This last Friday, I taught the third After Effects workshop that I have been a part of, for the benefit of a few students from the Mediaworks program. Myself having been in Mediaworks last year, and having attempted to put together a similar workshop for Mediaworks then, it was great to see all of the people interested in AE in this generation of Mediaworks students. Fortunately, I am a bit better at facilitating such a workshop now than I was then.

As a resource for anyone that might be interested, here is a small section about how to teach yourself how to use After Effects.

How to get help and teach yourself
The most effective way to learn After Effects is to experiment with it and learn on your own. In accordance with this goal, here are some useful resources.

• After Effects Help File
• Everything you need to know to operate the program is contained in this well-written, intuitively organized, and easily searchable help file. Just press F1 while running After Effects, or click Help / After Effects Help.
• Online Tutorials
• http://www.creativecow.net/
  CreativeCow.net has a great deal of superb and useful tutorials. This link is to a list of all of their written After Effects Tutorials.
• http://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast/
  CreativeCow’s new series of excellent video podcast After Effects tutorials.
• http://wikivid.com/index.php/After_Effects
  a compilation of links to introductory After Effects video tutorials.
• http://nututorials.com/subtutorials/AfterEffects/23001/1/10/0
  categorized After Effects tutorials.
  
• http://www.stephenschleicher.com/
• http://aftereffects.digitalmedianet.com/
• http://www.editorsguild.com/
  an introductory tour of after effects, fortified with example projects
• http://www.toolfarm.com/
• http://www.xtreme-is-back.com/
• http://www.pixel2life.com/
• http://www.ayatoweb.com/
• http://www.videocopilot.net/
  a very energetic after effects instructional video creator…
• http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/aepage/aeportal.html
  a portal to all things AE…
• http://media-motion.tv/
  an excellent and well-trafficked After Effects list-serve.

• Total Training/Lynda.com Training Videos
• These are two great software training video resources, containing ridiculously thorough video training in all things After Effects, conducted by articulate professionals. Talk to the computer center about their subscription to Lynda.com available for the use of interested students.

• Books
• There are many books out there about After Effects, but one of the best is Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects – Volume 1: The Essentials by Trish and Chris Meyer. Instead of just telling you how to perform functions in After Effects, it attempts to teach you techniques for being creative inside the program, teaching you in the context of real-world design problems.

Attached to this post is the After Effects tutorial handout that I wrote for the last workshop I did with Ruth Hayes for SOS: Media, which might be of use to anyone looking for a basic text-mediated introductory reference for After Effects.

No Comments

For the past couple of days, I have been getting reacquainted with all of the writing and notes and ideas I was engaged with during fall quarter for my Artificial Intelligence project. Involved in this process is the reading of the massive quantity of journaling that I did, and watching and reading some new research material. Examples of this material include reading new posts on the Accelerating Future blog, watching some lectures from the Singularity Summit at Stanford, featuring a number of speakers from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and other places.

The next two weeks are not going to be about doing a ton more research however. They are going to be about answering the concrete questions necessary to actually start visual and auditory work on this project. What does the world portrayed in this animation actually look like? How will the presence of the Artificial Intelligence be manifested or embodied? How will the AIs experience of reality be embodied? How should a viewer experience this work of animation? What should they get from watching it? What are the larger issues that are important to be addressed with this animation?

Below are a smattering of notes from early portions of the aforementioned research.

(more…)

No Comments

J.C.R. Licklider’s March 1960 paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” presents a cogent, logical, and perceptive discussion of conceptual and technical matters surrounding the term present in his title. His pontifications regarding the nature of man-computer symbiosis, how it differs from conventionally existent human-machine relationship dynamics, and possible effects on human functioning, are exemplary timeless, and remain of great interest and merit, even 47 years later. The second portion of his paper, which is concerned largely with then-current technological barriers to the achievement of such a symbiosis, shows its age, but is not without value.

(more…)

No Comments

I was just falling asleep a moment ago when I realized that I hadn’t written a blog post yet this week about my progress and activities for SOS: Media. I have a bit of a little exigetic thought process on this topic. It seems that all of my classes this quarter are melding into this one giant tangled delightful hectic challenging boring stimulating mess of learning.

At the end of last quarter, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take New Media in addition to SOS: Media and Hybrid Music. I thought “great! robotics and physical interfacing! the one area i am completely deficient in! with a hefty dose of the media theory with a specific emphasis in technology! the perfect academic learning that i have been missing in SOS Media! it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough!” After starting my day with a very sleep-deprived music technology lab-time, a hallucinogenic meeting with my former faculty Ruth Hayes about creating a poster for a series of speakers on the intersection of scientific research and artistic endeavors, (which I haven’t really gotten a chance to look into yet), and one test car-ride in preparation for the picking up of experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, I sat down with fading sunlight outside of my covered window, in the comforting darkness of my room, and read Man-Computer Symbiosis and Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and realized that it was all worth while.

It seems that the two extra evening and weekend classes are complementing the subjects I’m exploring in sos media nicely. In fact I’m not sure where one class begins and the other ends. Fuzzy boundaries encourage additional exploration. The challenge is finding enough time to do everything I promised myself I would.

I have also been reading this book called Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. It is textbook-style writing on the aesthetic construction of the moving image, and how our perception of media is intrinsically linked to how it looks and sounds. I feel like this book fills in a subject area that was not developed as well as it could have been in Mediaworks. Sure, we had lighting workshops, and readings in The Filmmaker’s Handbook, but no really detailed cogent discussions of the structuring of images, and how this affects how people perceive the images in their process of decoding meaning. This book talks about what the author has determined to be the 5 major aesthetic fields of television and film: light and color, two-dimensional space, three dimensional space, time/motion, and sound. Some of the information is presented in a classical context — that is, narrative film, but you have to learn the rules before you can break them properly, right? I wish I had read this a year ago; I think my work would have been at least a tiny bit better because of it.

1 Comment

Maywa Denki are a group of artists and engineers in Tokyo, Japan. They are known for their creation of absurdly creative “nonsense machines“, and other works of electromechanical devices which are gloriously surreal in their purpose and functioning.

Here are some blog posts for further reading.

The Nonsense Machines of Maywa Denki
PopGadget – Maywa Denki
Suicide Bots – Maywa Denki
Hand Circus – Maywa Denki
Maywa Denki Homepage

No Comments