Riffs! Yeah! Can you digg it?

The few of you who don't catch me banging on about it every excuse I have, back in 2005 I spent weeks (as an experiment more than anything) to see if I could submit an entire shortened film to b3ta.com, a website I used to post hell of a lot of pictures on. The result was Star Wars in 168k, which is presented in its entirety in this post. It became a little bit of a sensation; I got hundreds of emails about it and offers from phone companies wanting to buy it to sell as animated wallpaper. I also got a lovely goodie bag from Lucasfilm and a Christmas card from them, which are currently framed on my landing. Since then I've wasted many more months doing Star Wars episodes 5 and 6, Ghostbusters, Alien and Aliens, Back to the Future and Flash Gordon.

"Yeah, we fucking know", I hear you ask, "Bored already. Whats your point?"

Last week, my good friend James Stace, Noit on b3ta (or Nolt if you listen to Shaun Keaveny) pointed me towards a digg article posting my animation.

"Ooh", I thought, camply. Clicking on the link I was pissed to find that despite it was definitely my animation, some fucker had removed any credits from it. The "FoldsFive presents" had vanished, and the "www.barbelith.co.uk" link has vanished from the end. Not so pissed off about the latter (the websites been dead for years) but definitely quite annoyed about the former. I have no problem people sharing it - it's what the internet is for after all - I just object to credit not being given. Anyway, to be fair, I emailed the people who'd posted the original (via both email and twitter, just to be sure) and they went out of their way to correct it and now the proper animation with credits intact has been restored.

"More self-gratification", you mutter, "The whole point of this post is to remind us about something geeky you did five years ago that you're the only person around who still cares about, isn't it?"

Kind of. What amuses me most (and the point of this blog post) is that even five years later, the digg comments are still the same.

A mixture of (a) People seeing it for the first time and enjoying it (this is my favourite group of people), (b) people telling me how much of a sad loser geek I am for spending the time doing it in the first place and (c) people pointing out that I've got some of the lightsabres the wrong colour.

(There are also a fair old few who bang on about it's not as good as telnet star wars, which I have to admit I'd never heard of before I did my animation).

The people in group (a) I can understand. They're fine upstanding individuals of good taste who will go on to live long, happy lives. However, the people in groups (b) and (c) baffle me. Not for their individual opinions, because they're all right - just because the two groups seem so blatantly opposed as to be amusing to me.

Anyway, as a bit of more self promotion, here's an interview I did during the peak of these animations for a little known obscure web-magazine. Still, get it where you can.