Tuesday, April 08, 2008

AFI ScreenNation Goes Live

The American Film Institute has a site for teen filmmakers.

The American Film Institute (AFI) has just launched a beta version of a new website dedicated to teen filmmakers: ScreenNation. To quote from their About page:

AFI ScreenNation is an online video posting-and-sharing community from the AFI Screen Education Center, targeted at middle- and high-school students.

Young people aged 13-18 produce and post their own videos, made in the classroom, in clubs and after-school programs, and beyond. Links for these videos will be posted all over the web, including social network pages, blogs, websites, emails and instant messages. AFI ScreenNation users can browse and view, forward, rate and tag and post comments.

AFI ScreenNation will showcase work produced by students in classrooms utilizing the AFI Screen Education filmmaking process, proven to help kids master core curriculum subjects, excel in 21st Century skills, and learn how to learn. In addition, the site launched with videos posted by students involved with a host of featured partner programs, organizations, schools, districts and festivals --- a veritable portal for video as a tool for learning and personal expression.

The site will include tutorials and video challenges in addition to content from teenage filmmakers.

It is easy to think this is just a late attempt by an old-media stalwart to act hip, but in reality, AFI has been on the cutting edge of technology for ages. When QuickTime 1.0 came into being, Sony and Apple helped form the Advanced Technology Program at AFI Hollywood, which is where the two of us were originally introduced into this field. Their “The Cutting Edge” salons hosted by Scott Billups is where we learned techniques and formed our chops, and was the inspiration for Motion Graphics Los Angeles (MGLA). Lately, they’ve been the host of an interactive media incubator which has been very active, the Digital Content Lab. And there’s nothing like having “AFI” on your resume inside Hollywood. So if you know (or are!) a teenage aspiring filmmaker, hook them up.

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Sunday, April 06, 2008

You Are What You See

A recent study reinforces how important it is to carefully choose the elements we use in our graphic designs.

This Saturday on NPR’s Weekend Edition, there was an odd little piece about a study performed by Duke University about people’s reaction to logos (click here to listen; click here to read a text article about the same study). It said that being exposed to the Apple logo – so briefly that they couldn’t even register what they had just seen – caused the subjects to then become 20-30% more creative, while being exposed to the IBM logo caused them to become more competent and professional - or at least, acted that way on a test they took immediately thereafter. (The same study also concluded that people exposed to the Disney logo went on to behave more honestly than those exposed to the E! Channel logo.)

No, the point of this is not to start another flame war between Apple and PC users. And yes, I’m familiar with “blipverts” and other forms of subliminal advertising. What struck me was how important imagery we use – even subtle, background imagery or images that are not on screen all that long – may influence our viewers when designing a show open, informational graphics, or other forms of motion design. We always try to think through things like color, pace, and the calming versus threatening nature of imagery we use when designing motion graphics to evoke a certain mood or reaction, but the results of this study have made me even more hyperaware of it.

(While lying there listening to the program, I was also reminded of the William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition where the heroine was actually allergic to branding. She made a living off this talent from companies who hired her to see if their new logos made her sick – if so, they had a winner!)

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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Animator vs. Animation

A fun animation that shows what can happen when you tease your art a little too much…

Steve Kilisky recently wrote a thought-provoking blog about how video (and now, the web) has traditionally been initially driven by technical folks, with the artists following along. To this day, there is still often a distinction between an “artist” and an “operator,” “animator” or “developer.”

In that light, Trish recently found (on a calligraphy list, of all things) a pointer to this excellent cartoon that shows what can happen when an animator provokes his animation to revolt. It’s well worth a few minutes from your day. (Be patient through the first minute; it keeps picking up pace from there...)

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Monday, March 24, 2008

Seeing RED

You wanted digital film? You got it. Oh, by the way - do you know how to work with film?

All of the recent posts about workflows, workarounds, and discoveries using the RED One camera brings back memories of a warning I issued when DV cameras first became popular among independent shooters and moviemakers: Be careful what you wish for; you might get more than you expected.

Cameras •
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Sunday, March 16, 2008

Music Isn’t Free

Why you can’t use that song to go with your video - and how to find one you can.

Both Trish and I come from the music industry originally; as a result, music greatly informs our animations - we strongly prefer to pick out the music before we start working on a job. We also are both deeply interested in intellectual property issues (indeed, I’ve served as an expert witness on several music sampling cases); as a result, we care a lot about where that music comes from. And the sad truth is, a lot of people are using music illegally in their videos. But you can cure that.

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Monday, March 10, 2008

Can’t Give It Away; Can’t Throw It Away

Getting rid of old desktop video gear is as hard as disposing of nuclear waste. Any suggestions?

It’s ironic that Giles Baker of Adobe just wrote about going tapeless, as we’re currently in the middle of a major spring cleaning of our studio where we are getting rid of our tape decks, among other things. Some are being sold on eBay (here’s our DVCPRO, BetaSP, and SVHS decks, in case you’re curious; the DLT drive and tapes go up in a few days), some are being donated (and we could use some suggestions on that below), and the rest are being trashed.

It’s the trashing part that’s proving difficult. 

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Thursday, March 06, 2008

The Difference Between the “m” Words

Imagineer explains the difference between mokey, monet, mocha, and motor.

As Imagineer is fond of one-word names that all start with “mo...”, it can be hard to know or remember which tool does what. Below is some text I lifted out of an email by Ross Shain (VP of Sales, Eastern Region) to an After Effects list explaining the differences, with links to a comparison chart. It is particularly relevant as Imagineer Systems has been offering some deep discounts on some of their highly-touted tracking and rotoscoping tools; I just posted a News item on them extending some of these discounts until the end of March (click here to view).

In short all our products use a unique 2.5D planar tracking technology that allows you to motion track objects with blur, noise and go offscreen. Simply, the planar tracking technology is hands down more powerful than any point tracking system out there. The technology is then implemented into the products in various ways.

• mokey - removal tool - automates complex compositing techniques to remove unwanted elements from screen. Great for rig, scratch removal, stabilization etc....
• monet - placement station - compositing tool to track and insert elements with luminance passes, mesh warper and lens distortion correction.
• mocha - tracking and roto utility. Motin track and roto. Export the data or mattes to almost any app including AE, Flame, Smoke, DS, Shake, Fusion (adding Nuke soon), etc.
• motor - same as mocha but limited to rotoscoping
• mocha-AE - not a plug-in but a stand alone tracking utility that exports tracking data as AE keyframes. Corner pin with perspective or transform, scale, rotation. Copy and paste to AE layers. Increases AE’s capability as a vfx compositor!

There is some overlap between products but many users have found that with mokey and mocha their bases are very covered. Here is a link to a product comparison chart.

For more questions, please contact us off the list.

US eastern region:  rosss @ imagineersystems.com
US western region: billyw @ imagineersystems.com
Europe/Asia and others: pjc @ imagineersystems.com

If you need more information, here is a link to tutorials on their products.

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Monday, March 03, 2008

Staggering Mistakes: Reversing Field Order

People are still screwing up field order - on national TV.

The two most-watched cable channels in our household are CNN and Speed (guess who watches which). Speed just started a new game show called “Pass Time” where several of the bumpers as well as in-show inserts exhibit the maddening two steps forward/one step back staggered motion of fields that have been reversed (maybe they thought it was a “look”...). CNN isn’t immune to this either; through the years some of their graphics have also exhibited this reversed-field judder.

This prompted us to upload an updated version of a classic column we wrote on interlacing, field rendering, and separating fields; you can find it here. But like any good motion graphics designer who tries to reverse-engineer any graphic they see on television, this has led us to speculate what might have been at the root of this particular problem.

Editing •
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