Just in case you didn’t know, I’ll be teaching a series of classes in the Baltimore area. The two that are confirmed so far are:

• Creative Alliance, March 11th from 1:30 to 3:30 pm with a book signing across the street at High Grounds from 4:00 to 5:00pm
• CityLit Festival III, April 8th at the Enoch Pratt Free Library Central Branch (hi Gavin!)

Once I get the confirmation and the details on the third class, I’ll post the details here. Come out and learn the magic art of the minicomic from the author and artist of A Moment of Clarity, the Minicomic Adventure.

Hello, all. Photos for the recent gallery reception at the JCC have been posted. Check out the January 22nd 2006 Gallery Reception section of the Stills from the Movie page.

News on the Freedom Dance site is currently broken. I’m working on an interim solution, but News will be inaccessible for a while until I come up with something. Stay tuned.

Update: News is back up, but the Recent News box oon the homepage will not be working for some time. Thanks for your patience.

Check out the Stills From The Movie page with a relatively modern browser. Thanks to script.aculo.us, the Stills From The Movie navigation is a bit…well, cooler and snappier. Enjoy!

John Bintz here. If you’re reading this, then you’re now reading the Textpattern version of the Freedom Dance weblog. I’ve finished the migration from cosblog, which is starting to show its age in comparison to all of these nifty edit-in-browser CMS packages. Textile is rather nice, too. Well, at least cosblog helped me learn PHP, which has come in handy more than once in the past few years. Expect a migration of coswellproductions.org to one of these new systems in the near future!

Anyway, what this now means for Freedom Dance is that, instead of me being the gatekeeper to weblog content, other folks on the team such as Steven, Craig, and Edward can post and edit their own entries, without having to go through me. It should allow for more frequent updates, and will give all of us more time to focus on the things in life that matter. Like coffee. And cartoons.

A few notes:

• Clicking on an author’s icon or using the author links at the bottom of the page shows only those author’s posted articles. Use the “All” link at the bottom of the page or the “Weblog” link at the top to return to the normal view of the most recent articles.
• Archives are no longer listed at the end of this page. Click the “Archives” link at the bottom of the page to view the list of all articles. Viewing an author’s articles by clicking their icon will always show all articles they’ve ever written.
• The RSS feed now only gives you the ten most recent articles.
• You can no longer filter entries by date. I don’t think anyone was using that, anyway.
• Some old weblog entries had “posting dates” that spanned several days. Those migrated entries now have a single post date, that date being the last day of the range.

Peace out,

John Bintz
Webmaster
freedomdancethemovie.com

Craig Herron and Edward Hilbert’s interview [1.7MB, MP3] on the July 11th, 2005 episode of “The Coffee House” is up on the site. Give it a listen.

Podcasting hip, it’s fresh, and all the cool kids are doing it. Check out a recent interview of “Freedom Dance” producer Steven Fischer on That’s a Wrap Radio, hosted by Carlos Cruz, and hear a clip of the show [168KB MP3] that talks about “Freedom Dance” (with permission from Carlos Cruz).

( this article’s a bit outdated now, since we’re now running the weblog on Textpattern )

cosblog just got a minor update, due to an implementation issue with this site’s weblog. Since cosblog is built more toward throwing an entry into a folder and letting the entry fall where it may in the weblog, it’s very difficult to keep any order to the entries. So whenever an update was made to a prior entry (which has happened several times), reordering the items required me to reupload not only that file, but also, because of time stamps on the server, all subsequent files. In order. Not fun.

But no longer. Thanks to PHP’s (somewhat rudimentary) metaprogramming support through the use of call_user_func_array(), I was able to add some dynamically called methods to the Metadata plugin object, calls based on the metadata parameter name, to allow manipulation of the core Blogject properties during Metadata processing. The end user can add more methods by extending the Metadata object and registering the new, extended, object in the plugins list. The whole update was a handful of lines of code. Yay metaprogramming!

That last bit, in non-programmer English: The weblog entries are now in order, and will stay in order, regardless of the number of changes to each individual entry. Stay tuned for a new release of cosblog in the coming months.

Back to “Freedom Dance”: Craig sent me a CD chock full of images ready to be colored. I hope to run through a majority of these in the coming days, so that we can keep the production phase on track.

Hello, everyone. John Bintz, Webmaster, here. Having recovered from my trip up to the MoCCA Art Festival 2005, I had some time to add some new graphics to the Stills from the Movie page. They’re under the Apple Truck Sequence link on the page. They’re really cool, so check them out.

Also, if you’ve got a relatively modern browser, let it sit on the homepage for about twenty seconds. You should get a very nice fade effect between the pictures on the homepage. The effect doesn’t use Flash—it’s all written in JavaScript, so it’s fast and lightweight. More pictures will be added to the rotation in the future, so be on the lookout!

This just in! Steven Fischer is featured in the Maslow Media “Freelancer Spotlight” for the Month of June 2005. Click here to check it out!

A few updates of note before I go to sleep:

• Added Meaghan Dunn to the Bios page
• Added some new stills from the first part of the movie to the Gallery/Stills From The Movie page
• Added a ton of weblog entries from Steven

The tech updates I promised are coming soon. Don’t worry, they’ll be really cool. I promise.

John Bintz
Webmaster

I just participated in the most grueling event in the comic book world—24 Hour Comics Day. This is the second year the event has been held, and I have to say it was a real eye-opening experience. I learned just how productive I can be in a short period of time, and this learned lesson of “just sit down and do it” will certainly help in my work on “Freedom Dance”, especially when I get back to coloring backgrounds and characters, and I have to do one of those monstrous scenes with a hundred colors and no chance of using the Magic Wand tool to color things quickly. Check out the comic, as well as the blogged adventures of the day, on my Website, and learn about the origins of the 24 Hour Comic idea.

John Bintz
Very Tired Webmaster/Colorist

The redesign and restructuring of the Freedom Dance website is complete. New features include:

• New design that focuses on simplicity
• News items are now set up weblog-style, with a recent newsbox appearing on the homepage
• Press information has been broken off into a new section called “For The Press” which also includes high-resolution graphics for print stories. If you are a reporter and would like access to the high-res graphics, contact John for the username and password

Thanks to Steven and Craig for their input on the new design. More technological goodies will be coming down the road for freedomdancethemovie.com. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the brand-new site for the “Freedom Dance” documentary, freedomdancethemovie.com. I’m real excited to be part of the project, as both Webmaster, and as a painter for the thousands of drawings that will be used in the creation of this awesome documentary. We have a lot of work ahead of us, both in the production and the marketing of this movie, and I hope to keep the Internet public in the loop about everything we’re doing.

Remember, if you have any questions for Steven, Craig, Edward, or anyone else involved in the production of this movie, feel free to contact us.

Take care,

John Bintz
Webmaster, freedomdancethemovie.com