Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

I had a brilliant day at the Learning Lighthouse last Thursday where I ran a Digital Photography and Photoshop session for 7-11 yr olds with their parents/ grandfathers and guardians. Each session was only 2hrs long and the children/ adults got through quite a lot and more importantly had a lot of fun learning (then breaking) the rules of Photography. The first part of the session was a practical based learning as the young photographers used digital cameras and we followed the Digital Photography Tips & Tricks Presentation . The group then did an introduction to Photoshop and ‘played’ with making titles and adding filters to their photographs. Here is a gallery of all the final pieces. You don’t have to have Photoshop to edit your photographs, there are lots of free on-line photo-editing software . Well done to all the students now photographers who participated on the course and thanks to the lovely crew at The Learning Lighthouse.

A good website for Photographers that has a great link to the 10 must have online tools for photographers. The website is called Epic Edits and is a great community blog & resources for those interested in the static shot.

Have been really busy with the BBC the last month working with Milky Tea on the production of a CBeebies’ pilot. We shot the pilot over two days in a converted barn down in Hemel Hempstead. It was a fab couple of days and I will post a bit later once we have got going on the project. In the meantime, here are a few shots from the shoot. It was a completely green screen shoot and was shot on DV Cam. Bit of a shame really as i was trying to convince the Beeb to shoot on HD progressive …. but the budget didn’t allow the extra cost for the pilot. Dave the camera man did a class job of filming and DOP’ing. Again, at a later date I will give a detailed breakdown of the shoot and how he lit the event.

Just throwing a few things together regarding Greenscreen shoots. I have always used Keylight in After Effects and find their Training manual a good little read into the art of Keying. (Keylight1.0v4)

Sorry to get all Geeky but … Myself and a few friends always have problems (as we do it so little) with printing to tape/ video! So here is a little reminder… a little mental note of a check list;

Just been playing around with switching the Depth of field with the camera in After Effects. Basically just set up 4 type layers in AE and then changed their positions on the Z axis. I then added a 35 mm camera and turned on the Depth of Field. If you take the Aperture right down to Zero, all the layers will always be in focus and so you need to ramp the Aperture up a touch! Then just animate (adding keyframes) the Focus Distance in between shots.

To bring the animation alive, I added some textures and put together a music stinger just to signify the change in focus. This is referred to ‘pulling’ or ‘racking’ the focus in Film terms.

Depth of Field – Camera Test from the Hatch on Vimeo.

Just been doing a bit of Spring (I know its way too early & its cold) cleaning of my Bookmarks folder and came across some great websites for Graphic Designers; tutorials, free stuff, textures etc. Anyways, here they are; 30 Excellent Resources for Graphic Design Freebies by Six Revisions…Colorburned & Bittbox

Hi All, Happy 2010 to everyone and wishing you all the best and a whole heap of success for the year. Apologies I have been very quiet on the blog but have had a bad case of Laryngitis and flu all over the festive period but hey ho! Anyways, gonna kick of the New Year with a post by Abducted Design – ‘A Collection of Visual Inspiration and Useful Tutorials’. Have a good one!

Good little wordpress video about character design;

http://designanimation.wordpress.com/

Brilliant site on how to draw Funny Cartoons;

http://www.how-to-draw-funny-cartoons.com/cartoon-character.html

Good caricature site;

http://www.ubikartun.com/

Here is another great site Active Tuts +