Animation Test: Kinect MoCap with After Effects

I’ve been doing a lot of work with rigging Kinect-controlled digital puppets for After Effects animation. I’m using a combination of Nick Fox-Gieg’s KinectToPin for Processing and a bunch of expressions to smooth things out and make connecting pins to their source tracks a little less painful. I’m hoping to put together a tutorial soon, but in the meantime here’s a test render of a puppet created from a very old engraving:

TDG on TV

The Documentary Group has had several projects on the air in recent weeks:

America in Primetime is our four-part series that traces the history of television through different character archetypes. Here’s the trailer:

The entire series is now available in streaming form at pbs.org, along with tons of bonus clips and material.

Angle of Attack: How Naval Aviation Changed the Face of War was released in November through American Public Television and is now available on DVD. I did some snazzy opening titles for this one that I’m pretty proud of. Check out the trailer:

And if you’re a Dish Network or DIRECTV subscriber, be sure to catch Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, airing tonight on the Documentary Channel as part of their “Best of Doc” series.

Silly side project: The Song of Newt

So Newt Gingrich’s spokesman sent out a really nutty press release last week, one that was far closer to epic poetry than political discourse. Turning it into an overdramatic German opera was the obvious thing to do.

Kevin Clark set it to music, Jason Buckwalter and Andrew Stewart performed it, and I did some quick color FX and titles. Super-fast turnaround! Here it is:

Great News: AEFlame for CS5!

Hooray! The fine folks over at AEScripts are now hosting a beta release of AEFlame for CS4/CS5. Best of all: it’s still free, so there’s nothing stopping you from spending the afternoon making big swirly fractal designs.

If you need a refresher on how exactly this (admittedly rather baffling at first glance) plugin works, take a look at my tutorial.

A cat-bunny-thing(?) for your health

I’ve been sick. (Achoo!) I doodled this little guy bringing me tea on a napkin, and he was cute enough that I decided to trace him in Illustrator and turn him into a vector:

He needs a name! Best suggestion so far is “Schroedinger”.