Sunday — well, maybe Cloudyday is a better term

 Life in General  Comments Off
Jan 242010
 

This morning I was up early; probably the earliest I’ve been up on a Sunday for a long time (not counting the times at my parents house, where I tend to be up early regardless of my original intentions). This was a planned event, however: I went to bed at around 11 PM. A little before that, actually. I was able to get some sleep, and then was up and out of bed at about quarter after 6. See, I wanted to get a number of things done, but more importantly, I have an important meeting (so to speak) in the city at 9 AM. That means I’ll need to be up and out of the house in time to catch the 8 AM train.

Hey, I might run across Dex on the train. Wouldn’t that freak him out?

Anyway, I decided it would be good to get my sleeping schedule warmed up for this. Tonight I’ll be in bed before midnight, definitely, and probably around 11 PM again, so I can be up early again tomorrow. Then, tomorrow night I have basketball at 8, and thus will be leaving right afterward to get home. So I can get to bed! Yay!

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

So Bill Livingston of The Plain Dealer posted a column about how Eric Mangini is not getting the credit the coach deserves for building the Jets into a Superbowl contending champion.

I find this rather bizarre given that I seem to recall Livingston making a lot of disparaging remarks about Mangini earlier in the season. Certainly, the man is allowed to change his mind, but it’d be nice to actually see him say something like “I was wrong about Mangini….”

[ S H I E L D B R E A K ! ! ! ]

I’ve been making some progress on my side video/animation project. Slowly, to be sure, but a good part of that is just refreshing myself on how to use Maya, AfterEffects, and Illustrator. So that alone has been good — nice to touch up those skills — but also this method taking the project in bite-sized chunks is also handy as it’s keeping things moving forward.

The really hard part will be coming up soon, though, which is trying to do some hand animation. I’ll have to do some tests and see if I can do the rough approach that I would like, but otherwise I may have to go the (very) long route of scanning in the drawings, then redrawing them in paths via Photoshop/Illustrator.

Stay tuned.

“Press Hop” DJ Steve Porter remix

 Reviews  Comments Off
Nov 122009
 

I ran across this yesterday, and thought it was a pretty nice video, a large part being that I recognized all of the sports press conferences that were used.

Another aspect that I really like about this is that because its video, you can see exactly how the DJ manipulated the clips (sped up, cut, etc.) so that the audio from the video clips falls deftly on the beats of the music.

Video — Video Journal #6 “Return of the Visit”

 Stuff I Made, Video, Video Journal  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

On and off over the past few years, I’ve been making Video Journals (currently I’m in “off” mode), and this one chronicles the adventures of a trip I made to Cleveland and Milwaukee back at the end of June in 2008.

Video — “The ARG”

 Games, Interactive, Narratives, Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

For one of my Parsons classes, my friend and fellow classmate Linh teamed up to run an ARG. It was mainly for a small group of fellow students, but did attract some additional players from other parts of the world. At the end of the project, we presented this video to help explain what it was all about.

Video — Homemade Trailer for “The Private Eyes”

 Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

Okay, let’s be honest — this really wasn’t that great of a movie. I think Roger Ebert said that it was the perfect matinee choice, which isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. But hey, I always liked it as a kid, and decided to see if I could make a trailer for it.

Video — Matt’s Demoreel

 Animation, Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

My ever-trusty demoreel! If you watched the other videos (not too mention still images) on my main site, you’ll recognize a number of pieces, but there’s also a lot of work-related content, as well as some animation bits.

Video — Music Video for the Rescue Rangers

 Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

Here it is — the first music video I edited together for an animation series. “The Stylophonia,” by Two Little Boys, using scenes from “Chip n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers.”

What I first most amusing about this one is that I actually edited this together using an VHS to VHS editing deck. This is back when you needed two monitors and had to assemble the video pretty much one clip after the other, as there was no way to shuffle up and down the timeline as we can do today. Considering the number of cuts I had to make, it was quite a bit of a learning curve.

It’s also a bit scary to realize that I made this over a decade ago.

Video — Music Video for Negaduck

 Stuff I Made, Video  Comments Off
Oct 272009
 

After listening to George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” it struck me that it really seemed to be talking about Negaduck. Mind you, this was when I was deeply immersed in the Disney Afternoon culture, so I probably could have drawn parallels between Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor and the Junior Woodchucks. Nevertheless, I thought the music video I edited together worked pretty well, at least in that I still enjoy watching it today.

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