Leigh :) Stark

Author: Leigh Stark

  • WordPress: CityRail never looked so good…

    Ok so after scabbing so many WordPress themes, I’m now going to try my hand at creating one of those nifty premium style themes.

    It of course will be free, and probably poorly designed since I’m not a designer.

    But here’s the first Photoshop piece of my first WordPress theme: “You Fool! You Crossed The Yellow Line!”

    "You Fool! You Crossed The Yellow Line!" is technically the second CityRail theme I had planned... it's just the first to come out of my Photoshop session...
    "You Fool! You Crossed The Yellow Line!" is technically the second CityRail theme I had planned… it's just the first to come out of my Photoshop session…

    There’s already a box under the two articles there that could essentially be used for a 4-5 square Flickr plugin and I’ll probably add a gum artwork or dirty ticket above the menu. The main section at the bottom should always be there according to this design, similar to how MNML works.

    Some comments would be nice though, since I’m not a designer and this is my first real design.

    In case anyone is wondering, the design of the station platform comes from how it looks at Bondi Junction (seriously, look down when you’re there) and while I took photos for inspiration, all of the textures and panels have been generated in Photoshop.

  • Haiku on a bus

    The bus smells of tired
    Autumn cold bites slow
    “Home James” will be said soon

  • Draft Panel of “Jim’s Bath”

    So the whole “making the storyboards for the Ninjas vs. Pirates” bit made me want to do some more animation, and since I’m a freelance journalist, I sort of have that ability to handle some writing and animating right now.

    In any case, I’ve come up with a small story I might be able to throw at Tropfest next year and I just thought that you – my one and only reader – would like to see the panel I’ve bee nworking on for the past hour and a bit.

    It looks better up close so make sure to click on the image...
    It looks better up close so make sure to click on the image…

    I’m planning to keep the style pretty rough with an almost “dried paint” look. I’m doing a tone of layering here and don’t worry, there will be character animation. It’ll be loose, expressive, and likely piss me off… but I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

  • Pirates vs. Ninjas

    Ok, so I have an idea. A basic idea, a simple idea, but for all intents & purposes an idea.

    It’s an idea my brother doesn’t like but Ross and I have gone to work on it regardless. And here it is…

    A pre-pilot with a very quick script playing off of the old “Ninjas versus Pirates” geek argument mixing with a fake news network.

    That’s the simple bit. There’s a bit more complexity to it as we’ve scripted more bits & pieces for this concept, but the overall idea is to have a fake news network with comedic bits.

    No, this isn’t like The Onion or The Chaser. We don’t purport to be funny… we sort of just hope we are.

    If we hit, we hit. If we miss, we hope to land on something soft & plush so as not to hurt our backs. We like our backs.

    In any case, here’s the simple pre-pilot video done with audio recorded over Skype and in person, as well as the gallery of storyboards below in case you like some of the cute little pictures that I edited into this video.

    [flv]https://www.leighlo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/prepilot.flv[/flv] (more…)