Continuing Education

Friday, 10 April 2009

I spend most of my day mashing out code and doing mid-level geek work, but I've always had aspirations toward the more artistic side of technology.  In my first job out of college, at an interactive marketing firm here in Columbus, I regularly tried to pick up any low-level design work that needed to be done. After several years of attempting to be a web-developer-slash-web-designer, I realized that I just don't have that level of design creativity in me and decided to leave it to the design experts (I'm looking at you guys, Harsh and Leimgruber).  When I left that firm toward the end of the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, I dabbled a bit in creative writing and even applied to a graduate program at Northwestern University's writing program.  I eventually found that while writing was a great way to process through my thoughts, I don't really have the patience for "capital-W" Writing.

Over the past couple of months, I've been working more and more with video. While it's definitely an art-form, it has enough of a technical component that I feel like I have better control of it than I do with pure design or writing.  Especially when you're using professional-level software such as After Effects, you get knee-deep in math and numbers, while producing something that affects the senses and communicates a message in a more sensory way.  I just wrapped up my third-ever video project -- a video recap of our 2009 RBI Baseball Tournament -- and I thought I'd post it here.  I didn't have any high quality video footage to work with -- everything was shot with either a very low quality Flip camera of the video functionality of our Canon point-and-shoot camera -- but I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

What I learned during these projects: Manipulating layer effects (opacity, rotation, position, scale), basic 3D layer adjustments, applying video filters, and basic video stabilization features in After Effects. I've learned a ton about the software over the past couple of months working on this project as well as the "How DID B-House Kill Dave Smith?" project. I'm nowhere near the level of friend and colleague Isaac Reese yet, but he's been a big help getting me up to speed on the software. 

Speaking which, head over to the Institute for Justice's YouTube channel and take a look at Isaac's work -- especially the San Tan Flat video. First rate.

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