Category — Image-making
The art of the iPod touch screenshot
Two things that iPod Touch users might want to discover:
1. How to take a screenshot on your iPod Touch.
Get whatever you want to shoot on screen, then hold down the Home button at the bottom of your screen and do a quick click on the Power button on the top of your iPod… like you are clicking the shutter. The screen will flash white and your screenshot will be saved into your photo album. Look for it there.
Donna drew and emailed this little piece of art to me, directly from her iPod photo album.
Which brings us to:
2. A wi-fi art app you can use on your iPod Touch (or iPhone)
Go to this URL and draw with your finger. You can change brushes and continue drawing. Change colours, too. When you’re done, save it as a screenshot, since you can, now.
BTW, Mr. Doob is a clever guy with a lot of interesting stuff to explore. His drawing app works on your iPod because it does not depend on Flash. This may mean nothing to you, but it’s a good thing.
July 28, 2010 9 Comments
After Effects sign in
My typing still sucks, but my handwriting is improving.
December 17, 2009 4 Comments
Reminders to self: complexities of 3D Flash objects.
Don’t bother reading this. I am making notes to remember all the steps I had to take in order to get this simple (and still imperfect) thing to work on a WordPress page.
I began by making the 3D book in Kinemac and animating the spin there. It will not export with a transparent background, so I used a workaround. I made the Kinemac background bright green, like a green screen, and exported my Quicktime movie. Imported the .mov file into After Effects and used the Keylight plugin to get rid of the green background. Aha! Looks like transparency… but it will not be when saved as a FLV file for Flash Player. More tricks are needed.
An auto trace layer (Layer>Auto Trace) has to be created above the .mov layer, tracing the background of the work area. The blend mode for this layer must be set to Silhouette Alpha. The background should look transparent at this point. If you need to change the dimensions of the comp, this is the time to do it (so both the Auto Trace and the movie layer get the same changes).
Send the comp to the render queue.
Change the output settings to produce an FLV, set the Video Output>Channel to RGB + Alpha. Set Color: to Straight (Unmatted) In Format Options, make settings as wished but be sure that Basic Video Settings has Encode Alpha Channel checked. If there is no audio, you can uncheck Export Audio. Click Render. The FLV should have a transparent background.
Now to get it to show in WordPress. I do not like the plugins available to insert FLVs into WordPress so I create an html page holding my Flash content and place it into my WordPress post with an iframe tag. <iframe style =”border:none” src =”http://ripple.ca/indifferences/indif.html” width=425 height = 420</iframe><!–more–> Without the more tag, the other entries in the blog don’t displaym so I stuck it at the bottom. Don’t know why it works, but it does.
Publishing and uploading the HTML.SWF,FLV set. First, I made an FLA to hold the FLV Player component and sized the document to fit my WordPress column width. I set the player source to the absolute path for the FLV. In the case above, it was on my server, in a folder called indiffereces. The HTML page, the skin SWF and the SWF are in that folder, too.
Last thing: As published out of Flash, the HTML page doesn’t control how borders and margins are handled by browsers, so it must be edited thus:
<body style=”padding:0; margin:0;” bgcolor=”#ffffff”><div width =425 height =420>
November 7, 2009 No Comments
3D Escher Knot
Photoshop CS 3 and 4 can import and move certain 3D file formats but this shot is from a test movie I made in After Effects. The sky background is a movie clip of clouds and the 3ds file of the knot rotes in space, reflecting surroundings and moving closer and farther away from the camera.
March 29, 2009 No Comments
Trying out iWeb
You can click on the image or use this link to check out the first example page I ever made using iWeb, a web authoring application that comes free with new iMacs. (It’s also part of Apple’se iLife Suite of apps, if you want to buy it separately. $79 for 5 apps.)
First impressions? It couldn’t be much easier to make a web site and the templates are nice to look at. You can do a lot of customization, too, so don’t worry about your iWeb site looking just like everyone else’s.
The HTML in any template system is a bit bulky, so iWeb sites aren’t as fast to download as they might be, but they aren’t too bad. I think this is a handy app for anyone who needs to put together a little web site and who doesn’t want to climb a steep learning curve.
November 4, 2008 No Comments