Posts Tagged ‘Techniques’

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.

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 doing a project with the BBC that involves some live action Greenscreen sequences. Here is a little bit of research;

2007 Compositing from scw1729 on Vimeo.

Great little film showing how much Greenscreen filming there is in everyday film that we watch.

Loved this video sent through from Matt Frodsham! A post from Videopia on his vimeo site about Framing and Composition….talks about the Rule of 1/3rds in Lay man terms with good Film references!

http://vimeo.com/1461280

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

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 +

Am going to be posting some Flash stuff over the next few days as I am teaching a Flash Course up in the Lakes. Here is a great design/ flash/ vector based Blog by Spoongraphics

For all those PC users, Windows do a free movie making programme called Moviemaker (funny enough!). If you can’t see it in your programme section in the explorer, you can access it from Accessories >

Here is a really intuitive guide with lots of nice pictures & very colourful. I would suggest to just jump on in and start making movies. If you haven’t got use of a video camera, you can still import photos, graphics, audio and record you own voice. It has lots of cool effects, transitions, Type intro’s and anything from primary school to Active age groups love using it.

Download me!