I was recently asked to blog about a conference on Synthetic Biology. Here’s a teaser. You can read the full entry here.

When a cartoon is in the early stages of production artists craft the storyline by creating a series of still images. Those images, referred to as “extremes”, depict characters in their most exaggerated positions and are often used in the final stories as visual hooks and punchlines for the audience: anvils are falling on heads; bodies are magically suspended miles above ground; tears are streaming from eyes. Chuck Jones, who famously created the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote characters for the Looney Tunes series of animated shorts, was a master of extremes. In the example here, Wile E. Coyote has just suffered his first ever T.N.T. mishap at the hands of the Road Runner. In addition to hooking the audience, extremes can be thought of as caricatures of the characters and plot.

Read the full post here.