Hide and go seek

"Could you put my shoes on for me please?", says the 3 year old girl to my son, Jake, in the middle of a child development class in year 12.
After putting on the first one, Jake looks around and says "Where is your other shoe?"
"I don't know."
Of course not. Why would she know. That would be too easy.

"Where were you playing when you lost the other one?"
She leads him over to the playground, and they search for 5 minutes.
"Does anyone else know where a spare shoe is?" Jake asks of all the other children.
One boy pipes up: "I know! I know!"
"Where is it?"
"I can't tell you."
"Why not?"
"I hid it!" he says, with a devious grin on his face, happy at being so clever.
Jake, in another display of his seemingly infinite patience, asks him calmly, "Why did you hide it?"
The boy, even happier, says something that an adult could never invent in a million years.
"I wanted to play Hide and Go Shoe!"

All the other children, upon hearing this, take off one of their shoes and shout, "Can we play too?!"
"How about we play that, not now!" says Jake, and diverts them to some other game, cleverly avoiding all the confused parents wondering why their children are coming home limping.
They eventually find the other piece of footwear hiding in a closet, and cover her bare metatarsals before she starts to develop scoliosis.

Sintel

I haven't been doing a lot of Blender or animation lately, as I have discovered some very cool Blender work done by others. Watch this short movie called Sintel on Youtube, or download a hi-res version from the main Sintel site.

Apart from the technical excellence of the piece (cool hair effects, lighting, all sorts of stuff), it is a very moving story of a young girl and a wounded baby dragon.


Don't miss it! (Increase it to 720p and watch it full screen. And turn up the sound - the music is great, especially the Ziggurat scene, and the song during the credits at the end.)

PS Why is it taking me so long to watch a short movie? Because the whole thing is open source (from the Blender Foundation), free, and lots of material from the movie is available. Screenshots, the music, "making of" documentaries, even source 3D files I can load up and create my own scenes with. Its a real mother-load!

PSS The only bad side-effect is it makes my stumbling around in Blender look very poor in comparison. So don't compare, ok?