Stop Motion Redux

If you haven’t noticed, stop motion animation is hip right now (see previous posts by Richard Harrington and Matt Jeppsen). This example, sponsored by HP, extends the concept by adding the extra time dimension of capturing a set of printers outputting graphics for the video. I also like the fact that you get to see the handlers tweaking the equipment during some of the shots. It’s a modestly amusing way to kill a couple of minutes.

More importantly, whenever I see a trend emerge, I have to ask if there is a business opportunity here. We’re clearly seeing some companies jumping on the stop motion bandwagon as an alternate way of subliminally promoting their products. If you’re looking for an angle to scare up some new work from old clients (or foster new ones), you might want to play around with learning stop motion yourself, and pitch the idea to your Rolodex. If you make a cool one, and are willing to share how you made it, let me know and we’ll post it!

HOW Design Conference 2009

Why would someone brave mid-100 degree temperatures and high humidity to visit Austin Texas in the summer? To get a dose of creative inspiration, of course. But rather than being devoted solely to graphic design eye candy, we were surprised to find that the 2009 HOW Conference was also heavily slanted toward the topics of product design and marketing - as well as numerous talks on how to keep your own creativity fresh while dealing with both clients and management.

Seeing the Future - In Color

We’re still recovering from the HOW Design Conference in Austin last week, where temperatures hit 107. After the ice packs melt, we’ll post a summary of interesting things we heard there.

In the meantime, for those who have color-focused jobs (or color-fussy clients), you may be interested in the work of 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. Click here to see their predictions for 2009 (white for business, blue is the new green, etc.). They also have a free weekly newsletter of color trends and ideas.

Data Rot

Well-known author David Pogue recently aired this interesting piece on “data rot” for his CBS Sunday Morning tech series, which has been transcribed for the New York Times web site. Aside from containing some interesting geek trivia and a renewed warning that DVD lifespans vary greatly (5 to 100 years, depending on the brand and storage conditions), the line that smacked me in the face was “well, hard disks only last five years, generally.” And that’s not Pogue saying it; that’s Dag Spicer at the Computer History Museum, who is trying to preserve these things.

I know a lot of people have migrated away from tape backups to hard drives stacked in a closet; I know I copied as many of our old Exabytes as I could read onto an external FireWire 400 drive (in addition to using redundant DVDs of more recent material). I’ve always worried about stored drives spinning up again and potential “sticktion” problems; this is the first time I’ve personally heard a time frame put on it by someone of authority. And as we know, FireWire 400 is getting dropped by some computers as well. It sounds like backing up data is no longer a save-and-forget-it exercise (not that it ever was), but instead a shell game we need to be playing constantly in order to keep backups up-to-date.

Regardless of media used, as we noted earlier still make two copies - just to be extra safe.

Circling Around the Drain

I felt what is referred to as “the shock of recognition” while reading this first-person account on Newsweek.com about life in The Industry during the current recession: This sounds a lot like what our life was like just a few years ago. Although we work(ed) in the motion graphics side of the business rather than production, it was a similar situation: we lived from job to job, every job was paid in full, and we hoped another job came in before the money ran out. During the good times, we had a steady stream of jobs, with very little breathing room in-between. But as the years went on, the highs got higher (more jobs in at the same time), and the lows in between got longer. Fortunately, Trish is a wizard at calculating cash flow (hint: it’s not about knowing how much money you have in the bank today, and spending based on that; it’s about knowing the date when the money runs out, and throttling your expenditures based on that), so we managed through the lulls just fine before the phone rang again - but the trend was disturbing.

Automated Video Production

We’ve all been there: A client asks for a job that requires complex editing and effects, and they say (as part of the negotiation over price): “Don’t you have software where you press a button and it does it automatically?”

Anything Worth Backing Up…

Recently, there was a good discussion on the MediaMotion After Effects list about archiving projects. Some use RAIDs and shared network storage devices; some use tape drives such as the Quantum LTO-3; some use stacks of DVDs; some use raw hard disks with adaptors like the Wiebetech ComboDock (which Art Adams wrote about a few weeks ago). However, three universal themes emerged:

Interview over on Motion.TV

One of our plans for this blog is to also talk about the business of being a motion graphics artist - how to work with clients, as well as how to keep your own ship in order. Unfortunately, we haven’t had time to do much of that so far (among other things, we’ve moved). However, Lilian Dregalla interviewed us for the motion08 conference, where we had a chance to muse about subjects such as understanding the purpose behind each motion graphics task you take on, as well as some of the philosophy behind our books. You can read it here.

Meanwhile, we’re about to hit the road, speaking at VidXpo in Denver next week, and then speaking at motion08 in Albuquerque the week after. Hope to see some of you there! Afterward, we’re hunkering down to finish a new edition of After Effects Apprentice (for CS4), and then hopefully this winter we can get back to some of the topics we want to blog about up here.

The content contained in our books, videos, blogs, and articles for other sites are all copyright Crish Design, except where otherwise attributed.

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