Digital Motion dot net

I’ve been thinking of the jumpy text thing that everyone was doing for a while. So, a few minutes with the wiggler and some animation presets later and…

After Effects Portal: Tutorials

Nice collection of links to After Effects tutorials on-line.

As you can tell by the headers of pretty much any website I do (including this one). I am obsessed with the skies in Seattle. When we aren’t completely clouded over, we have some amazingly beautiful and interesting skies. For the last few years, I’ve been taking lotsa pictures of them. At some point I’ll put up a gallery as soon as I can get over the fact that people will be able to steal all my pictures (not quite completely bought into that part of web 2.0 yet) or I can get the gallery watermarking stuff to work.

Anyway, John Nack on Adobe, is an awesome blog. He is the product manager for Photoshop and is one of the more interesting and productive Adobe bloggers (way better than me). He had a post recently on Atmospheric photography with links to some stuff that I really dug, so I’m reposting them here:

Photoastronomique.net: Some really amazing photos here of stars, the moon, and deeply interesting skies. With some animations as well. It is both in French and English. (also, nice modifications of the gallery templates).

Amunndn’s Photostream on flicker: Some really atmospheric (in the emotional sense) stuff. You look at them and assume they must be heavily photoshopped, but when you really look at them, you can see that he might be using a filter here and there, but they are real pics.

A collection of photos of some truly strange (and some truly beautiful) clouds.

Nicole Bengiveno created a set of photos called the “Essence of Atmosphere” for the New York Times. These are more atmospheric in the emotional sense, but they do an excellent job of conveying a mood in a very direct way.

BlueSuburbia by Nathalie Lawhead

a lovely little interactive flash-art site. Some parts are more effective than others, but it is a very imaginative and appropriate use of Flash here. Definitely an inspiration.

[via jamesisgames]

Good sites for creative professionals

This is a nice list of creative pro blogs put together by James Dempsey over at Macworld.

courtesy of John Nack

Type is a critical part of digital media, and it is important for motion designers to have an understanding, here’s some links to check out:

The Type For You Blog
15 tips to choose a good text type
Pinups done with type

Amie Street

These guys are doing something really smart. All songs are free to start with, and increase in price as they increase in popularity. This is insanely smart for musicians and for music fans. It makes trying out a new band nearly painless. It is also DRM-free, which I have to admit I like as a music fan (but am a bit more dubious about as a content creator).

If these guys can get some traction, this would be a great site for new bands to build an audience. My one complaint is that actually finding music on the site wasn’t as easy as I’d like it to be. I had to search for a band before I could find charts, but even then, I wouldn’t mind some sort of flat list of bands by genre or something so that I could really explore. That is a major nit for this kind of site, but is easily fixed.

One other thing I like about these guys from their for-artists page:
# Amie Street takes no ownership of your music, nor do we ask that you sell exclusively on Amie Street. There is no digital rights management software (DRM) on Amie Street.
# Amie Street does not charge a monthly fee or a sign up fee.

Something that is very cool about all these new web 2.0 music sites is that they are blazing the trail for the indie film sites of tomorrow. Pandora or last.fm could just as easily be customized video channels. Amie Street could sell video downloads just as simply…

Courtesy of TechCrunch

At this point, you’ve probably heard about Neave.tv, which is a nice experiment with a flash-based TV channel. Mostly, I like the transitions between the videos. I hadn’t bothered to surf over to his main site before, there are some great (even better than neave.tv) flash projects that he’s done. Worth looking at for Flash inspiration.

Neave.com …the website version of Paul Neave

Want to learn about remixing, but don’t want to make the investment in software or hardware? Splice is a nice combo between social network and an online flash-based remixing tool. A great way to get started and get advice and support as well.