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Well here it is, my debut tutorial! This tutorial is going to go over how to create a stylized paint drip effect in Adobe After Effects like the ones seen in the new iPod Nano commercials. Thats right you don’t have to be Jonathan Ive to make your own iPod ad. But then again he will probably always be infinitely more cool and richer than either you or me. But I digress, this is the first entry into what I am planning to be an ongoing feature. Or this may be the last one I ever do if enough of you say that I stink. Who knows? But anyways love it or hate it please leave a comment on what you thought and I can decide if this is a waste of time or not. Cheers!

Continue reading Melon-Chromatic: Creating a “drip” effect

I have decided to add a few new features to the blog to inspire myself to write about something other than just what I did during the day. The first new feature I have decided that I am going to try is to create short tutorials. I will try to have a new one at least once a month of something that I use a lot or thought was really cool and haven’t come across a tutorial for yet. I have two already planned out. I have been having trouble with finding decent screen cap software for Vista but if I don’t find anything I will just write some them up and do screenshots. Hopefully though I will be able to find something that works because I think that most people prefer video tutorials.

Here though is a preview of the first tutorial that is going to go over how to create a simple stylized paint drip using only solids and masks in After Effects. I had figured out this technique about a month and a half ago for my demo reel and then this week I saw the new iPod Nano commercials that had something similar to what I did. The video below is a test I just did to make sure I could achieve something similar that took about a half hour to make. I don’t know, looks good to me. What do you think? I am planning to have the tutorial up by the end of the week.

Oh yeah everybody should check out Nick’s new blog. It looks good and it has some cool things planned that I can’t wait to see. Good night!

This is a short bumper that is a part of a seminar documentary I was doing for the Final Cut Users Group. I had to change the text to “Featured Speakers” and “Final Cut Pro” to Final Cut Users Group”, but I don’t know where that file is but I just wanted to show the effect on the image. It has a keyframed wiggle to its orientation and position and then I used a couple of bulge filters on an adjustment layer that are keyframed with the cuts. I was really happy with the way I was able to create a high resolution camera movement using only a single still image, a few expressions and one filter. Also I was given a couple of examples for styling the text and was told that the shattering letter was something they wanted. I didn’t really want to mess with tweaking the shatter effect other than the positioning so I precomped the text into a layer with a frame rate of like 450 or something and then was able to with time remapping change it to whatever pace I wanted. I also had some particle effects and smoke as it broke apart but that ended up getting scrapped because we all agreed that it was looking a a bit dirtier than what we wanted. I will try to post the other bumpers that were part of the video I made at a later time.

Well I have been spending all day working on a music video. I thought I should update the blog before I head out tonight. I thought that I would show something that I did about a month or so ago for Mario Letavay, a recent graduate from VFS in Writing for Screen and Film.  This is a short intro title sequence to a film called “Vac & Decker” that the characters in Mario’s film “Tuesdays with Mort-E” make. Mario gave me the raw footage and then I took that into Final Cut to build a rough and then finally I took it into After Effects to try to give it that half 70’s cop show, half blaxploitation look. Once I was about 95% done I watched test renders of it but it didn’t exactly look right. So I tried adding Sabotage on top of it and it worked. I hadn’t been cutting to music because Mario said he was going to write some music for it but once the sound was added I think you really started to get the spirit that Mario and I were looking for. 

Continue reading 9/12/08: Small update.

I made grandma Peterson’s Swedish meatballs this weekend and ate them all. And got sick from eating too much.

…and I probably should have shaved before taking this picture. Continue reading I made meatballs.

I mentioned in a previous post that Google had released a new browser named Chrome. Always intrigued with what Google is working on, I downloaded the browser and have tried to use it almost exclusively the past few days. I admit I haven’t been able to do that completely due to my addiction to a couple of Firefox’s add-ons (Delicious, DownloadThemAll, MinimizeToTray, PicLens, FireBug, DownloadHelper). But other than my addiction to Delicious (its a dot com now and not del.icio.us, I only noticed last week) which for me is a big deal for me and my browsing experience the experience has been very good.

The main thing that I actually noticed was that it is really stable and runs faster. One of my main complaints of Firefox is that it just ate memory and it was prone to crashing (a lot). So one of the first things I did when after it installed was to open all the sites that I frequent in a series of tabs and then check my task manager. To my surprise instead of having a giant process for Chrome, I had a number of smaller processes, which I found out today why. Continue reading Google Chrome

Hi! These are the award show bumpers that I created for the VFS Digital Design grad award show. I decided I just wanted to have fun with these and I didn’t really want to work that much on something that was too serious (and not that fun). I knew that with the 8 second restriction for the nomination bumpers that the people in attendence who had never seen my projects most likely wouldn’t get that good of an idea what the project was really about so I pretty much didn’t concern myself with trying to catch them up. But with that being said it was a great honor just to be nominated and I even won one.

Download Jamie Peterson’s Awards Bumpers (9.5mb, 52sec.)

First off, congrats to my brother Aaron and his girlfriend Kadee on their first born, Athena Sunshine Marie Peterson. I went down to Portland today and was with them so I wasn’t able to do any work until I got home tonight around 9.

Today a friend of mine sent me an email with this beautiful promotional book that the good people at Bethesda was handing out at PAX’08 in promotion of their upcoming game Fallout 3, The Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide. I usually don’t really go for remakes of the kitsch 1950’s/60’s style, but I ate up this book’s illustrations and textures that are combined with the well written and humorous copy. The book is 50 pages long and is full tips (in the style of the Worst Case Scenario… books) for surviving in the nuclear wasteland version of America in 2077. A nice touch that didn’t require too much work but goes a long way for me nostalgia wise is the little notes section in the back. The little blank map and lined notes area reminds me of the great game manuals that used to come with my NES and SNES games.

After going through about half the book I went to the official site to find out more about the game. I had played the original one a long time ago but don’t remember much other than it was based in a post-apocalyptic world that started in the 1950’s. The screenshots from the game look really gritty and realistic like Gears of War. I am sure that this is going to be a good game given Bethesda’s track record and after reading about it I can’t wait to play it.

This is also a great chance for me to mention something I saw over at Cartoon Brew a while ago that I was reminded of when seeing this. The Punch Below the Belt is a real book issued during the second World War. While this sort of stuff does evoke an emotional response from me (at times disgust), I do find these sort of things very interesting and think of them as things that we shouldn’t forget that we have done and how recently.

Also on a side note Google has released their new browser Chrome today. Hopefully this is something that I can use to finally replace my bloated Firefox browser.