After Effects Tutorial: Edmonson Cartoon Effect

Requires After Effects CS4+. Use the Cartoon effect to turn a sequence of still photographs into animated line art. You can composite the result over a wide range of textured backgrounds.

Note:
Almost a year to the date I originally wrote this tutorial, I can finally make it public because the film has been released! You can watch it here: Jury Selection: Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company.

This is the trailer, which is almost entirely done with the effect I’m about to explain:

I’m currently working on a new Constitution Project film about Edmonson V. Leesville Concrete Company. In the past, we’ve used methods like digital puppetry to avoid filming reenactments. Edmonson is a much more recent court case than the others we’ve covered (1991), but the US Supreme Court only permits audio recordings of oral arguments, so there’s still no footage of the proceedings.

We were actually able to interview several of the people involved, however, resulting in tons of sharp, clear green screen footage (It’s also our first CP film in HD), as well as hundreds if not thousands of still images. So what to do with them?

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The Constitution Project: The Website

We’ve spent the last several weeks building a showcase site for all of our Constitution Project films, and it’s finally done!

Give it a gander:

http://www.theconstitutionproject.com/

There’s a lot of information here: you can watch all of our films (via links to Sunnylands Classroom), access related research material, and find out when and where they’ll be screening (Yick Wo will be in three festivals in the next few weeks!). It should be a great resource for teachers and students, but my bigger hope is that people who are interested in the subject matter but have no idea the movies exist will stumble across them. Yes, they’re aimed at high schoolers, but I think the potential audience is much wider. They’re genuinely fun to watch.

I didn’t design the site from the ground up, but I did a LOT of customizing and actually ended up writing quite a bit of PHP. I started with the lovely Elegance WordPress theme, and tweaked it quite a lot. I even wrote a couple widgets from scratch! WordPress is a wonderful thing, and I’m really looking forward to using it as a CMS for work.

There are two things I’d really like to get working eventually and wish I knew how:

• Include term descriptions when listing a film’s custom taxonomy terms in the sidebar
• Associate a set of links with a single film’s page (the film portfolio is a custom post type), and have them show up in the sidebar automatically.

Both seem quite obvious, and yet have me stumped. I’m hoping later versions of WordPress will make them easier.

Taking the “OW!” out of Powerpoint

I do my best to never, ever have to touch Powerpoint. I managed to go more than three years at my job before I finally had to relent and install it for a particular project. I have to admit, however, that I’m vaguely fascinated by how it manages to be exactly the wrong tool for 90%+ of what it’s used for. On one hand, it forces you to oversimplify complex ideas, without giving you what you need to actually make them easier to understand. On the other, it puts very dangerous powers of Bad Animation in the hands of people who shouldn’t even be going near the text color selector.

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Go Home Wrong!

I have a little side project I’ve been working on recently, and I think there’s finally enough content there to make it worth sharing.

It’s a photoblog called “Go Home Wrong” and the idea is to do just that: take a different route home from work — even just a block out of your way — and see what’s there.

The whole thing came about when I bought a teenyteenytiny folding bicycle and discovered how much interesting stuff there is along the Hudson Greenway — it certainly beats spending an hour hurtling through underground tunnels on my way to my windowless office. I’ve stumbled across everything from a truck full of folded-up escalators to a fish-delivery service called “Meat Without Feet”, and those photos really needed a home. In addition, several lovely people have added things they’ve come across on their own commutes, such as an acorn-shaped grave marker and a sign for Astronaut High School. The eventual plan is to go home even wrong-er, and take weird circuitous routes between my job and my apartment. And to get other people to do the same. As they say, “variety is the spice of oh-my-god-I-don’t-want-to-cut-through-the-manhattan-mall-again.”

I would love to have more contributors, so if you find something fun on your way to work, send it in! There’s a submission form on the site.