Day: Feb 7, 2019

This will be new to me really as although I have a very small amount of experience in Photo Shop, I have zero in Adobe After Effects. I used to run a commercial website for my clothing shop in London and I did the product photography for that, so the only skill I needed in Photo Shop was cutting the shots out to apply a white background. Very exciting stuff (yawn…). This lecture will be worth a look for me!

Already, I have learned a new term. The ‘Connect screen’ which is the very first screen that the user is going to see. Then, an introduction to a cool site that I never thought would exist but could be very useful to me! Subtle Patterns. I think that I could use this for game development although I would need to check the licensing first.

I have been thinking about buying a graphics tablet for a little while now and although that’s not needed in the lecture that I am watching (not yet anyway), seeing these simple things explained is making me want to take image creation a little more seriously. The only thing is that there are only so many hours in the day! I am a sucker for focusing on too many things and that is only just calming down for me now in my old age so I need to be vigilant so as to not catch the ‘Im the exception’ bug, and think I can do everything! Another outstanding term learned… Hamburger Menu, excellent 😉

Although I don’t have Photoshop and frankly I don’t have the time today to sort that out and follow along with the lecture, it’s very enlightening to watch the presenter use all the tools and settings that to the layman (me) looks complex and overwhelming. It’s obvious that he is very skilled and I am learning a little about how to visualise the work that he is doing. I mean that in the same sense that I have experienced with coding. The most important part of learning to code does not seem to be learning the syntax and so on, but more learning how to think about the problem you are solving. I am enjoying watching him compartmentalise the structures that he is creating and gives me an anchor to hold onto when I do take to plunge into image manipulation.

Watching the presenter prepare the PS document for importing into AE, it became clear that it’s so important to learn from someone that has ‘been there and done that’ as often as you can. All he is doing is merging elements of the PS design into fewer, logical groups so that when its imported to AE is much less clutter to deal with. If only kids knew how expensive in time, effort and often money, it is to ‘make your own mistakes’ they would listen more to the people that have already walked that path. I know that what he is showing in the lecture is trivial but the first thing I thought about was the hour that it cost me trying to edit text on an Unreal UI widget. I didn’t know that I needed to make the widget editable, clicking on a checkbox. Experience is worth so much and any way to accelerate its acquisition is worth exploring.

I really enjoyed watching that and I am comfortable that some of the things that I have been learning in HitFilm will translate well into other applications of a similar type. Watching the content on keyframe animation and having had a little experience with that both in Hitfilm and Unreal I am keen to get my hands on Maya and try my hand at character animation. I feel that one of the areas most lacking from Serial Link is custom animations that could really show and emphasise what’s going on.

Thanks for reading and if you got this far, stand up and stretch your hamstrings.

I left off on the last post having found out about an atomic animation. I have to talk a little about that! I just had no idea that we are at that level, which is a little naive really considering the atomic bomb and the Hadron Collider. I am watching a little ‘how they made it’ video on YouTube which you can get to here.

The short documentary talks about how they achieved this incredible task in which single atoms are moved across what looks like a mesh of ball-bearings that I presume are other single atoms and in reality a perfectly flat surface. First, the whole scene must be in an environment that is -260 odd something degrees Celsius so that they stop moving. The researchers are then able to use a machine that houses magnet to very precisely move a single atom across the lattice-like structure so as to shoot another frame of animation. The researcher talks about being able to actually hear the grinding and the thud of the atom moving! That sounds pretty dangerous to a ‘normal person’ like me but the fact that IBM has not been blown to bits at this time (and yes, a quick Google confirms that…) tells me that they know what they are doing.

Its the scale of it that just blows my little mind. The image is seen through a microscope that zooms in 100,000,000 times. A hundred million. He also says that if an atom were the size of an orange, then an orange would be the size of the Earth.

Of course, it’s not about trying to build a tiny competitor to Disney. The research team are trying to figure out how to leverage the techniques to build new technologies. They are confident that should they master it (and I think they will, given enough time, money and imagination) a regular street walking dude would be able to carry every movie ever produced on his iPhone (or cheaper, more flexible Android superior, I mean competitor).