Is It Halloween yet?

Below is my latest design work. A promotional poster for John Carpenter’s Halloween that I created on the Wacom Cintiq 12WX Digital tablet. It’s a very comfortable and easy to use digitizer that allows me to draw in the most natural way, directly on the actual screen. It’s got a pretty hefty price tag of $999 but in comparison to my Intuos this just blows it out of the water and well worth the investment. I finally feel like I’m back to real sketching and illustrating except now I have a “undo” function built in. The tablet also  has a great feel to it with the pen and active digital eraser as well as the customizable buttons and track pads on either side of the drawing surface to program all your shortcuts. There’s quite a few cables for it for the DVI, power, and USB hookup but it’s pretty easy to setup, install, and configure. The Mac immediately recognizes it as a second monitor and in no time your sketching away.

 This poster has landed me an opportunity to work with Cinema-suicide.com to do movie posters for their midnight film showings at a local theater in New Hampshire. I can’t expressed how excited I am about this opportunity. It brings together my love for b-movies, horror, sci-fi and my love for illustration in an all you can eat buffet of coolness.

 

here’s a video of the Cintiq in action.
 

Do Screencasting the Mac way or go home.

I stumbled upon this amazing bit of new software called “Screenflow” from Vara. Simply amazing it honestly looks like something Apple would have done themselves. It’s a very high end screen activity capturing program that  can capture hi-definition video or video playing from a DVD source or anything else going on the screen. It uses an algorithm to only record the portions of your screen that are actually changing. So you can record your live isight camera and chat or even video game play and have your voice over and mouse movements all captured to a movie file.  Then you can use the advanced editor that has things like the integrated callout features or the ability to drop in your own media. very powerful stuff for creation of high end demonstrations. Watch the demo at http://www.varasoftware.com/products/screenflow

I Didn’t know Quicktime could do that.

 

Apple always makes great interfaces

I found this neat little feature in Quicktime Pro that allows you to import a mask layer image directly into your movie clip. Basically I needed to crop down a movie but not actually shrink the content to fit into the smaller window. I Only needed to crop off the extraneous data at the bottom of the clip so it would be a much smaller file size when I imported it into Flash as well as being more in tune to the shape I needed for the background of my animated header. (I do not in anyway condone the use or creation of animated headers..please consult your physician before attempting to make your own animated header.)

 

So heres how. First open your quicktime movie and go to “Window” then “Show movie Properties” and you’ll get this nice little dialog box. Can you sense the power? It does a lot of other nifty things but I just wanted to crop my film.

 

You’ll notice that you can choose a image to create a mask in the left box. I quickly created a image in photoshop the full size of my movie which is 380 by 216. Then in my image file I create a thinner black box where my movie would play through and saved the file out as a 2 color .GIF. Quicktime then cuts away the white and crops down to the black box automatically. I select the “extract” button in the upper left and blam! I now I have a perfectly sized self contained movie file with the extra stuff cut away. Very handy! Hey I know it’s not rocket science but it’s the little things that impress me.

If anyone can make online document collaboration software it’s Adobe…well and Apple.

Katie Landers at needsum.com dropped me an email to checkout the early information on Acrobat 9. I figured it was just going to be another hash of useless bells and whistles that Adobe lately has been adding it’s bloated software suites lately. Honestly I do love designing with Photoshop, illustrator, and inDesign but when they charge $400 for a few minor features and tweaks then it is getting a bit ridiculous. Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Connect Pro may change my tune though as they’re actually offering some very compelling collaborative features. I’ve only read through it briefly but it looks like it maybe what people have been waiting for in regards to true online document collaboration. Google Docs has tried it without much success, Microsoft attempts are many and still just as confusing as before though Sharepoint is about their best attempt thus far. But what Adobe has done is leverage the popularity of PDF format and tie it in with  simple to use collaboration features. They made it blend it with the application and made it intuitive for the first time user. PDF’s also support streaming video and flash animation embedded within them so you can create some really media rich documents. Users can have different levels of editing permissions on files and you can now  view and respond on comments in a rich internet application environment. I also like how easy it is to make online interactive PDF  forms. That can open up a whole new relm for e-learning and online surveys since it tracks data submitted through them.

You can also switch to a live collaboration session to invite people to look at your edits in real-time instead of timeline based efforts of back and forth notes.

Here’s a link to their guided tour. 

I could definitely see this beneficial to collaborating on a design with a client or other employees as well as a QA of their content and pages and look forward to giving it a try. Finally Adobe you’re starting to think beyond the bloat and consider real solutions for businesses and customers. Make things simple…make them integrate and tie it all together in a familiar interface for publishers. By getting desktop publishers on the band wagon of online collaboration they may finally bring businesses to the solution.

 

 

Your loan has been approved. You may now fill up your gas tank.

It would be funny… if it wasn’t so infuriating.