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This year for my Flash online Greeting Card, I created a Flash Game based on my 10-year-old Niece’s board-game that she created and illustrated.

To play the game follow the link:
http://mattgillmore.com/portfolio/christmas-game/

Try to get your sleigh around town and to the milk and cookies first! If you land at a nice house you get to move forward 2 spaces, but if you land on a naughty house you have to move back 4 spaces. Along the way you can hit Card spaces. Playing a card can have interesting effects! And if you land on the entrance of the rainbow bridge, you may find an animated shortcut! Christmas Catastrophie can be played 1 player against a computer or 2 players with a mouse and keyboard and is suitable for all ages. I hope you can take a moment a play!

Have a Happy Holiday, a Merry Christmas and a Joyous New Year!

Matt.

‘People who get Jean Simmons tour dates get “KISS-information”.’

I watch everything on my television with closed captions turned on. Television shows, movies, DVDs — everything has closed captions or subtitles displaying.

My mother was mostly deaf. Without her hearing aids she could barely make out anything, and even with her hearing aids it wasn’t until the advent of Closed Captioning that we were finally relieved the task of repeating nearly every line of dialog on TV. Growing up in later childhood and as a young adult everything in my life had closed captions.

And my wife is French, living in America for several years, and speaks Italian and Spanish as well. So it’s of great assistance for her to watch everything with closed captions. Of course, she calls them subtitles. In France as in much of Europe, people are much more accustomed than Americans to the use of subtitles in foreign movies and television.

So between growing-up with captions and always having them on as a lifestyle as an adult, and having a wife who depends on them, I am intimately familiar with Closed Captions.

And it has been my observation for quite a while that of all of the television shows and different channels that I watch, The Daily Show on Comedy Central has typically, some of the least accurate, and more often, what I can only describe as “uninformed” and occasionally “uncooperative” Closed Captions on television.

Sometimes when Jon Stewart is rolling along hard on one of his zingers — talking fast on one of his rants — and he’s really bringing to light the hypocrisy and the self-contradiction of the right-wing establishment, the Closed Captions just sort of trail off with an ellipsis as if whoever is typing the Closed Captions just can’t keep up, even though the captions keep up just fine with all the multi-talking-head shows like “The View” or “Fox and Friends”. Sometimes when I see The Daily Show’s captions trail off during some right-wing smashing rant, I wonder if Papa Bear O’Reily is doing Closed Captions for The Daily Show.

And sometimes I see this, and I don’t know what to think:

What Jon Stewart actually said was, “Let’s face facts, the guy had some issues.”
What got Closed Captioned was, “Guy had somish seuss. Let’s face facts.”

And you can’t tell me that it’s just Comedy Central’s Closed Caption system, because I’ve never seen this kind of trouble on the show following, the friendly rival, The Colbert Report.

Oh my god!~ Stephen Colbert is doing the Closed Captioning for The Daily Show!

The Daily Show runs Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central.

Since the movie trailer player and the body content required several seconds to load, even on my 15 Meg Internet Pipe, I sat for several long seconds staring at the obvious white blurs between the elves, the badly blended shadows in the foreground, the lazy way the image was repeated by flipping the shadows and just wholesale erasing the parts that didn’t blend.

Finally the page loaded and I watched the trailer with a jaded eye and was mostly distracted with the idea of right-clicking and choosing “View Background Image” to see if it was really as bad as it seemed in those awful seconds of loading.

So after the trailer was finished and I went back to the background the first thing I thought was, “I wonder how much they paid for that”? I have first-hand experience with these big media houses and their huge accounts with these interactive marketing agencies and I know for a fact that these outfits can spend stupid amounts of money on these branded social media pages. How much did you pay for this page guys? How many hundreds of bucks did they bill you for “production design”?

And then my second thought as I looked at the area that had to be erased, and the obvious flip that they used to extend the image, and the complete lack of attempt to blend the shadows, that you know, it would not even take an hour’s worth of honest time, putting a vector mask around the characters needed, building the scene from cleanly vectored characters in layer, rendering (or at the very least blending) the shadows. If I had the original images I bet I could get it done in about an hour, two hours max. That’s a hundred bucks worth of my time.

Get the background image here!

And the third thing I thought was that anyone who knowingly put up this background image, for a national movie, on a branded YouTube page, even under the lame excuse of “no one is going to see it under the body content”, even if they only got paid 100 dollars – obviously doesn’t even have enough pride in their own work to be ashamed of what a lazy shoddy job they did.

But, I wasn’t there; who knows. Maybe there was a baby on fire and the graphic designer had to save the baby as opposed to working on this background, or maybe the Movie Distributor only spent 35 bucks on the whole project, or maybe the Movie Director’s Nephew did the web-work in exchange for a Pizza-night party with all his friends. Who knows. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why this background image went up.

But there’s no excuse for it.

Arthur Christmas opens in theaters November 23rd of 2011.

View the official trailer here, and see if they’ve fixed their shoddy background yet:
http://www.youtube.com/arthurchristmasmovie?x=us_showcase_1002_7

What is the range of time on these little graphs? One day? One hour? 6 hours?

It’s kinda like, here’s a speedometer, with no numbers, and we’re not gonna tell you if it’s miles-per-hour, or kilometers-per-hour, or feet-per-second.

I tried mousing over them. I tried clicking on them, I read the FAQ, I read the “how to read our data” page…

If someone could let me know @mattgillmore or contact me here.