New Python Material

As previously reported, the recent surprise demise of high-quality video host site Stage6, left the SYF site with a few dead video links. Stage 6 was an enormously useful tool to the online film maker, as it provided one with a convenient and immediate way to distribute video of an acceptable broadcast quality, to journalists and festival runners as required. The site will also be particularly missed by SYF because our films were amongst the most popular content there. All the same, its demise provided SYF with an opportunity to revise its online catalogue from scratch, remastering many of our older films from original source material - so now all our links are not only fixed, but they provide the best quality versions of our films ever seen.

Not only that, but as a taster of things to come, we're providing a new collection of promotional images for out Python movie, which journalists and webmasters are free to use, provided the appropriate credits and links are included. Click on the previews below to view larger images.

Finally on a related note, a special thanks also to the Guardian Guide, who gave us a shout out in last Sundays issue.

Stage6 R.I.P

Apologies to visitors discovering broken links to some of our HQ videos, this is due to the surprise death of Stage6 and new links will be in place as soon as possible. More details on this soon...

Market Kitchen

New Year, new broadcast commercial. Just before Christmas I completed another directing job with Tandem Films, this time a spot for the BBC. Not that the BBC have commercials - oh no.

The piece is for the food show Market Kitchen, and consists of a single 30 second shot in which we pass from Spring through to Winter. We used stop-motion animation to play with the idea of 'simulated' time-lapse photography, but at the same time, broke away from the confines of linear time to create a nonsensical, magical depiction of the passing of seasons.

If it's not broadcasting already, it should be running on BBC digital and cable channels withing the month, and then throughout the rest of the year. More details as they come

My Internet is Bigger than Your Internet

Common wisdom would have it that the popular video hosting site Stage6 is owned by DIVX, Inc. I would contest however, that Spite Your Face 'own' Stage6. At least this week.

Which is my roundabout way of telling you that our Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock has been the featured video on their front page for a week now, meaning that our other contributions like Holy Grail in Lego and ONE: A Space Odyssey have also been dancing around the top of the featured videos chart.

In the past, those same films have topped the charts at Yahoo Movies, iFilm, Atom Films and Veoh - so in the age of online video saturation, it's good to know that the SYF can still kick it with the Ownage!

Harmonise

Because we're much cooler than you, SYF have been making the video for the first single from London's hottest new band, Ipso Facto. Harmonise is officially released next month from Disc Error Recordings, but we are proud to present you with the video from today.



The piece is modeled loosely on the final act of the 1929 G.W Pabst classic Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) starring the iconic Louise Brooks - which when you look at the band, is hardly a massive leap of logic.



If you have a Myspace account (which you do, because you're on the internet) you can view some behind the scenes photos here, courtesy of the bands art director Ciaran O'Shea.


Meanwhiles, you can enjoy the production stills included in this post, and take your pick of how you want to enjoy the full video:

HQ version on the Disc Error site, where you can buy the single.
22mb MP4 here.
Myspace version here.
And for the undiscerning, a Youtube version below:



The video was directed by me (Tony Mines), the DP as always was Tim Drage, with additional editing from Alec Rossiter and make up by Sophie Knock. Special thanks go out to Molinare and Tandem Films for use of their facilities.

Learn Em'

We're the featured video on the front page of Myspace today. And you're not.


Learn Em' is the new single from electro wrongens The Errorplains, and the music video there of, is directed by me.

The video is modeled around the old Nintendo Game and Watch© not us, the 1980's. All Rights Reserved series of hand held games, a decision reached mostly because it just looks cool, but also because of the tight schedule. The aim of the project, for us, was really to see how far we could take the idea of 2-frame animation. To try and relate a whole story, with action sequences (of a sort) using what should probably be too few frames to even create persistence of vision.


So anyway, go watch it on Myspace now, or anywhere else you might choose to find it, and let the world know what you think.

Here or here.

Making Star Wars The Han Solo Affair

The story behind The Han Solo Affair is really a story about 'keeping it real', as we used to say in the hood. The film came together in 2002, which was an important transitional phase for the Star Wars franchise as a whole. The Phantom Menace had been released some years earlier, but the world was still waiting for Attack of the Clones.

Episode 1 had bought about the now infamous explosion of Jar Jar toys, but the world was yet to be thrown fully into a revival of Star Wars mania. Sure there was a lot of peripheral stuff out there, but it was nothing like it is today - nothing at all.

In fact, as we were well aware, if the project happened it would be only the second time in Star Wars history that a short film had been produced under license, the first being the Boba Fett cartoon in the Star Wars Holiday Special.

This meant we had a responsibility to history, one we took very seriously.

The initial brief was to produce an Attack of the Clones animation. The movie was still months away, and while we had access to a certain amount of preview material, it just wasn't enough to tell the right kind of story. Sure our film was going to be a spoof, but it was a licensed spoof, and that was a big deal. We wanted to make something that fit neatly into the Star Wars universe without messing it up.

And we wanted Darth Vader.

So we started playing around with the original trilogy. Our basic idea was to take two consecutive points in the films, and make up our own story about what happens in between. So that, in theory, you could edit our lego sequence into the middle of the movie, and it would still make some sort of sense.

This same puritanism would guide us through the rest of the project, and dictate the look of the film. Strong shot compositions. Soft, analogue wipe transitions. Physical model spaceships. Hand rotoscoped light sabers. All more elegant weapons, from a more civilized age.

Sure there were easier ways to do some of the stuff we did, but we did it the hard way, and we did it on purpose...

The sets were built in the workshops at Legoland, where they create all the models for the park. We only had two days there to build everything, so made extensive notes on exactly what we would need.

The picture above is one such note, using a VHS copy of The Empire Strikes Back for reference.

This similarly, is a 'diagram' for the construction of the Bespin corridor sections. The idea was to build key locations which could be linked by 'Scooby Doo corridors' - sets designed to loop indefinately, like an old Hanna Barbera cartoon.

The conceit of retelling the most tragic part of The Empire Strikes Back using cheap cartoon mechanics was, to us at least, inherently hilarious. Plus, to the benefit of the finished film, working in this way kept the camera 'moving'.

The picture above illustrates the primary complication with shooting any lego animation, which is the enormity of the camera in relation to the 'actors'. In many cases the minifigs had to be positioned physically inside the hood of the camera, just to get a close-up. We've since switched to digital stills cameras, but its done little to resolve the issue.

Opposite is a capture from the camera, as it appeared before we cropped the shot to widescreen. This we did for reasons of authenticity, and because it looks better. Lego minifigs are short and rotund, so they well suit extremely wide compositions.

The shots were captured straight into the computer from the camera, and each one was 'frame blended' together from several identical frames, to reduce video grain.

Finally, we've compiled some footage from the studio shoot into a short making-of feature. You can watch the Youtube version below, or click here for a better quality MP4.

Coco Pops Commercial

The Coco Pops commercial I directed for Tandem Films is now airing nationally across Britain, with theatrical showings and other UK territories expected to follow soon. Coco Pops, for the benefit of our readers in the colonies, is the popular Kellogg's breakfast serial better known to you as Cocoa Krispies.

You can watch it online here.

I should clarify that the spot was produced by Tandem for Leo Burnett, and is not a SYF production - though SYFs own Tim Drage, and Spider-Man veteran animator Tom Bevan were both involved at various points. And of course I directed it, so I get to write about it on this blog.

The concept for the piece came from Leo Burnett, with the production teams brief being to realise it using stop-motion - or using techniques that look like stop-motion. I must admit, I never thought I would be called upon to animate anything physicaly smaller than a lego man, but coco pops certainly fit that bill (stop-motion mitochondria next I guess). Further to which, the story called for said pops to be in mid-air half the time. For a stop-motion animator, about the only thing that the brief left out, was if the coco pops had to be on fire.

The lazy solution would have been to do the whole thing CG, but making a film using only one technology, is for little babies and Hollywood. Instead, we took the Heath Robinson approach, and decided to tell the story using just about every practical animation technique available - whichever best suited each effect - all the while retaining that desired stop-motion aesthetic.

In the course of the thirty seconds you can see stop-motion, CG, live action, 2D traditional, rotoscoping, replacement model, photosonics, slow-motion and practical effects work, plus some techniques that there aren't even proper names for. For now, I'm not going to spoil the magic by telling you what shot uses what technique - but what I will say is that effects you think were done one way, were almost certainly done another...

Cosmic Adventure.

In this animation game, you can spend a lot of energy pitching for projects that as often as not don't come to anything. But sometimes you at least walk away with a new piece of artwork that you probably wouldn't have bothered to do otherwise. Below is an example of such.

650,000 People Can't be Wrong.

Well, they probably can. But they aren't.

Last month I was talking about Youtube and the relative difficulty for independent film makers to tell how many viewers they are really getting there, because of the profusion of multiple uploads that popular titles seem to receive. Well, inspired by a sudden spike on one of our own uploads I decided to take the time to work it out, and it proved a fascinating anthropological study.

Calculating your hits on Youtube is difficult, because often the numbers shown in a search listing are cached from some time back, and clicking through to the link can reveal that a lot more people have actually viewed said file since. Also, it depends on the search terms you use. I tried to enter every likely word combination I could think of, but you still can't account for people who have uploaded your movie under completely the wrong name, entered it in another language or alphabet, or deviously claimed it as their own work. Taking these factors into consideration, the figures produced below can be seen as not only highly approximate, but as fairly low estimates.

Finally, I know for a fact that almost all of these views have been in the last six months, because I purged Youtube of dodgy pirate copies before that date - something you could realistically do back then, but couldn't possibly manage now. However, I suspect that the vast majority have been in the last two to three months, as I distinctively recall being disappointed by the casual glance I took at our viewing figures back then. I can only attribute this to what has been the 'year of Youtube' and as a side effect of the journey towards 'web 2.0'.

So anyways. Way in the lead is that which we lovingly refer to in-house as The Python Film with a reputable 650,000+ (six hundred, fifty thousand). Not bad for a film that has been active online for more than five years and doesn't even have a proper title.

Following suit is the ever popular Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock, with something in excess of 104,000 (one hundred, four thousand). Spidey still isn't getting quite the same viewing figures as Python (on Youtube anyway) but it has by far the greatest number of 'bootleg' copies.

After that is The Han Solo Affair with a reputable 23,000 (twenty three thousand). I got bored of counting them all after that.


As I said last month however, the true marker of success on this crazy interweb of ours, is to find out that a 12 year old boy in Mexico has painstakingly created a stop-motion fan sequel to one of your films. Well Poncho, who bought us this Doc Ock sequel/remake has done it again with Night at the Graveyard - a sequel of sorts to our earliest bricksploitation film All of the Dead. Now that's love.

Greed is Good.

There's not enough pictures on this damned Blog.

Trawling through old files I found this selection of aspirational imagery. I did these sketches about three years ago, but I would like to think that if I had taken my sketchbook out onto the streets of uptown L.A in 1984, that this is what I would have seen...

Feliz año nuevo!

The new year is off to a busy start at SYF towers. Fans in France could stumble out of bed at 3:30pm on January 1st, to see our work featuring in a documentary on Canal Plus. Meanwhile, the tv commercial I'm directing for Tandem is nearing completion, and should be broadcast for the viewing pleasure of our British fans in a few weeks time. After it airs, I should be able to talk about it's production in greater detail. It's quite a stylistic departure for what it is, so I look forward to seeing how people react to it.

Also, the episode of King Arthurs Disasters that I storyboarded (episode 22) aired on CITV in December. The series was their highest rated show. Look out for repeat viewings this year on CITV and Nicktoons (UK).


Speaking of fandom, it's probably about time for a brief round up of the years web activity surrounding the SYF catalogue:

I get sort of embarrassed when recognising that we have a 'fan base', and such a strong one too. But have them we do - in fact it is fan support, forum conversation and viral spreading that has kept SYF going strong for so many years. So the biggest change for SYF this year, as it has been for everyone online, is the incredible expansion of Youtube.





This has mostly a good thing, but it has also homogenised free web distribution. Previously, a viral film like our LEGO films, would reach its audience across a host of platforms over a long period. Our films have sat at the top of the charts on sites like iFilm and Yahoo for years, steadily gathering a fresh audience - then every once in a while, one of them would be linked by some community or other, and we would suddenly recieve a fresh new spike of interest. Now, everything gets posted to one place.

In July, I made a futile attempt to purge Youtube of elicit copies of our films, that I could upload versions with the correct accreditation. This lasted about a day, and of course there are now countless duplicates of our films up there again - which on the whole is a positive thing. I couldn't possibly try to understand the mind of someone who would volunteer their time uploading something, that has clearly already been uploaded, but the fact that they do means that more and more people are still watching our films and visiting our site. The down side for the film maker however, is that with multiple copies of the same film on a single site, it's impossible to determine how many viewers we are really getting.

The great joy of Youtube, of course, is that it has democratised and simplified video uploading, leading to a massive increase in the amount of weird useless nonsense in the world - and that can only be good. For instance, how else can one account for this German fan dub of Peril of Doc Ock, a film which is originally without dialogue!

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and there is no greater accolade the film community has to offer, than having someone produce an unauthorised Mexican remake/sequel of your film! Thats when you know you've made it.

Special thanks also to Anthony Kaufman at Daily Reel for including Doc Ock in his 'best of the best' selection, and for proving that other video hosting sites still exist!

Also, an honorary mention should also go to our arch enemies for seeing fit to produce this, which was clearly inspired by our work for LEGO and features some great character animation. I can't speak for the big L of course, but our relationship with Megabloks could be analagous to that of Charles Xavier to Magneto, a sort of contentious rivalry and respect. Somebody over there rightly recognises that stop-motion animating their actual product, is infinitely preferable to the alternatives.

Finally, a hint of things to come. The constant barrage of fans (quite rightly) harrassing me to upload the 'behind the scenes' material should be treated to a dramatic change in direction on that front. Meanwhile, SYF are in the earliest stages of planning a new animated short. Here's to keeping busy!

November News

Belated thanks to Amid Amidi over at Cartoon Brew for linking to my last post (have I really not posted in three months?). I could have done with paying more attention to the spike of visitors (and spam) this blog received that week, but I didn't. My excuse for this tardiness is that I have been directing a TV commercial for our friends over at Tandem Films.
At this point all I can tell you is that it's a spot for Kelloggs, but i'll be able to give you more updates over the coming weeks. Will it be 'not rubbish'? I hope so, i've certainly been in the same room as it for quite some time now...

How to make your animation 'not rubbish'.

Visit any one of your favourite animation sites at any time, and you will doubtless encounter some sort of aesthetic debate going on. 2D vs CG. CG vs mocap. Indie vs network. Old vs new. East vs west. Cobra vs mongoose. All these debates are really about the same thing - trying to draw a line in the sand and say "good animation is about this, so that must be bad animation".

Try to define what constitutes 'good' animation and you are always going to end up stepping on too many toes, there are just too many factors to consider. Defining the rules for what constitutes 'rubbish' animation, however, is much easier - and I have reduced this process to the consideration of just two factors. Observe:

When creating animation, for one to produce work which can be defined as 'not rubbish', one must observe the following two rules. Failure to observe either one will result in animation which can be rightly identified as 'rubbish'.

Firstly, one must be in the same room as the animation for which one is responsible. Being in the same building is not sufficient, and being in a different postal district or hemisphere is right out.

Secondly, one must recognise that animation in all its forms concerns the creation of sequential imagery, and therefore consideration and attention must be paid to every frame! This does not mean that one must animate consistently on 1's - rather, it means that supervision be given to each frame, and that the amount of movement and nature of movement therein, be personally observed and considered. Attention to only key frames, or to key poses, shall equally result in 'rubbish' animation.

The first of those guidelines is self explanatory. Its a seemingly innocuous statement until you realise that it automatically discounts most TV animation and most Hollywood movies, as having rubbish animation. And rightly so.

Certainly you can make an entertaining show using outsourced animation, but you're simply not going to produce something that contributes anything dramatic to the animation lexicon. The entertainment value is going to derive from elsewhere, from the script or the direction. The animation is inherently going to be functional at best.

The second dictate however, is the more incendiary, as when applied to certain popular ongoing debates, can be used to burn a number of sacred cows.

For example, consider this. Katsuhiro Otomo's new cel-render project, Freedom. It looks like Akira, it smells like Akira, it apparently has all the same scenes and characters and locations as Akira - but something is missing. Something essential. For, while the hand crafted intricacies of Akira will fascinate mortal animators for centuries, sending them slowly insane as they try to fathom the implications of drawing all those damned buildings - well, this new film just isn't going to have the same effect. But why? From across the room it looks almost exactly the same as the most technically accomplished hand animation ever achieved - and yet up close, you gradually realise, there's just nothing there. The character animation in Akira is hardly the most emotive in the world, it represents a total stylistic rejection of much cartoon practice. But Freedom, even by contrast, just seems to offer us puppets, drifting from one pose to the next. So if you were wondering what Akira would look like if it had been made by something other than human beings, it looks pretty much like this. Exactly the same, but dead. Identical, but souless.

Now don't get me wrong, in certain respects its as beautiful as any other Otomo movie. It has nice backgrounds, good prop models and okay puppets - and sure, with a little more time and money you could tweak the physics, add more variety to the facial animation, put in more subtle moment-specific movements and it would be almost truly indistinguishable from a drawn animation. But in so doing, you would be taking the process so close to actual frame-by-frame animation, as to negate any economy generated from rendering it with puppets in the first place. In short, there are no effective shortcuts around that second golden rule!

Its clear that after spending a billion years making Steam Boy, that this is an experiment in economy film making for Otomo - which is fine. But is the soul behind the eyes of the characters really a fair or economic exchange for all those detailed costumes?

So there it is. Now in conclusion, lets see what it looks like when both rules are lovingly observed.

Shameless act of self publicity

As well as running this gaff, I also work freelance, doing animation bits and bobs (Spite Your Face only operate at night, like Batman). To this end I have added a showreel of my own work to the site, which you can also view here.

For those of you who are interested in these things, the reel was made in After Effects and Final Cut, and features 2D motion graphics and animation elements combined with video, studio animation and CG (Cinema 4D). I won't pretend that I did any of the CG modeling, but I did do all the compositing. All the illustration elements are my own.

Like it says in the corner - hire me, I like your money!

Also, it's my birthday tommorow, so hooray for me.

You Face

The online animation community has gone bonkers today, talking about the recent crack down on You Tube by the big guns, notably Warner Brothers. You Tube has in recent months become a wonderful repository for classic animations that are otherwise unavailable, trapped beneath the weighty ownership contracts of corporations too apathetic to release them. Yesterday, in response to a scary letter from the WB, You Tube arbitrarily purged a whole host of files, including some that rightfully exist within the public domain. This is stupid. It is stupid of WB and stupid of You Tube.

Most of the Spite Your Face catalogue has been released virally online, so we couldn't fully control its distribution and representation if we tried. We only come down on people if we find sites hosting our films without the correct credits, or if they are hosting a rubbish bootleg that has had our tags and watermarks removed. In such instances we usually offer a link to a better quality copy with our URL embedded, which works out better for everyone. We do this because we and our clients both recognise, that the democratising effects of file sharing also create huge indirect advertising revenue.

This is the future, and this is how Hollywood should be playing it. Instead they have taken the Napster route, hypocritically coming down against a form of distribution that, three years from now, they will be happily utilising and manipulating for their own cynical ends.

I'm surprised at You Tube too. SYF have, to date, an excellent relationship with You Tube. Recently I posted our viral catalogue on there myself, before I did this however I made a point or having them remove the huge number of bootlegs on there, mostly because they were badly stretched or had our tags removed. At the end of the day we want everyone to find our films, but we also want them to know who made them and know who funded them. We also have the good sense to realise that if we ever released our films on DVD, say, that a bunch of crappy You Tube copies floating around is not going to be detrimental to our potential market.

You Tube were helpful and responsive in aiding this editing process, but most of all I was surprised to find myself dealing with an actual human being - not just some ugly automated process. It has been my experience of their staff that they will consider each case of copyright infringement individually. So I'm surprised at this mass purging, but at the same time, feel it might be worth people contacting them about specific files they have had removed.

In practice, You Tube is essentially a huge advertising portal where the public willingly promote corporate products to one another - just look at all the thousands of 'music videos' that fans have edited from popular shows like Naruto. From that perspective, it makes about as much sense for WB to clamp down on somebody posting Cartoon Network content, as it does for them to go into the streets and strip the Daffy Duck t-shirt from some kids back.

Spite Your Face also have a huge presence on Veoh, a rival video site of which Michael Eisner is apparently a major shareholder. Repugnant as I find the idea that Eisner might be generating revenue for our content in some obscure way, if You Tube go all Napster shaped, instead of integrating sensibly with license holders while remaining free and open, then their audience will migrate elsewhere.

How do I become an Animator?

At SYF, we get a lot of emails from people wanting to know how we did this and that bit of animation in our films. In response to this we'll hopefully get around to posting up those much touted Behind the Scenes articles in the coming weeks.

'How do I become an animator' is another common question to SYF towers - and while we're all waiting for those articles I thought I would address it. It's a very broad question that could prompt any number of responses, but amongst the simplest and most charitable answers is watch stuff. It's common for animators to develop an obsessional enthusiasm for a particular moment of animation - a thrity second sequence, a movement of a single character, the motion of a single arm. I could list hundreds of such moments, that convinced me early on of my need to animate. What is even more inspiring, is when you discover that many of your favourite moments in different films, were animated by the same guy - and the connection you made between them wasn't just in your head.

Studying animation this way, identifying the sequences that really stand out from the rest of a film and discovering why they stand out, is hugely rewarding and will help you develop a steep learning curve. Its a school of study, however, that is hugely neglected. One guy doing his bit to redress the balance is Ben Ettinger, on his Anipages Daily blog.

I was inspired to write todays post because theres an article on Anipages looking at 3x3 Eyes, and in particular hilighting the work of Koichi Arai. It made my morning to discover that this one guy was responsible for some of the best vehichle work in Akira, the title sequence to Golden Boy, the bed escaping in Roujin Z, the arm-tearing moment and destruction of the tank in Ghost in the Shell, Sharon Apple's wings in Macross Plus and the rape scene in Perfect Blue.

That reads pretty much as a whats-what of the best bits from the best movies in anime! I can picture all of those moments with absolute clarity and identify exactly what impact some of them have had on me as an animator and a director, so big thanks to Ben for identifying the connection. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've watched Arai's work from Akira frame-by-frame, more than once.

Anyways, if theres any aspiring animators out there reading this, then give anipages a visit until we post those articles up. More soon...

SYF vs Wired

SYF have started a war against leading technology magazine Wired, on account of it amuses us to do so. It started when Wired shamelessly plaguerised an image from our ONE: A Space Oddysey, and used it in a double page spread in their February issue.



I responded on our behalf with this somewhat faceteous letter.

We have yet to reveive a reply from Wired, though in the following issue they did reprint the offending image at the top of their (fittingly titled?) 'Rants and Raves' letters page, accompanying an otherwise unrelated letter.

Bring it on!

DCA Magazine.

This is something we really should have reported on some time last year:

The SYF have featured in a fair few magazines over the years, but issue 21 of Digital Creative Arts really was the SYF issue. I provided the cover illustration and also a double page spread for the main article, which also features SYF graphics thoughout. Besides that we also get a mention on about eight other pages, including a company profile. And then, of course, there's a couple of our films on the cover disk.

It's published by Highbury and if you're interested I'm sure you can pick up a back issue...

Illustrations, Friday.

I did something like 680 drawings this month, but as is usualy the case with commisioned work, I can't really share any of it with you for legal reasons. Which is boring.

Somewhere along the way though I seem to have scraped together just enough down-time to do the odd sketch for meself. Below is a compilation of odds and sods from the last two months. Some are from magazines, and some were done around East Londons trendy coffee shops and booze hovels. Though I couldn't tell you which are which. More to come soon...

Oblogatory First Posting

Hello, and welcome to the official Spite Your Face blog. My name is Tony Mines, one of the Directors of SYF, and in these pages I'll be keeping you up to date with news of our activities. There might be behind-the-scenes info coming up, or it might turn into a production diary, with new projects in the works. We'll all have to wait and see.

At the same time, this will also be my own personal blog and I'll be posting up new illustrations, and some musings on animation in general.

So why blog?

People who know me are probably wondering "why on earth is he wasting his time blogging?", and people who don't know me are probably asking "who are you anyway?"
Of course, that's assuming anyone ever reads this at all.

I guess the answer to both of those is that it's an inevitability. Its inevitable because I'm an opinionated big mouth, and it's inevitable because the whole animation industry seems to revolve around blogs lately. I know that I, for one, read several blogs regularly - like Amid Amidi's excellent news source Cartoon Brew, Benjamin Ettingers AniPages Daily , and of course there's that bastard son of a thousand maniacs John K. This to say nothing of the blogs of good friends like David Freedman, Jay Smith and those crazy hipsters at Errorware. So who are The SYF to stand in the way of the blog revolution?