The New York Geekcast

Last Thursday I found myself drifting way downtown to a meeting of AfterEffects NY, which promised a special lecture by Steve Forde, the new Sr Product Manager at Adobe After Effects. It was a quaint affair, with a tingle of promise and excitement. AE has been around for 18 years (barely legal!) and all of the original team-members from AE 1.0 COSA (1993) are still working there! Steve Forde used to be in charge of the company that made NucleoPro, but now he heads the AE production group, which consists of 20 guys and 1 girl. He collects all of their photos… He is in charge “of the one application I literally spend my life in.” [random Twitter quote] And he wants to “give our lives back 30 seconds at a time.” Steve Forde totally did, because I learned you can just pull the Effects tab off to the side so you can see the Project tab, and it’s dumb little things like that, that help my workflow.

“All of this stuff may or may not happen to be in a new version of After Effects at some future point in time, maybe.” That was the legalese they produce at Adobe… But at any rate, there are A FEW EXCITING THINGS you can look forward to:

Light Falloff -
Tired of those pesky lights being unrealistically bright and not conforming to our sketchy understanding of the physical universe? Worry no more! Now there is a built in slider that will simulate light-fall off from spotlights and more, so you can have murky shadows…

Rack Focus -
Possibly the coolest thing I’ve seen. They took a video of a boy pretending to hold something in his hand, animated in a ball of fire, separated the hand (foreground) from his face (bkgd) and then applied a rack-focus-map to all the layers. Then you just slide back and forth and viola, simulated rack focus!

Source Code -
all videos will be coordinated and you can switch between any source code you want… I’m sure editors are happy about that

Image caching -
each layer will individually cache their data, so if you change one little thing, it will take less time to update the whole image

Multi Ram Processing -
didn’t actually understand this, except that when you use it, limit the number of virtual CPUs, use a smaller amount of RAM, and disk caching will now default to 20gbs, and u should use it with an ext HD.

3D Glasses -
apparently they already had this filter, but now there will be a one click 3d-stereo-camera rig you can set up and different preview options to try out all the diff kinds of 3d glasses that exist today

RED film -
raw film data can be processed in AE, just like those snobby fashion photographers instantly color correct their pics on set

and finally…
WARP STABILIZATION & SUBSPACE CONTROL!!!!!
A new stabilization filter that uses a default cloud of 500+ tracking points to stabilize an image. We got to see all the crosshairs, but that won’t be available in the future. They had no idea how to term their controls, so one is actually called Subspace. It is all to reduce artifacting and warping around the edges of stabilized footage. Also cuts back on the amount of scaling and cropping. A vast improvement, but not universal for every shot. Personally I think it might cause a little motion sickness, but you’ll have to judge for yourself.

I was going to include a video preview of the Warp Stabilizer, but even though AENY promised it would be up the next day, all my Google efforts produce nothing but Star Trek engine designs…  but keep an eye out!

[Forgot to mention our latest episode -- "When Computers Were Magic" -- coming on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy this review. -- ed.]

Tron has been aging on a disconnected hard drive for the last 28 years. A Western Digital My Book, from the looks of it.

The first Tron has inspired countless (every?) animator alive today. And if you need to check the changes in the world from the ’80s, remember the oft-quoted fact that Tron was not qualified for special FX awards because “using computers was cheating.” A while ago I re-watched Tron on my Mac laptop, via a possibly torrented movie file from a friend. In the ’80s, computers looked like this:

an '80s computer

The whole idea of Tron was inspired by this machine, and the possibilities that came with it. Enter static flickers, black lights, spinning disks (direct technical influence) and motorcycles. Would it have been too much to ask for a new Tron that was equally influenced by today’s world of Apple, Sony, Facebook, and Google? Do we not have an equally inspiring technical society today, that looks good even in plaid and thick-rimmed glasses?

Continue reading ‘Tron Defragged’

It’s the Electric (boogie woogie woogie woogie) Company! A few nights ago I went to an ASIFA-East panel starring some producers, writers, and animators of this funky new revival. I… am too young to have been emotionally impacted by the original Electric Co, but not so many many other people. Let’s see if I learned anything from them:

The original TV show aired from 1971-1977 and had over 700 episodes. They were a sketch comedy show for kids starring the talents of Joan Rivers, and the Hubleys (a cute animator couple who inspired John Canemaker) among others. It was a “melange groove tune” for “people who like to scratch things.” That is “it’s a TV show not for kids, but for little people,” says Karen Fowler the executive producer. She is a very LOUD happy person who wanted to combine pop culture, righteous music, comedy and ‘the freedom to make mistakes’ to recreate this show. PBS Kids was lucky to receive a “Ready to Learn” grant to kick off the business, but ‘favors’ still had to be called in to get over 80 different animations done cheaply for the first season. On top of new animated segments, and a new narrative storyline, a special emphasis is placed on vocabulary skills. Hear hear.

Continue reading ‘Electric Co.’

Last night I attended the 6th Tom Stathes’ Cartoon Carnival, a periodic cartoon festival with a 1930s theme and a penchant for naughty old animation.  Skipping the god awful commute to Queens (I wrote out all the directions for the M train but stupidly decided to take the 7 instead and got lost) the location, Attic Studios, was gorgeous.  A vast white loft with two full walls of windows showing a view of the bridge (ONE of them anyway) and the Manhattan skyline.  Many white plastic chairs and a big screen for the 16mm film projector.  And a small roped off area where you can buy drinks, get free popcorn, and flirt with the cigarette girls who offer raffle tickets, ciggs for $1 and candy ciggs for a $1.  Continue reading ‘Travelaffs!’

I was wondering how to review this movie and I thought, well why not wait till the last minute?  Gird your loins everyone, Scott Pilgrim vs the World comes out in half an hour!

The minute the opening credits started, I thought about what I was dealing with.  Was this a return to scratch film animation, or was this some how closely reproduced in a computer, with some heartfelt scratches and paint added in some new way.  Did that matter?  Then the movie started.  What is up with Canada, I thought?  It seemed like The Discrete Charm of the Hipster Bourgeoisie.  But that quickly passed when the music animation began.  Ghostly blended comic book stars and stripes representing one medium in another.  The basic shapes were an interesting change from the usual abstract Apple visualizer or hippie trance that one often sees as “music art.”

And then came the first evil ex-boyfriend.  What an effin’ awesome adventure.  I haven’t read the books. I had no idea what was going to happen.  Poor guy doesn’t know how to read emails, crashes at his gay best friends bachelor pad, and gets stalked by a Catholic Asian school girl who looks like she walked straight of your nearest EGL web comic.

Each increasingly awesome battle was separated by the introduction of the characters who dain to orbit about Michael Cera and his Punk chic girlfriend.  Like *SPOILER* the crazy goth lesbian, the angry girl drummer, and my favorite, Aubrey Plaza from “Parks & Recreations.”  Scott Pilgrim vs the World is a computer game, with a nod to ATARIs.

Nothing like a 3 day geek convention to introduce me to the West coast. Armed with my nerdy t-shirts, camera, sketchbook, and magical Super Mario 3 baseball cap, I tried to absorb as much info as possible. I apologize in advance for the random panels I attended.

3 things you need to know: 1) One fan stabbed his friend in the eye with a pen for a seat for “Cowboys & Aliens” 2) Stan Lee made out with two chicks simultaneously in the Marriot hotel lobby on Saturday night, and 3) this will all be in documentary by Morgan Spurlock

Comic Con

Check out the album for my Top 5 Cosplayers, all the runner ups, and photos from events!

Click to read more about Comic Con secrets! Continue reading ‘cOMIC cON 2010′

I was all psyched to see Inception on Thursday morning, and then review it here as soon as the clock struck midnight on Friday, but I fell asleep, so. C’est la vie.

Any movie where you find out the name of the lead female is Ariadne is bound to be good. “Inception” is an action packed and beautiful blend of psychological and physics experiments. Brush up on your Einstein elevator experiments, Mobius strips, Escher drawings, infinity complexes, and more. I wish I took more than Pysch 101 in college because I’m sure there were references I missed. The movie is rife with important nouns: totem, architect, forger, chemist, labyrinth, inception, and limbo. Joseph Campbell probably has a boner in his grave.

The special effects stream flawlessly into the movie, and the story practically flows around them. The casual destruction of a cafe, Fred Astaire inspired anti-grav battles, and creation through infinite mirrors are just a few examples. “Inception” confidently gives the audience a lavish feast of the ideas of it’s own universe. Whether or not you really understand or agree with all the rules is up to you. An old gentlemen sitting next to me was confused about whether or not you die in real life if you die in their dreams and I told him “It depends if they are on drugs or not.” He replied: “Oh, well you can never understand people on drugs.”

The heart of the movie lies in Cobb’s (Leo d Caprio) tortured past. The concept is so romantic, original, and basic that you wish Nolan had actually developed it more. However, I get that this is an action movie and at 2.5 hours there might not be time for a Dostoievski-an look at the implications of a pair of lovers in… well you’ll see. This movie probably requires multiple viewings (altho in this economy I’ll wait till Netflix, or till someone asks me out). You will definitely have a lot to ruminate on and argue with other geeks. Bottom line: Go see this movie if you are a NY Geek. And stay to the end of the credits.

Non… je ne regrette rien…