Metropia

Unlike Mike Curtis, I’m not at FantasticFest, but I still heard about an interesting (to After Effects artists) screening there - an animated movie called Metropia. According to Brian Behm (who did attend), the entire movie was done in After Effects: “Talking to the director afterwards, he had upwards of 40 layers in the eyes that they were animating. Really a pretty stupendous thing.” If you see the whole thing, stay through the credits and note the thank-yous to Adobe and to Peter Norby of Trapcode.

Polyvore: Playing Mix & Match

A couple of months ago, we mentioned the Color Marketing Group: a global consortium that attempts to determine what the hot trends in color for various market segments will be in different parts of the world. They have a free weekly newsletter of color trends and ideas. This week, their hot tip was the fashion site Polyvore.com which allows members to “mix & match products from your favorite stores.” Found wasn’t interested in the shopping aspect; what they found most interesting was the color coordination present in the numerous fashion ensembles which users posted, all arranged as neat thumbnails for reference (and the fact that you could use their site to create your own collages for clients etc.). The images in this blog entry are from their site. Even though it has an obvious feminine bias, give it a visit.

Below is Found’s description of the site:

A Bird in the Hand…

The problem with technology is that “something even better” will almost inevitably come out - often after you’ve already pulled the trigger and bought something you thought was more than sufficient. Case in point: I just bought a Canon 5D Mark II (and love it), but Canon has just announced the 7D (which looks awfully good on paper - maybe “even better”). Excuse me for a moment while I wrestle with my personal demons on the subject (or failing that, enjoy Philip Bloom’s lovely test video on Vimeo, shot with a 7D - more on that later).

Snow Leopard: Hopes, Misunderstandings, and Gotchas

Snow Leopard (aka OS 10.6) looks like a great system update for Mac users: better performance, smaller hard drive footprint, cheap price (if you’ve been keeping up with your OS updates). That said, we personally are always cautious about upgrading to the “x.x.0” version of anything: Call it old age, but quite often we prefer to let the serial early adopters (you know who you are) find where the gotchas are, while we get work done in the meantime with “old” technology. Here’s a brief collection of some of the issues (some real, some illusionary) that we’ve heard of so far; please feel free to add your own in the Comments below:

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