Flow Test

I have a lot of unfinished bits and pieces (bits and bytes actually) on various disks that are part of an ongoing City.Flow() video project. During our recent trip to Arcadia National Park I shot some HD footage to complement the heavily processed city stuff. While experimenting with that footage I created this test. Can you guess what the original footage was?

Play it in HD to get the best view. Embedding in HD is possible with YouTube videos but the player is then too big for this blog.

Not a bad way to turn ninety!

(Left to right) Tony Dalton, John Landis, Ray, Tim Nicholson (associate event producer), Randy Cook and Terry Gilliam. Photo: Mark Mawston.

Through a post on linkedIn I came across this image. At least three of the people in this photograph I admired or even consider myself a fan of. Terry Gilliam is my favorite director. As a teenager I was very much into John Landis' movies. When "An American Werewolf in London" came out, I clipped many an article. Especially on the work of Rick Baker, who is not in this picture but was present at the event.

I did see the new nonagenarian (I actually had to look that word up) a couple of years ago when this master of animation was in his early eighties. He showed some of his original art work and I was much impressed by the quality of his drawing, which are works of art in and of themselves. I also admired the sharpness of his mind and foound his talk to be very inspirational. This was in Amsterdam, and we went there with a bunch of Visual Effects students from the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, where I taught at the time.

I am not even half way there, but turning ninety this was does not seems a very daunting prospect!

Home

Last week, while at least one computer was rendering most of the time, I finally found time for one of the other reoccurring summer activities: home improvement. After banishing the groundhogs from our back yard it seemed that they tried to create new dwellings under our porch. I have replaced one of the rotten lattices, three more to go. A severe cold kept me from doing much this weekend, but I should be able to make the other ones next week. Of the next and biggest one the frame is already build and painted.

Back from SIGGRAPH 2010

I am back from Los Angeles and kind of recovered. Here are some of the things I saw at SIGGRAPH 2010. This year I had no time to blog from the conference. I spent quite a bit of time working for the SCOOP podcasts and videos which can be viewed on ACMSIGGRAPH's YouTube Channel.

3D stereo was big again this year, but the display that impressed me most was a computer generated hologram with full parallax. As a graduate student at Ohio State I created animated holograms of my 3D character Earguy, but they only had left/right parallax: only 3 dimensions in the horizontal direction (just like Avatar, by the way, and all the other stereoscopic 3D movies). At the Emerging Technologies I saw the "An Interactive Zoetrope for Animation of Solid Figurines and Holographic Projections" which not only had left/right AND up/down parallax, but was interactive on top of that. Impossible to video or photograph since it was set up facing another interesting exhibit that displayed bright and colorful images on bicycle wheels.

In the adjacent Art Gallery, which was very focused on haptics (stuff you can manipulate of get feedback from by way of touch) which is not my thing, had an interesting piece called "Tools for Improved Social Interacting", a clever piece with an explanatory video with good content but not so great cinematography that reminded me of my "New and Improved Smiling Device"

Of course I also saw some great animations and a lot of friends, old and new. Another successful battery recharge.

Yes, I took the pictures accompanying this post and they indeed depict the exhibits described. In case you VVOh!\|[)3red