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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Peeling Gold Leaf Effect

So I’ve been experimenting with BCC Reptilian. It’s normally used to make lizard skin-style textures, but I discovered some other interesting things to do with it, and this was the most realistic effect I managed.

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How to Talk to a Graphic Designer in Six Easy Steps: Part One

All design projects have different needs, and individual clients and designers are very different people and have different ways of working, thinking and talking about their work. But having a general framework for interaction can help prevent people coming across as, say, a “nightmare client” or a stubborn artist unwilling to stray from their “vision.” With permission, I’m going to use a small design project I did recently for a workshop performance of Kevin Clark‘s opera Summer’s Twilight as an example. This is a long piece, and it may sound like a complicated process, but it is far less scary and involved that it seems — the example project only took a few hours over a couple of days.

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Jazz Up Your Footage With ‘Leave Color’

I’m working on a set of short films to accompany a jazz concert later this month (more info when I can share it), and I’d like to show off a cool looking — yet very easy — effect we’re using. All the video is treated to give it that soft, silvery nighttime ‘jazz club’ look, with a bit stronger contrast for the performance clips. We didn’t want just straight black and white, though, so instead I’m using an oft-forgotten After Effects filter that’s been around for ages: Leave Color.

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Proposal Design: Setting the Right Tone For the Film

A big part of my job is designing proposals for films my company hopes to produce. They might be aimed at potential investors, production partners or networks that might want to air an already completed documentary, but the goal is always the same: proposals should be more than just basic reading material. Their design should give a sense of the overall look and feel of the project, draw attention to the elements that their audience will find most interesting, as well as simply convey the idea that we’re professionals and know what we’re doing.

Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get it right.

We have a fairly substantial library of short educational films that we’d like to repurpose into a television series. They’re a bit unconventional, as civics films go — informative, but with an edge — and I think they’re actually entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. But before we recut for TV, we have to convince someone to air them.

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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 not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

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.

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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 rigging — and a lot of carefully placed anchor points.

I’m much more satisfied with the results, particularly now that I have a keyframable checkbox parameter that switches the bend direction of the joints. In plain English, I can make someone’s elbows bend both ways — e.g. a character can go from having their hands on their hips to picking something up off the table next to them with very little trouble.

Creating the jurors themselves was a lot of fun — the characters need to function more as archetypes than individuals. The result: a wide range of ages and races and a complete lack of faces.

I now present… my little jury guys (and girls!):

Warning: Do Not Eat.

Meet Hector.

Hector is a cube-frog from IKEA. He is the best!

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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:

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.