The problem is, your mind starts filling up with new information, and there’s only so much you can learn in a day before your mind is exhausted.
This is something I admitedly struggle with on a daily basis. Being in a creative industry, I need to create… and not even just for work. I really need to do my own projects to both stay sharp and have an outlet. But it’s all too easy to just sit back and consume, whether it be Facebook & Twitter, stories in my feed reader, TV, or even something helpful like tutorials.
Carlos Pero at Web Producer has a great write up of why it’s important to create something before consuming something.
A Behind-the-scenes about the “HBO Starship” intro from the 1980s. It’s good to remind ourselves how far effects, graphics, & animation have come in only 30 years. I’m also tempted to use some of these techniques digitally.
UPDATE: Humble pie. I already had to fix a pretty critical bug. Post Haste 1.0.1 has just been released.
One of the more tedious tasks in post, with the exception of rotoscoping, is just setting up a project. A while back, we discovered the usefulness using a template folder to keep everything consistent. Thomas Tomchak at Suite Take goes into great detail about project templates. But we were still duplicating folders, copying and pasting, and renaming multiple files before we could get started. I decided to make the write my own software to make things easier. The result is Post Haste.
Post Haste really just does one thing, but does it well: automatically generates a project folder for you. All you have to do is enter information such as project number, client, etc. and Post Haste will create a project folder with files in place and renamed. It’s customizable to allow up to five fields of information and auto-fills certain fields such as date, editor, or suite. Take a look.
Post Haste is completely free. There are no nag dialogues about how you should give me money. Really, I wrote the program for myself to make things easier. But to make things interesting, I’m releasing Post Haste as “luchware.” If you find it useful, consider buying me lunch.
I scored 20/20, but Mattell & Toyota were difficult as they are all caps and don’t use the tell-tale characters. Of course, it helps that this chart showed up the other day as well.
Typical motion capture uses tracking points placed on the actor at specific areas. This usually only works really well for skeletal tracking, like position of joints, etc. Though, it has been taken to extremes for films such as Appleseed where many tracking point were placed on actors’ faces.
Mova developed something different. It uses phosphorescent makeup & dye to create a random pattern of tracking points across skin & cloth to create pretty damn accurate tracking. You just have to take a look to really understand how it works.
Several weeks ago, I heard about YOURLS (get it?), a personal url shortening service. I had tossed around the ideo of using it, but never got around to it. Then tr.im (my url shortening service of choice) announced they were shutting their doors, then they weren’t, now they’re “community owned.”
So, just last week I registered coni.gs to host a YOURLS install, as well as a landing page for my various profiles online. The service is private, meaning only I can post urls to shorten, but it will handle all posts on this blog. At the bottom of each post (eg, Short URL: http://coni.gs/32), you’ll see a short URL listed. It is also included as a <link> tag in the head of the page for auto-discovery. It’s a nifty service.
