Friday, June 06, 2008

Who Will Rule The New Internet?

“Take what man makes and use it, but do not worship it, for it shall pass.”

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.

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Wednesday, June 04, 2008

A Distorted View of the World

A case study of why it’s crucial to plan just how you’re going to move between 16:9 and 4:3 worlds.

One of my vices is auto racing; I love to watch it. Which, of course, means that Speed TV (formerly Speedvision) is a requisite part of my satellite or cable TV package. Speed is owned by Fox Sports; you’d think there’d be some budget available, and some standards enforced. But every now and then, they put on a program that makes me wonder just who they’re hiring to do their production. (See my previous blog post Staggering Mistakes for another shining example.)

One recent program - a preview of a Formula 1 event - had me stumped for days trying to figure out just how in the world they managed to mess up the image that much (the result of which is simulated here). Here’s what I think they did:

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Monday, June 02, 2008

Rethinking the Music Video

What if the graphics in a music video were driven by the music, instead of a filmmaker?

At last year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference, Jakob Trollback - director of the highly innovative motion graphics studio Trollback+Company - gave a talk and showed a sample of a different approach to take for music videos. His idea is that the video could and should be an expression of the song, not an expression of a filmmaker’s high concept, or for that matter the low concept of MTV demographics. The video above realizes this vision with the song Moonlight in Glory by David Byrne and Brian Eno from their groundbreaking album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Trollback isn’t the first to take this approach. Imaginary Forces created a legendy piece honoring film soundtracks for the Oscars which also used abstract graphics apparently motivated by the music, while even earlier Digital Kitchen made a great piece for Sony’s digital theatre sound system which was very similar in flavor to the piece above (if anyne can dig up a link to video of either piece, I’ll add it here). But it’s an interesting, thoughtful approach nonetheless.

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Saturday, May 31, 2008

mocha AE to CC Power Pin

Using Animation Presets and Expressions to simplify using CC Power Pin instead of Corner Pin with mocha AE.

Imagineer Systems’ mocha AE is a stand-alone planer motion tracking application that creates keyframe date which you can in turn use in After Effects. If you are performing a perspective-style track, you will paste the resulting data into a Corner Pin effect already applied to the to-be-pinned layer in After Effects.

However, some prefer using the CC Power Pin effect that comes with Cycore Effects (bundled free with After Effects) over the stock Adobe Corner Pin effect: It is more flexible, and some feel it resamples the layer with higher quality. As a result, a number of workarounds have appeared to apply mocha’s Corner Pin data to CC Power Pin. I’d like to share a couple, and add my own.

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Friday, May 23, 2008

What Is Art?

The age-old question is debated...by animals.

A good chuckle for the long holiday weekend: From the Atom Films creation Creature Comforts, a series of Claymation animals discuss what is art. The discussion encompasses a variety of media, from painting to dance to music. Watch for some of the sly jokes, such as the dogs playing poker ("DPP") discussing art (the infamous series of DPP paintings is often the subject of “what is art?” debates), and the solo dog discussing his printmaking creations (i.e. tracking in dirt).

The Creature Comforts spots are well-written, often bringing up several sides of an issue in a balanced manner with large doses of understated humor thrown in, such as their Oscar-winning spot interviewing animals in a zoo about their situation - the first video that comes up when you visit the Atom Films/Creature Comforts page.

(By the way, if you are a fan of sly art debates like this, you must check out the two books Why Cats Paint and Why Paint Cats.)

Enjoy!

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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Web Video: The New “Skip Intro”?

Is video on the web being used as a way to avoid creating real content?

Remember when “Flash Intros” (or what Adobe would prefer me to call “introductory animations created with the software Adobe Flash,” lest I dilute their trademark) were all the rage? You had to have one play when a user first arrived at your site to be considered hip, media savvy, and up-to-date.

But in reality, most of these detracted from rather than added to a web site’s experience, resulting in lots of users clicking on the oft-included “skip intro” button so they could get to what they were really after: the content on a site. In the end, many were an annoyance rather than a value-add.

I’m beginning to fear that web video could suffer the same fate. I’m sure you and your client feel more hip, media savvy, and up-to-date when you include video on their site, but are you really serving their user by doing so?

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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The Myth of 1%

When making a business plan, don’t make any assumptions about market share.

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?!?

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Saturday, May 03, 2008

Multithreaded Information

Is the medium really the message? Or should we think more about matching the message to the medium?

(At the end of an old article we recently posted to our Keyframes channel about creating graphics for the NBC AstroVision sign in Time Square, we mused about the ways networks are trying to take advantage of new media to connect better with their audiences and create more brand loyalty. Even thought it was originally written ten years ago, it still resonates today. I thought I would drag it out here for your weekend musing, in case you missed it over in CMG Keyframes.)

One of the original attractions of “multimedia” was the ability to provide additional details and background information about a subject without forcing interruptions in the linear unraveling of the central narrative (as I do here with my frequent parenthetical asides). Examples of this include allowing the user to click on hot words or photos in a CD-ROM application (do any of you still remember those?) or on a web page to take you to another page with tangential content, or attempts to present multiple media streams at once - such as text, photos, and sound - to give a wider gestalt to the story.

So where does established, linear, big media - i.e. broadcast television - fit into this picture? Although the economics are different, many of the same goals applied, even ten years ago: You have a linear central story (the program), but other details you could provide...even something as simple as outtakes from filming the program, or background on the stars. Fan magazines, newsgroups, web sites, and even TV Guide help fill this roll. NBC, in their own way, started doing the same back in the late 90s. For example, their “NBC2000” group was one of the first to put the alternate screen boxes at the end of television shows, sometimes containing outtakes or promos of other programs. With their AstroVision sign, they went further.

Initially, NBC tried “repurposing” their existing TV promos onto the sign. However, as many multimedia producers also found out back then, you can’t always take a message from one medium to another and expect it to hold up. In this case, the lack of sound, as well as the differences in attention span between someone at home and someone in Times Square (or Epcot Center, or sporting events, where they also play these promos), rendered the original promos less effective than they were on TV. In response, NBC started designing alternate content for the sign - such as trivia puzzles, word games, and factoids about their stars. Each one is then followed by a few seconds of the program the star appears in, along with the name of the show, television network, and night it plays. It ain’t exactly a hot link, but it does give you the pointer you need to follow up on a thread you might have found interesting. And if you’re already a fan, it gives you some additional background information to widen your experience of the show.

It wasn’t the “grand convergence” many preached about back in the 90s (or even today), but neither was it a bad idea - especially for the time. I know it is still popular to say the medium is the message, but perhaps some of us would be better served by focusing more on the message, and then figuring out how to use the mediums at our disposal to better disseminate it.

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