Fun « Moovl – just add imagination

Lego 50th Anniversary

January 31, 2008 at 9:21 pm | In Art, Events, Fun | Leave a Comment

You may not have realised that the Lego brick is 50 years old this year (Google themselves changed their logo for a day). Around here we think the only thing cooler than Lego is Moovl, so here is the Moovl logo rendered in the beautiful little bricks.

Go Green Competition Winner!

December 10, 2007 at 11:59 am | In Events, Fun | Leave a Comment

I’m very pleased to announce the winner of our Go Green competition. The winning school is White Rock Primary in Torbay.

The school used Moovl during their regular weekly ICT club, and the pupils showed some great creativity to fit our theme of ‘Going Green’. The judges were particularly impressed with the range of drawings, and also the imaginative use of the Moovl tools (for example the text tool and the animation tool).

Thanks to all the other schools who also entered the competition.

A selection of the winning drawings is show-cased below.

Have yourself a Moovl little Christmas

December 4, 2007 at 9:12 am | In Fun | 1 Comment

I know it’s a bit early for most people, but I’ve created a Christmas Card page on this site with a free Moovl e-card.

You can preview the card by clicking on the picture below.

To send your e-card, go to the Christmas Card page where there are full instructions.

Moovl Halloween

October 30, 2007 at 11:51 am | In Animation, Fun | Leave a Comment

Here’s a bit of fun for Hallowe’en… I’m not quite sure why the pumpkin is jumping on the skeleton, but it makes a nice noise.

New animation: Three Blind Mice

September 23, 2007 at 4:54 pm | In Animation, Fun | Leave a Comment

The Incy Wincy Spider animation that my son and I made has been a (small) hit on YouTube, with over 2,000 views so far, a five-star rating, and some nice comments:

cute it made my little 3 year old cousin really happy lol shes so cute singing to it and i luv this guys acent i luved it so cute

‘Need to see it again’ said my 2 year old daughter as she recited it along with the lovely voice on your animation. Such a clear, clever animation, thank you

Inspired by the success of this animation,we decided to try and animate another classic nursery rhyme: Three Blind Mice. As before, we used Moovl to create the drawing and animations, then screen-captured them and edited them into a movie using Windows MovieMaker.

The whole experience was definitely fun. As ever, there were creative concerns about whether the sequel could live up to the success of the first movie, but luckily we managed to reunite the same team of artists. In fact I’d like to think that this is of similar quality as Godfather II (generally acknowledged as better than Godfather I). Although perhaps the casting of family members is more akin to Godfather III.

The Big Draw (Again)

September 18, 2007 at 12:01 pm | In Art, Events, Fun | Leave a Comment

Back in June I blogged about The Big Draw - the Campaign for Drawing’s annual showpiece.

There’s now much more information on the Big Draw website, including an online events calendar and details of the national launch event on 30 September. You can also register your own event as part of the programme.

The Campaign invites everyone to join in, using drawing to engage with the past, present and future. The eighth Big Draw runs from 1 to 31 October 2007, with a special focus on Saturday 13 October. Any drawing event in October can be registered as part of this programme.

As part of the national launch, there is a session on interactive drawing at Queen Mary, University of London. More details can be found here, but an insider tells me that as well as discussing Sodarace, there will be a demo of Moovl.

The range of activities for the national launch is impressive, and there are hundreds of other events taking place around the country during October.

Futurelab’s digital pet project: Fizzees

August 22, 2007 at 3:46 pm | In Fun, Moovl development | Leave a Comment

Futurelab was one of the organisations that helped considerably in the early development of Moovl. They have a new product in the pipeline called Fizzees. I saw a demo of this product a while ago, and it’s great to see it moving into a prototype phase, and hopefully commercialisation.

The Fizzee is a digital pet (like a tamagotchi), that is worn on the wrist. Unlike other digital pets however, this one responds to your own physical activity (eg heart-rate) to determine it’s own health and development. As well as the individual Fizzee, there is a website that allows children to collaborate, compare their virtual pets, swap activities and find out about other aspects of a healthy lifestyle.

It seems like a great tool to make exercise fun, and engage young children in thinking about their health.

Famous art in Moovl

August 1, 2007 at 12:53 pm | In Animation, Art, Fun | 2 Comments

Inspired by a colleague who drew the Moovl Lisa, I added my own version of Munch’s The Scream. I can’t decide whether the animated version is more disturbing than the original.

Perhaps The Girl with the Pearl Earring would have been better.

Flickr photostream

July 28, 2007 at 2:31 pm | In Animation, Fun | Leave a Comment

I’ve added a Flickr RSS feed on the sidebar (on the right-hand side). This will show regularly updated still images from Moovl (all my own work at the moment).

If you want to see the full set of images you can click on the ‘more photos’ link in the Flickr panel, or if you don’t want to go to the trouble of scrolling down, then you can click here.

The still photos don’t really give the full sense of Moovl because… err… they don’t move. But having said that, they’re still quite cute.

Moovl Moo cards

July 28, 2007 at 7:30 am | In Fun | Leave a Comment

The Moovl Moo cards are here (see Moo Moo Moovl). Just over a week since I ordered them, which is pretty fast considering the problems with the post at the moment.

They are small, but robust with quite thick, sharp card and nice colourful images.