Depeche Mode – Fragile Tension (music video) – OpenFrameworks at Work

I’ve recently been looking into realtime video compositing and effects and chanced on this video after popping around at memo.tv and various other Quartz Composer focused sites. This is some really beautiful work here. Truly amazing when you read up on how it was made, too.

The opener was essentially a testimonial piece that showcased Pioneer employees delivering key messages about how they have empowered themselves to be agents of change in their business. I really enjoyed developing the work and we created a mobile kit to capture interviews with over twenty field representatives across the midwest. We ended up shooting the piece with a Panasonic HVX200 and Red Rock micro adapter. We really wanted to get some decent depth of field and allow the viewer to focus on the talent. The adapter we had was a first generation and we needed to contend with varying light conditions. The adapter isn’t very fast and knocks the image down a couple of stops. We ended up getting an HMI and generator along with a decent 12×12 silk to keep the sun off the talent. The interviews were set up and shot in less than hour. They did a great job delivering the lines with sincerity. Many props to the other folks who worked on this. BJ Aberle’s original music track and performance. Tim Martin is our main cinematographer and is an absolute machine with amazing patience and attention to detail. Rob Cody edited the piece and brought his years of experience and timing in the creation of the final edit.

While traveling around for the opener, I became enamored with the textures on the old barns that I was seeing at different field locations. We were hoping to capture that with a dynamic build of geometry and text influenced rural images. The closer was built on a soundtrack that BJ Aberle augmented from an existing track. The idea was to use the sounds in the field to build energy around key corporate messages. Matt Forcum brought his considerable compositing skill to this piece and we brought it in on time and on budget.

Thanks to all the folks at Pioneer and at Iona who supported this effort.

links for 2009-11-23

• A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources
  Wireframing is one of the best parts of starting a new web design project. You have a blank canvas and you are allowed to let your creativity rein free. Your design may eventually be spoiled by the clients added input… but for that short time…
  (tags: wireframe process free)
• Concerns on CSS Validation and iPhone targetting
  Using the media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" value in your link to the CSS file will cause a failure in the W3 validator. How can you fix that?
  (tags: iphone conditional validator)
• WWW FAQs: How do I design web pages for the iPhone?
  Another detailed article on targeting the iPhone via Conditional Comments and CSS media type attributes
  (tags: css iphone conditional)

I have yet to announce this here, so I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that I have a new personal project I have been engaged in over the last few months.  It’s a webcomic called Robot Beach.

Most people don’t know this about me, but I am not supposed to be a motion graphics artist.  If you were to hop into a time machine and travel back in time to ask my grade school self what my career is going to be one day I will tell you that I am going to be a jet pilot.  That, or a cartoonist.

Robot Beach started its life as a simple sketch I created two years ago while I was bored and on a lunch break.  I sketched out a little robot and for some reason thought that he might look cute with a surfboard and flower print swim trunks.  Something about that little sketch felt fresh and interesting.   I knew I was on to something special.

So what are you waiting for?  Go check out what I do on my down time!

A conversation with Paul Caggegi

Recently I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Paul Caggegi for his wonderful podcast show The Process Diary. We talked about Robot Beach, Annabelle’s Bistro, and other animation and illustration related topics. This was my first interview about my comic I and I think it turned out great. (Even though at times I feel like I was wandering about like a lost child in a world that I know little about.) Paul did a great job of reeling me in and keeping the conversation engaging and entertaining.

On Self Promotion

Most everyone who reads my blog already knows about my new project Robot Beach. If you haven’t already checked it out, I encourage you to head over there and see what I have been up to. It’s a lot of fun!

The experience of creating a webcomic has certainly been an enjoyable one, but more importantly, it has been a wonderful learning opportunity. In particular, I have learned quite a bit about marketing and the business of self-promotion over the last few months. For me, the knowledge gained has been invaluable. Both to my self-esteem, and to my comic.

Jeffery Zeldman posted an article today on self-promotion and there is a quote I wanted to pull out of it.

There is a difference between being arrogant about yourself as a person and being confident that your work has some value. The first is unattractive, the second is healthy and natural. Some people respond to the one as if it were the other. Don’t confuse them. Marketing is not bragging, and touting one’s wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler “fresh rolls” if he hopes to feed the townfolk.

This is a big deal for me. I am rather self-deprecating by nature, and (as most artists I imagine) I tend to de-value my own work. I question whether I am good enough, or worthy enough to expect others to take interest in my art. It has been a struggle to overcome these insecurities and to come to realize that others don’t see my confidence in my work as me being arrogant or self-righteous. (well, my wife being the exception…)

And so I encourage everyone to go out and create! Share your creations with others! Have confidence in the work you produce knowing that you are doing what you love and that you get to show it off to the world!

Paged, Staged, and Engaged: 
Reimaging the Poem as Interactive Performance

A cross-disciplinary group exhibition by Bradley faculty.
December 2 – December 18, 2009
in the Hartmann Gallery at Bradley University

Opening Reception: December 2, 5 – 7:00pm

Using Kevin Stein’s poem “On Being a Nielsen Family,” this collaborative project interrogates our culture’s historical privileging of the printed page as sole site of poetic performance. Instead, this collaborative project proposes a cardinal notion of poetry: that poems are events, not stories about events.

Project collaborators have thus fashioned a collage of print, audio, video that challenges cultural assumptions about how poems are created and received. In short, the project’s artist-collaborators have aimed to re-imagine traditional print forms, welcome current technological innovations, and encourage reader/listener participation in the creative act.

In the process, the poem’s literal and figurative “space” has transitioned from the historically orderly confines of the printed page to a physical realm of interactive performance. Such fooling around evokes in both poet and reader the self-sufficient joy of reshuffling the perceptual deck of cards one has been handed by previous reading.

Bradley University Galleries
Elizabeth Kauffman, Gallery Director
1400 West Bradley Ave
Peoria, IL 61625
(309) 677-2989
ekauffman@bradley.edu
art.bradley.edu/bug

links for 2009-11-18

• ClickTale Blog » Unfolding the Fold
  Web designers and usability professionals have debated the topic of web page scrolling since 1994. At the early days of the web, most users were unfamiliar with the concept of scrolling and it was not a natural thing for them to do. As a result, web designers would design web pages so that all the important content would be “Above the fold” or even worse, squeeze the entire page into the initial screen area. This practice of “squeezing” continues even today.

F-Shaped Pattern

Found a very interesting article on how a user reads content within your website. In this case, a study was performed which tracked eye movements across three websites. The Resulting pattern of eye movement resembled an “F” shape.

Very interesting and not terribly surprising. Although I would like to see a similar study performed on websites with a large number of photographic elements or right-side navigation.

links for 2009-11-17

• WireLust » Blog Archive » AS3 port of JZLib
  AS3 port of JZLib – A project that uses FZip to decompress zip files in flash. Pretty nice stuff if you need that kind of thing.
  (tags: zip as3)