and this time it involved the leak master itself..Wiki Leaks! It seems the site is now full of virtual bullet holes.

Accordingly, some Pentagon secret data were leaked out and published in the said site. President Obama bugged by another leak vehemently protested as he believed it endangered troops in US and Allies military operations overseas. Fair enough, so here's my take, playing on the logos of Pentagon and WikiLeaks. (below)




Do you remember a leak that involved design of new iPhone 4? Gizmodo (site that published design prematurely) got into serious trouble despite the site owner volunteering to return the stray phone. Poor guy was treated like a terrorist, roughed up, home raided and computers seized. Did WikiLeaks pick up on that? However karma struck a just chord, (recently) it was found out that iPhone 4's antennae "leaks"!

Oh boy, all these leaks are making me so uncomfortable; so please excuse me while I take one. (Mind you the stem is fine, but with my age I might need to change the washer:)


*Wikileaks is an international organization, based in Sweden,^[1] which publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. (from Wikipedia)

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/impressive-but-not-a-good-look-20100728-10vy1.html