Archive for April, 2008
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ABC News to Launch Online Film Competition
Found out about an interesting upcoming online game/film competition today at work. (It’s through ABC News, though, not DocGroup.)
In short: you create 1-3 minute films for the web about world conditions in the future, and the best ones become part of the broadcast series and affect the narrative direction.
In an unprecedented ABC News two-hour special airing this September, the world’s top scientists, historians, and economists will predict what the world could look like by the year 2100. Experts say that unless we act now, the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could destabilize the world with catastrophic results.
In order to tell this story we need YOU to report back from the …
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Get it Straight
Photoshop Tutorial: A super-quick trick for straightening out your disoriented images — without the guesswork. All you need is the measure tool.
This is an easy one; no serious experience required — and it should work even in very old versions of Photoshop.
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On the Mend
I’ve been sick for a couple weeks now, but the antibiotics finally seem to be doing their thing. Updates with slightly more content should resume shortly.
In addition to wandering around in a haze and attempting to sleep under my desk, I’ve been working on graphics for a series of short films about Japanese internment during WWII. Certainly not the cheeriest topic, but interesting nonetheless. I didn’t know much about it going in, so I’m learning a lot from this project — even if I can’t go crazy-creative with the visuals.
I’ve also gotten to design several proposals for documentaries my company’s hoping to put into production. I really like proposals. There’s just something very satisfying about the process: you’re taking something …
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Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun on PBS American Masters
One of the documentaries I worked on before I started at DocGroup is going to be on PBS American Masters this coming Wednesday. I did a lot of image restoration work and made the pictures move around.
This film was more than a decade in the making, and I’m really excited to see the results!
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It’s Photoshop Phriday!
This week’s Photoshop Phriday feature on Something Awful was “Reverse Magazines” — take a magazine, find the reverse of the title (i.e. Bad Housekeeping or Illiterate’s Digest), and make a cover for it.
So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:
![A tornado stole my husband!](http://victorianece.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/provincial-copy.jpg "\\"Provincial\\" Magazine")
My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.
Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.
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Fanning the AEFlames
New tutorial! Create gorgeous animated fractals with a FREE After Effects plugin. (AE 5.5+ required, CS3 recommended)
AEFlame seems intimidating at first, but once you learn the basics the possibilities are endless. This tutorial assumes you have decent working knowledge of After Effects.
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No Schoolhouse Rock Here
People keep asking what exactly it is I *do* at my job.
Well, I’m our animator/graphic designer, so pretty much any visuals — print or motion — that need to be created go through me. I don’t really do character animation; my work is more titles and graphics to explain things — elements to add to the overall ‘look’ of a live-action film rather than the films themselves. I also design most of our project proposals, which is cool because I get to find out what’s in the pipeline.
One of the main things I’ve been working on lately is a set of videos for the Annenberg Foundation’s Constitution Project, a series of educational films designed to make US politics and history …
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Stop working for free, guys.
Okay, so user-generated content is all the rage, and there are a million contests where you can make a commercial and win money.
I’m all for the democratization of television and whatnot. Putting your own short films on YouTube is one thing. But here you’re doing a huge company’s work for free. Win $57,000 for your video about ketchup? Sounds great! …until you think about how much Heinz would be paying an ad agency to produce just one nationally-broadcast commercial. But this way, they get a huge range of choices for free (tons of really creative people sent stuff in), and are getting the actual content they use at a discount.
Sure, it would be cool to see your work on TV, …
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Fractal Wallpaper
Abstract fractal wallpaper created with AEFlame.
(All files are 1680×1050.)
