Virgin Bingo – Deal or No Deal

Ricardo the Jalapeno strikes again in another spot for Virgin Bingo and Deal or no deal – currently airing on Channel 4 in the UK during the ad breaks around Deal or No Deal.

Noah

Our little boy – born 3 weeks ago. Noah is by a mile the best thing to happen to me and Lucy and we love him to bits (despite his continual efforts to get us wet).

The Third and the Seventh – Making of

Amazing lighting/rendering here with a selection of shots by Alex Roman simulating in CG architecture from the POV of a camera.

Breathtaking stuff, really, really nice and incredibly inspirational.

Upular by Pogo

You might remember the Alice in Wonderland clip I blogged about a little while back – well Pogo has been at it again with Pixar’s Up and here are the results.

Happy new year and all the best for 2010!

Apples anyone?

Ingenious and well executed viral by the Mill. We’d all better stop resting on our laurels and get that thinking cap out of the cupboard and back on our head to compete with the likes of this spot. The Mill using 3 iphones, some clever maths and hours of rendering to create apples, in the big apple. Makes my Betfred poker chips look like tron.

And here’s how they did it.

Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody

Mamma?

Jedward set to rake it in…

…bit of a guilty pleasure…

Anyone following my twitter/facebook feeds will know that i’ve been a big supporter of John & Edward on this years X-Factor. Their music has been an inspiration and they have for sure made it actually watchable (it is duller than dishwater now). So I was very happy to read the following on the telegraph website:

Jedward have been given a deadline to accept a £50,000 offer to fly out to the jungle and take part in I’m a Celebrity.
I’m A Celebrity executives have reportedly approached the 18-year-olds’ mentor Louis Walsh who is now attempting to convince their parents to let them go.

Louis is hoping to persuade them it’s a good move for their career, but still believes ITV haven’t offered enough money.

Entertainment industry experts have predicted that the brothers could earn around £2 million in the next year, despite leaving X Factor well before the grand final.

They are contracted to perform at the official 30-date X Factor tour – for which they will be paid £180,000 – and there is talk of a autobiography being rushed out in time for Christmas.

Asked about the prospect of joining I’m A Celebrity yesterday, John said: “We’re up for any challenge, we’ve got to think about it together and see if it’s for us.”

What is the value of a blog and what do stats mean?

Do you hold a horse race in a field of Rocks? Do you plough the sea with oxen? You would cripple the horse and you would drown the oxen.

Wise words from Amos 6:12

Yesterday I, in a brief moment of self celebration, let some of my closest friends know that my blog (which you have wisely hunted down and are hanging onto every word of) receives around 200 hits a day. I wasn’t quite expecting raptuous applause or a toast, but positive acknowledgement would have been nice. Instead I was greeted by an unexpected but highly amusing anecdote. A friend, who I will refer to as Sarah (that is her name after all) said that she visited daily. I was overjoyed. She continued to say that it was because it has all the links that she likes to follow in one tidy place.

She uses my blog for the links on the side. (Sarah also requested that I add another link for her, of course I will oblige, after all she is a fan).

But this got me thinking, how often do we misinterpret things and create assumptions that effect our thinking and misdirect us? Do all of my visitors use me as a links page, am I merely a google typo or does what I have to say actually interest any of you?

Amos continues to say in a few words what I am struggling to in many:

And yet you’ve made a shambles of justice,
a bloated corpse of righteousness,
Bragging of your trivial pursuits,
beating up on the weak and crowing, “Look what I’ve done!”

That’s me told. Maybe rather than writing for the sake of it or embedding any old clip from YouTube I should focus my energies on content over crowd pleasing. A message with a purpose is worth much more than a thousand whispers in the wind.

It’s interesting that in a time where we have the ability to speak to a potentially huge and global audience we focus on current trends rather than something of value.

Does anyone still read articles about upcoming technology for 1998 or last weeks share prices? It’s worth a thought…

Water in Commercials double bill.

Slightly random post today, here are 2 great examples of water being animated in tv commercials – I must admit my favourite is the shiny suds ad for it’s comical value. Give them both a watch anywho and enjoy.

Bavaria Beer – Drop

Method Cleaners – Shiny Suds

I like both of these ads, but which one is better – there’s oly oneway to find out…..poll!

Tutorial – Using expressions to control a second composition in After Effects

The purpose behind being able to link properties from 1 composition to another is to open a whole new world of possibilities where; for example, you could have one slider that moved cameras in multiple child compositions for true 3D matching in nested compositions – or for applying batch effect tweaks to many layers at once – the possibilities are endless. This tutorial isn’t to achieve anything particularly cool or create an exciting composition – it’s to understand how, by using expressions, we can link properties in After Effects. Let’s get started!

First things first – create 2 compositions called “Parent” and “Child”. The child composition will be where things happen – this will be nested in the parent composition which will have a control to effect a layers opacity in the child composition.

I have used basic PAL resolution / frame rate and a 1 minute duration – this doesn’t make any difference to what we are doing so feel free to use settings that work for your project.

Right – next we’re going to import an image to use as the background layer in the child composition – i’m using a pumpkin patch – again this could be anything.

Your child composition should now look a bit like this.

The next step is to add a solid layer – this will be the layer that we will be creating an expression for. It will lie on top of the background so we can fade in and out of black.

Right – now go to your parent composition, drop the child comp in and create a new solid layer on top – call this “Tweak”

Turn off visibility for this layer and with the solid layer selected goto effects > Expression Controls > Slider Control. Press enter to rename the effect “Opacity” and press enter on the layer to call it “Tweak” (This is important as the expression needs these to be the same).

Your parent comp should now look a bit like this. We have everything in place now to get our expression working – our compositions are named, as are our layers and effect. Go back to the child composition…

Alt/Option click on the stopwatch next to the Opacity parameter on the black solid layer in the child composition – this will enable expressions for this parameter. By default this will be “transform.opacity” – we’re going to change that.

Change the expression to: comp(“Parent”).layer(“Tweak”).effect(“Opacity”)(“Slider”)

Once you have taken a few moments to look at this expression, let’s break it down: comp(“parent”) is telling AE which comp we want to find our control, as our parent comp is called “Parent” that is what goes between the brackets and speech marks. Next we have .layer(Tweak”) this is choosing the layer within the parent composition that we are taking out control from. Incase you’ve not already worked it out, the next part .effect(“Opacity”)(“Slider”) is telling AE to take the value of our slider to control the opacity of the black solid in the child comp.

Now back to the parent comp – you will notice that when you move the slider, the image fades in and out of black – congratulations – you’ve completed your very first multi-composition nested expression. Make yourself a cup of tea to celebrate!