Mobile Animation for Comics

We wake up most mornings listening to the new on NPR (National Public Radio). This morning, after a story on Comic-con (the huge annual comic book convention), there was a piece on the boom in “mobile animation” in Japan. Japan is a big market for comic books (”manga”), as well as a big market for mobile phones and new trends in mobile media. The story indicated that distributing comics through mobile phones had become The Next Big Thing over there. Some advancements include touch-interface phones such as the iPhone, which allows a tactile turning-the-page experience. But also of interest is animating the comics for delivery over cell phones and other mobile players.

If you’re looking for new niches or market opportunities, it may be time to brush up on the subjects of converting drawn art to vectors (time to crack open that copy of Adobe Illustrator which came free with your After Effects or Photoshop bundle), creating vector artwork (especially comics), and - most important of all - animating that artwork. This last skill is what can set you, a motion graphics artist, apart from other more conventional illustrators in the field, or make yourself an important partner for them. Adobe Flash is obviously the big dog in this field, but there are also a couple of other solutions out there worth exploring, such as Anime Studio Pro which allows you to add “bones” to vector or even hand-drawn artwork, and the Puppet Tools in Adobe After Effects CS3 and later.

By the way, another news item this morning concerned a new search engine called Cuil (“an old Irish word for knowledge”) started by a bunch of ex-Googlites. A search for “mobile animation” on Cuil returned a subjectively more useful result (arranged in a far more visually useful fashion) than a standard Google search. Keep an eye on them.

Mainstream Media’s new correspondent: YouTube

I’m still working out how I feel about this, so feel free to chime in with your own comments.

This past weekend, drag racer Scott Kalitta died in an accident while qualifying for the NHRA SuperNationals. The event was televised by ESPN.

I first learned about the tragedy while browsing the web site for the Los Angeles Times newspaper. In the initial version of the story, they didn’t have photos, but they did have a video of the accident.

It turns out that the video was an embedded clip from YouTube.

The interesting implication of this is that a news gathering source no longer needs to have staff on site, trade the story with a partner, or buy it from another news service; they can just link to a free service someone else has created.

AFI Digital Content Lab Sessions

We occasionally post mention of what’s happening at the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL for short), as it’s perhaps the best incubator around right now for interactive television. Here’s a couple of sessions they have coming up that are part of other conferences (the first with a registration discount):

MediaXchange June 25-27, Los Angeles, CA Exhibition Session June 26: New Technologies Impacting Drama Creation Professionals from around the globe congregate in Los Angeles to address new models for scripted drama and for an exciting insight into the fast-evolving future of a more global TV drama industry. AFI Discount Resistration Code: EDU814 (3-day) or AFIEDU814 (1-day).

LA TV Festival Digital Day July 30-August 1, 2008, Hollywood, CA DCL Session, July 30: Steal These Ideas Join project participants and mentors as they share lessons learned in the Digital Content Lab. The innovations and ideas developed in the lab are for the benefit of the entire television community, so come, learn and steal an idea or two!

A Retro View of the Future

Back in the early 90s, I wrote a column on interactive media for Audio/Video Interiors magazine. It was an odd fit; I was writing highly technical, philosophical think pieces, while the magazine was aimed at the most blatant forms of consumerism and instant gratification – but the editor gave me free rein, and it was a fun romp.

I’ve had reason to go clean out my archives recently, and it’s been quite a laugh to read the predictions of what the “future” of television and video would supposedly look like. To give you an idea of the landscape at the time, DVDs were just being developed, HD was but a promise, and the main way of gathering information was to attend lots of conferences and trade shows – for example, it was considered odd that I also had started to use chat rooms on sites such as The Well as part of my research.

One set of predictions I wrote about were made by noted futurist Nicolas Negroponte (co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, and author of Being Digital) on the implications of television going digital. Let’s have some fun and see how many came true:

Who Will Rule The New Internet?

For those who contemplate issues such as the title of this post, Josh Quittner wrote an excellent article for Time on this subject. (It’s rather long, so be ready to carve out a small chunk of time before heading over to read it.) He doesn’t preach, nor pick winners and losers; he notes at the end “I’m rooting for everyone in this war.” Instead, he gives thoughtful, in-depth coverage of what Facebook, Google, and Apple’s iPhone are up to, along with a bit of a history lesson and comments from top-shelf thinkers such as Marc Andreessen. Find a few minutes this weekend and give it a read.

The Myth of 1%

There are many variations on this common trap, but the general outline goes like this: Someone hears a report about how much money there is being made in a market segment, such as podcasts or movie trailers or renting out RED One cameras. They then theorize that if they could capture just some small percentage of that market - say, 1% - that they would be rich. And thus, a business plan is born! After all, who can’t capture at least 1% of a given market?!?

Web Video Viewership Revelations

I’ve been mulling over the “VideoCensus” released last month by Nielsen Online (you can view the PDF here). Among its goals was to compare the way video was watched over the web from network-backed sites to “consumer generated media” (CGM) sites such as YouTube. Here are some of the results, along with some speculation about what’s behind them, and how it may impact the work we do:

Favorite Technical References

The video industry has saddled us users with some truly ugly numbers to deal with (such as 720x480, 29.97, and so forth) when working with digital video. Making matters worse, these numbers are often misquoted or misunderstood.

Thankfully, there are a few web sites out there with some truly valuable, correct information on digital video standards. Here are the sites we refer to most often when we need to know the inside scoop:

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