SNOW!!!

It's that first real snow of the year. Not the first time flakes come down, or the first time a few stick to the ground without melting. But that first magical snow. The snow that feels warm even though it's blistering cold and blowing right in your face. The kind of snow that calls for a hot chocolate when you get inside. The kind of snow that makes you want to take a walk outside at 3 in the morning watching in blow around, turning even piles of litter into mounds and waves of peace. The kind of snow that sticks to your hair and freezes in place. Snow that brings hope and turns the darkest time of year into the brightest.

this is earth

an implication of earth, a shade of earth, a joke told about earth, a speaking of earth's life, or maybe just a spin on the old wheel of chance.

discs

I made an abstract animation yesterday, called "discs." It still has a few tweaks to go in the compression and sound mix, but until then, here's some stills from it. They don't bring out the motion, which was much more the focus, but these are some kinda fun static frames.

shapes

I've been talking and thinking about shapes a lot lately. More in an abstract sense than in the literal meaning of "shape." Here's a couple That were doodled a few days back. TH added a lot of the detail work to the top-left shape. And Neil Young was playing in the environment, so that got doodled in a bit too.

burst!

just a quick burst of color! a one!

siggraph papers countdown widget

I was stumped on something for a moment, so I started this new Dashcode thing and made a Dashboard countdown-to-the-siggraph-deadline timer. Hour correctness is set to Pacific time, but it'll tell you how many days are left correctly. :-)

Here you go.

And I got un-stumped while I was working on it!

crowd on a carpet square

Nuit Blanche ("The New Blank") had an installation of a carpeted sidewalk, see (secretofthesyncope.com), from which you could take a piece of carpet home with the aim of photographing it and uploading it to a growing collection. You'll have to scroll through the next button to see it on their site, since whatever script generates their index seems to be curfuddled, but the local household creatures seem to be intrigued by it.

Natural outdoor light

Autodesk has a great article/tutorial on natural outdoor lighting. It's fun because it collapses a lot of observation into a short roundup for those of us who are too focused on being too busy elsewhere to notice what we see everyday.

Speaking and Rats and Posters, Oh My!

I just returned from what has to have been the busiest SIGGRAPH I've ever been to. I gave a talk on the last morning (how to chop vegetables when making Ratatouille), which was really well attended, considering the 8:30 time. A co-author was giving a talk in another room at the same time (hand tracked gestures to animate cameras and simple motions); he also had good attendance. We had a couple posters up as a result of the sketches and posters being clobbered together. They didn't seem to be all that rewarding for us as authors, in that we got very little feedback. They seem to be more unidirectional in that, as attendees, they're convenient to browse outside of presentation times when the area isn't crowded. Lots of parties, caught up with lots of friends. San Diego is also and amazing place for siggraph. The climate and atmosphere and location in the city all mix really well. And the conference content at both SIGGRAPH and SCA had a really nice variety and more novel ideas. Motion capture technology is all over the place. Pretty soon you'll be able to make you're own motion capture zombie films using only the camera in your laptop. Now to finish digesting all the information...

Abstract Swirly Things

Michel Gagné has a section on his website that describes the fun animation of flavor in Ratatouille. Traditionally animated motion graphics reminiscent of Fischinger. :-)