a.m. overtone: visual techniques

Snapfish Photobooks has been redesigned! I helped out on the Flash/Flex interface part of things.

Photobooks was featured on the Today Show (July 27th).

“Lensbaby’s Optic Swap System lets you swap your optic to create selective focus, fisheye, soft focus, macro, pinhole, and zone plate photography.”

Lensbaby Plastic Wide Angle Lens:

Lensbaby Composer + Macro Lens:

Lensbaby Composer + Macro Lens:

Find out how your video is doing on YouTube Insight for FREE! Many people don’t realize how to access it. Click on My Videos and under My Account click on Insight. What’s really interesting is the Discovery link that tells you who is driving the most traffic to your video.

Vimeo Plus charges $60 a year to access Full Statistics. To find out who is driving the most traffic to your video, click on the “Embed” link on the bottom left.

“I’m Not” HD Video coming this summer to an internet connection near you!

The Concept combines all types of colorful 80s movies.
Including, but not limited to:
• Superman II: His ice fortress (in technicolor)
• Zod, Ursa, and Non in the epic outerspace glass prison effect
• Close Encounters: The UFO sound to light sequence
• Backdrops from 80s high school year book photos

Screen grab of the “sound effector” sequence in Cinema 4D

Screen grab of the imported sound generated C4D sequence into After Effects and using Sound Keys to map the effects to the frequencies of the beat.

I did a quick test between AE CS4 and CS5 on a new MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM to find out a pleasant surprise. Adobe doesn’t cap the RAM to only 3 GB anymore. I’m getting the full use of my 8 GB MacBook Power now!

The downside is that none of my plug-ins work in CS5 and the updates are not the free kind. The new Rotobrush Bezier tool is sloppy. The only real update is that it works with all the RAM finally, which should just be a CS4 update (shakes fists)

On the upside, I rendered out this LochNess Monster in no time!

Another Cinema 4D MoGraph example using Extrude Deformer and Random Effector. I composited the type and background in After Effects.

I was in L.A. testing out the Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens. It’s not a point and shoot lens, it takes some practice twisting and turning the knobs to get a sharp focal point, but I enjoyed the learning process and ended up with some lush lens blurs (photoshop blur filter was not used).

I’m usually not a fan of 3D type, but by using Cinema 4D MoGraph Effectors, you can create some eye catching 3D Typography. This experiment uses the Step Effector and the Shader Effector to turn LED lights into the phrase “Sound Wave”. I used Ableton Live to conjure up a quick audio loop.

Cinema 4D 11.5 has a slick render setting called Ambient Occlusion in the Advanced Render. It uses the environment to simulate smooth shadow casting on realistic translucent surfaces. The magical part of this setting is that it is able to block (occlude) the ambient light of other surfaces. The only set back is the long render time.

Hipstamatic is instant happy-hipster-ness. Lots of vintage combos. You can swap out lenses, film and flash types. It makes taking photos on the iPhone fun and the results have various outcomes.