california native plant week, the cartoon

Here’s a little cartoon I whipped up this morning on Xtranormal, the site that lets you create and distribute your own animations without needing to really know what you’re doing. (When it comes to CGI, that pretty much describes me…)

It’s pretty much California Native Plant Week meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Hello Kitty. And it’s a test of how well voice synthesis can deal with some common (and less common) scientific names.

Pixar, my number is (619) 555-0213.


14 thoughts on “california native plant week, the cartoon”

  1. Hey, thanks everyone! I hope you had as much as I did putting it together!

    Arleen, my guess is that your Tom Tom’s voice is the same voice synthesis package that Xtranormal licensed. You should try to see if you can feed it street names in botanical Latin.

    David, have fun with it!

    TM, what struck me most is that when faced with deciding how to pronounce the unfamiliar “fasciculatum” the program chose to use the FASC pronunciation as “fascist” instead of “fascicle,” rendering the word as fascist-culatum.

    Janet, oh, I think these two characters have a history before they did this video…

    Helen, I rather enjoy the flatness to the voices. The tone works really well for passive-aggressive modes of communication, something my family trained me really well in.

    Maggie, the thought did cross my mind… I can see some sequels–and prequels too. I’ve blown through all my free Xtranormal points to produce this clip, but it might be worth a minor splurge to make some more episodes.

    Sue, so how do YOU pronounce “fasciculatum?”

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