We end our series on the Bishop Muesum Animation exhibit with a look at a couple of the top exhibits.  You can animate yourself into a video clip.  Here guests are in a booth that takes pictures and allows you to simulate those famous Matrix Time moves by having 16 camers take pictures from all angles and a second both does some Time Lapse taking pictures every few seconds to and looping them together for an animation effect.  See some examples in our you tube video but to experience it all you really have to hurry to the Bishop Museum by May 25th and check out the Animation Exhibit yourself.   Bishop Museum is open daily (except Tuesdays) from 9am to 5pm.  Adult Admission $15.95 ($8.95 Kama’aina and military) and child/senior $12.95 ($7.95 Kama’aina and military).  Admission includes full access to the museum including the science center, hawaiian galleries, planetarium and much more.  See another great review of the exhibit here.  

Here is one of the animation stations at the Bishop Museum Animation exhibit.  There are a variety of hands on stations where you can move objects like the horse in this case and take a series of snapshots to create a resulting animation.   Other stations let you do with with blocks, forward and rewind time lapsed images, try to animation flying characters over a city and much more.  Tomorrow we will close our series on the animation exhibit but looking at the marquee attraction.  Remember the exhibit runs through May 25. 

Here is the character construction room at the Bishop Museum animation exhibit.  Here you can watch a view on how to create a character and using some templates and and lesson draw your very own cartoon character.  There are also tools at the exhibit to help with story creation and the actual creation of motion.  More to come tomorrow.

This is the foley artist table at the Bishop Museum Animation exhibit.  Foley artists create sound for animation and even tv and movies.  After a brief lesson you view a cartoon clip and use the items seen to create the sounds then it plays back the cartoon with your sounds.  Its extremely challenging cause it moves to quickly but if you have a few people you can see if you can master the foley artist.  Great fun especially for the kids and for the kid in everybody.  More tomorrow 

Our Bishop Muesum Animation series begins here at the Castle Memorial Building which houses the Animation exhibit through May 25.  The exhibit is created by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in collaboration with the Cartoon Network.  While geared at families and kids there is something for all ages here as I found it fascinating to learn about how animation was done and there were great interative exhibits.  In the coming days we will take a look at a few of them.  I highly recommend this especially for families and people interested in animation.

Here is the  sunset at Haleakala which can be spectacular in its own way.  While not as nice as the sunrise (see our sunrise photo) it is still a sight to see and feel as the temperature rapidly drops.  It also saves waking up at 3 or 4am to make sunrise.  Plus there is a better chance of a sunset view.  Hope you enjoyed our look at Haleakala.  The last couple photos are spread off since I’m taking a quick vacation and where do Hawaii people go for vacation.. Vegas of course.  We still have the spectacular Superferry ride back to Oahu which will complete our Maui series and I may even sneak in some Vegas pictures since some people do call it the 8th island.

Here is one of the holes at the Jungle River Mini Golf Course at night.  The swirling lights add extra challenge and some holes even have flashing strobe lights that really force you to focus on your shot.

This is one of the holes at the Jungle River Mini Golf Course located right next to the Pearlridge Shopping Center in Honolulu.  It is a full  18 hole golf course and a perfect family or date place with reasonable prices.  It costs $8 to $8.50 a round of golf and at night it turns to a Cosmic Mini Golf which we will see tomorrow.  The holes are not as elaborate as Castle Park was or some mini golf courses on the mainland but do provide a good challenge as the hole have inclines and declines versus some of those mini golf courses that are just flat.  More tomorrow.

Hawaii SuperFerry Alakai

It seems appropriate that we begin our Global Hawaii Blog with another new beginning. The Hawaii Super Ferry which will be starting neighbor island service on August 28 invited us and over 4,000 eager local Oahu residents to check out their first vessel the Alakai. Here are my thoughts on the ship.

There are two classes standard and lounge (which we will call first class). You can see below the difference in seats:

       
Standard Seating                                 First Class Seating

The seating arrangements looks almost like an airline but also provides the options to sit on seats with tables which are suitable for meetings or families. Seats do have nice windows though of course the first class area has better windows.

        
Standard Seating                                      First Class Seating

Each section has a lounge area where you can order food and sit at nice tables.

        
Standard area lounge                               First class lounge

Another nice feature is a little area where kids can watch some TV and also play in a play area.

Finally the big new feature is a spacious area to hold cars. You can drive you car onto the ship and have it and its contents travel with you to the neighbor island and just drive off the ship.

Some final thoughts. The staff and crew appeared well trained and were very nice and informative. Based on what I saw and the duration of the trip if you can afford it an upgrade to the First (lounge) class is money well spent (extra $20 each way). The trip however isn’t that cheap as there is a fuel surcharge. As a sample I priced a Friday - Sunday trip and it was around. Note prices will vary.

• $470 (first class price $550) for two adults and a standard car.
• $720 (first class price $880) for family of 4 with standard car.

It takes 3 hours each way and there is one departure per island per day. Please feel free to comment if you have rode the ferry or have any other thoughts or opinions.For booking information go to http://www.hawaiisuperferry.com.