Graphics
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Wall decals are awesome.
I have a solid white wall in my bedroom that’s more than eighteen feet long, and I had the hardest time figuring out how to decorate it. (The fact that most of the walls in my apartment are solid concrete and won’t accept nails definitely doesn’t help.) But I put up some wall decals this weekend and am really pleased with the results:
Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m …
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Shrinkery
I’ve spent much of today playing with a fun technique called “tilt shift” — you can do it with lenses or Photoshop, but either way you get the same effect: normal size objects appear to be miniature models of themselves.
It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950’s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.
This technique works best with photos …
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Bite-Size Jurors
I’m working on a series of films about juries at the moment. They should be pretty fun to do (I get to animate trial by ordeal, for one), but there’s a lot of character work and not a lot of time. Thus, digital puppetry.
I was hoping to work with After Effects’ extremely fun Puppet Tool, but the results I got while experimenting were just a little too squishy for this project. (Anyone know some tricks for getting convincing, not-too-exaggerated motion out of it? Even liberal use of the starch tool seemed unhelpful, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out a way to make elbows and knees bend properly.) So for the moment it’s back to IK …
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Meet Hector.
Hector is a cube-frog from IKEA. He is the best!
He’s sort of my large, square mascot. Expect him to make the occasional appearance in future tutorials.
This particular graphic came about while experimenting with mosaic effects. Aside from the photo of Hector, everything’s Photoshop-generated, and this file’s rapidly approaching 30 layers. I even managed to use several filters that normally fall well within the “Tacky Awful Effects” category: Patchwork, Clouds and Motion Blur. Lesson of the day: all in moderation, all in moderation.
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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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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 …
