Ninja January 21st, 2009

In one week, I got emails from 3 brides-to-be, 2 bands, and 1 curious student all asking:

Q. How did you create the swirls in your First Kiss Illustration?

First Kiss

A. I drew all the paths using Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool—no fancy shortcuts. This was before I discovered the handy swirl tool. I would endlessly tweak and make many trips to my local Kinkos for large-format prints.

Now, I wouldn’t leave you hanging. Here’s my tutorial on making swirls and curls in Adobe Illustrator. It does require basic knowledge of the pen tool. If you’re not familiar with the pen tool, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has a great pdf guide and practice exercises here.

And for the truly pressed, I’ve included links to free vector swirls and curls at the end of this post. Now, on with the tutorial.

Step 1—Draw a spiral

Click and hold down the mouse on the Line tool to reveal the other tools. Select the Spiral tool.

Click and drag outward. If you’re a bit of a control enthusiast, you can also click on your art board, and a Spiral Options window will appear. Here, you can enter the spiral radius, decay, spiral segments, and spiral direction. I’m using the default 80% of decay, 10 segments option.

Using the Direct Select tool (white arrow), you can choose points and drag them outward to alter the spiral’s decay. Or as mentioned above, you can change the decay in the Spiral Options window.

Set the stroke weight to 10 pts.

Step 2—Covert to outline and modify shape

Object > Path > Outline Stroke

I like to work in outline mode, so I can see stray points more easily and then delete them. To access Illustrator’s outline mode, hit ⌘ + y. If you’re on a PC, substitute the ⌘ symbol for the Ctrl key. To exit outline mode, hit the same key combination again.

Once in outline mode, use the Direct Select tool to choose points and drag them to alter the line weight of your swirl.

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Tags: Adobe Illustrator, Curls, Downloads, First Kiss, Free, Illustration, Pen, Swirls, Tutorials, Vector

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Ninja January 8th, 2009

Arms is a project I started in 2004 after a year-and-a-half-long bout of pretty awful writer’s block… And once I started writing again, finally, I guess I’d absorbed a good bit of what they’d all taught me about mood, atmosphere, emotion. Slowness in music, literal and figurative.
– Todd Goldstein

Photo via rcrdlbl

Arms is the lo-fi, solo project from indie-rock Harlem Shakes guitarist/half of folk duo, The Sea & The Gulls, Todd Goldstein. Recorded in his bedroom, Goldstein played all the parts and then layered them to form the absolutely charming, romantic album, Kids Aflame. Uber-catchy tracks, Whirring and Shitty Little Disco, are easily my favorites from Kids Aflame.

You can download them here:
+ Whirring
+ Shitty Little Disco

Enjoy,
Ninja

Related links
+ Find tour dates and more information on Arms’ website
+ For more tunes, visit Arms’ myspace

Purchasing link
+ Kids Aflame

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Tags: Arms, Brooklyn, Downloads, Folk, Free, Harlem Shakes, Indie, Kids Aflame, Lo-fi, mp3s, New York, Shitty Little Disco, Solo, The Sea & The Gulls, Todd Goldstein, Whirring

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Ninja December 8th, 2008

Remember Cindy Lauper’s song, Good Enough, from The Goonies?

Well, Canadian indiefolkers, The Acorn have a great cover of it, and it’s been stuck in my head all weekend. You can downlaod it here. Enjoy!

Happy Monday,
Ninja

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Tags: Cindy Lauper, Downlaods, Free, mp3s, The Acorn, The Goonies

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Ninja September 25th, 2008

This Saturday, September 27, is Museum Day (here in the United Sates). This event is sponsored by Smithsonian Magazine and offers free admission to participating local museums.

NY participants include:
+ American Folk Art Museum
+ Museum at FIT
+ Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
+ Edward Hopper House Art Center
+ Society of Illustrators
+ The Center for Book Arts
+ The Drawing Center

You can find additional venues here and print your free admission card here.

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Tags: American Folk Art Museum, Cooper-Hewitt, Edward Hopper House Art Center, Exhibitions, Free, Museum at FIT, Museum Day, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Magazine, Society of Illustrators, The Center for Book Arts, The Drawing Center

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Penguin September 15th, 2008

Dropbox is a free file sharing/syncing application. If you do a lot of commuting on the go, but have a desktop as your main machine, this app is for you.

Dropbox is an app that runs in your system try. It looks at a folder on whatever machine you’re on and if there are changes to the files or the filesystem, it will update all your other machines seamlessly in the background. It’s an amazing piece of software that “just works”.

Another cool thing, is the files are accessible from any machine via the web.

The only down side, is it only offers 2 GB of space. For most people, that won’t be an issue.

Download Dropbox for free.

-Penguin

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Penguin August 29th, 2008

People are starting to realize that, when it comes to distribution, the internet changes the game.

“If you’re a business whose content is easily distributed and stolen digitally, you have to figure out ways to engage your [audience] on a deeper level — figure out how to get them to your site, offer them extras on a DVD, or benefits that are only available through purchase,” says Aaron Dignan, founding partner of Undercurrent, a new media consultancy.

- Wired

I’ve talked about how the game changes when distribution is free.

If you’re going to distribute, I would say host torrents. Most of the major sites (aside from Google Video) have caps on length or file size which makes viewing kind of tough. Watching a few minutes is not a big deal, but 1.5-2 hours, I want to kind of sit back. This is not to say you shouldn’t split it up and put it out there though.

If you want to monetize the net, you need to look at something like Dr. Horrible by Joss Whedon. He didn’t take TV and cram it into the internet. He looked at internet and came up with something that fit the medium. If TV barely fits online, film will be even harder.

Whedon invested about $300k and after an initial free run on the internet, charged for it on iTunes. The free buzz that was generated piqued people’s interest. Even now, you can still find it oh Hulu.

The lesson to be learned here is that he fit the product to the medium. But what’s important, is that Whedon controls and owns all the intellectual property rights. And that’s worth a whole lot. He make soundtrack CDs, a DVD sequels, or just continue to expand the storyline. He can do whatever he wants with it.

I can already here you say, “But it’s Joss Whedon! He already has a legion of rabid fans!” Fair enough. Let’s talk about Head Trauma.

Lance Weiler took Head Trauma his film and built events around them. He had the film scored live during the showing. He had the actors engage the audience. And a whole bunch of other crazy game type stuff.

Does it take a lot of work? Was it a huge gamble? Heck yeah. But he took the existing technologies and leveraged them to make some money.

Then there’s the traditional film festival route. But even that’s drying up. At Toronto, there’s reports that Steven Soderbergh had trouble moving Che with Benicio Del Toro in the titular role. And he’s not the only one.

“Filmmakers have to take a lot more ownership of their projects,” said Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity firm 42West, which represents more than a dozen films showing at Toronto. She spoke of a growing need for even the most established filmmakers to baby their works through a festival apparatus that can keep a film alive when commercial distribution is slow to materialize.

- NYTimes

The game is changing and the good news is everyone’s trying to figure out the new rules as we go along. The key is to keep pressing on and taking those risks.

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Tags: Benicio Del Toro, Business, Che, Distribution, Dr Horrible, Filmmaking, Free, Head Trauma, Joss Whedon, Lance Weiler, NYT, Steven Soderbergh, Wired

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Penguin June 26th, 2008

From Wired: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web:

[Android] is the re-creation of the Internet.
- Eric Schmidt

The internet is huge, powerful, awesome, useful; it’s been a boon for all content creators: filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers. Imagine where it would be if we understood this internet thing early on? The internet is still growing, it hasn’t even really come into it’s own yet. But as we try to capitalize on the internet, specifically through PCs, are we missing out on something bigger?

The mobile market is growing, adding 3 million users a year. When you leave your home, you bring 3 things: keys, wallet, cellphone. The iPhone, Blackberry, and other smart phones have made it so you can carry the internet with you. By extension, phones will eventually eclipse PCs in usage. I’m not saying they’ll replace PCs, but there are millions of people in the 3rd world who can’t afford a PC, but have a phone.

David Lynch said that as the screen size reduces, so does the experience. When I watch Youtube or any other online video, I have very little patience for the short or video to hook me. If there’s nothing compelling in the first 30-60 seconds, I move on. Cell phones are even smaller, so the attention span will be even faster. The fact that it’s mobile also changes the way things are utilized.

I love my Nintendo DS. I use it more than my Playstation 2. But the only game that I really play is Tetris. Tetris is a great game because each time I play is localized. There’s no ending, so I can stop playing at any time. I don’t have to worry about a story or where I need to go or do after a week or two of inactivity. I don’t have to worry about saving, so I can play while I wait for people and just close it when they come.

The mobile market will teach us new things about filmmaking. Video will be there, but we may not be able to tell the same sort of stories or tell them in the same way. But we can’t miss this opportunity.

Newspapers are dead. Magazines are dead. DVDs and CDs are dead. All have been replaced by the internet. And when information is free, we need to figure out another way to make money.

Google’s model is to build a killer app, then monetize it later
- Andy Rubin

Our killer app is our content. With so many content producers out there, it’s increasingly harder and harder to differentiate our product (our films) from the noise. It’s not just the stories that we tell, but how we tell them. When I’m browsing videos, I can instantly tell by the editing, titles, shot composition, or even color-correction if the video will be any good. As important as the story is, the presentation of that story has to be just as good, if not better. This requires resources in the form of money and talent. These are either financed, or we get that little break to begin to monetize our content.

How do we monetize content? I wish I knew. The MPAA doesn’t know, that’s why they’re holding on to DVD. The TV studios are starting to understand with things like Hulu, but the ad placeholders are annoying enough to force me back to bit torrent. My gut says the solution is to take it offline.

• Connect with your audience and provide them with an experience they can’t get online. It would be an extension of your film, bringing characters to real life or bringing set pieces for the audience to participate in.
• Make the DVD special, include things that can’t be copied for free.
• Other merchandise that ties into your film. Sometimes it’s t-shirts, sometimes it’s something else.

As indie filmmakers, we need to be pioneers. We need to understand where technology is bringing us and learn from what business and other content creators are doing with it. Yes we’ll make mistakes, but we make plenty already with our films.

-Penguin

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Tags: Android, Business, David Lynch, Distribution, Filmmaking, Free, Google, Internet, Mobile, NDS, Phones, Technology, TV, Wired

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Penguin June 4th, 2008

Rating: 1.5/4 stars

Egon & Donci is a free for download CG animated movie. It’s about a an amateur astronomer, Egon and his pet cat, who discover a “map” to Earth.

The animation is pretty good. There are some nice shots and good use of the medium. The scenes in space are beautiful, full of color and atmosphere. Unfortunately, that’s really all that’s good about it.

There are so many times where the film feels like a really long tech demo. The camera flies around a little too much. The plot is mainly just a vehicle to show off the environments and animation. It takes too long to start and by the time any tension or drama comes in, you’re kind of bored.

To download it for free, you have to sit through a short ad before the link is served.

One thing I really have to give to the filmmakers is their willingness to put almost everything online for download. I haven’t had a chance to go through it, but they made all the sound effects they used in the film online. There are also texture maps and cloud sequences.

-Penguin

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Tags: 1.5 stars, Animation, CG, Downloads, Free

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Penguin May 14th, 2008

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to organizing digital pictures, it’s just what I do.

I have a Perl script that copies all the pictures from my compact flash to my HDD. Why a Perl script? Because my Canon XT splits up the pictures into different folders in sets of 100. When you have a 4 GB CF card, that’s a lot of folders to look through. The script looks in each folder and each file and sorts them by date. It creates a folder on the HDD for each day in the format YYYYMMDD.

Once the card is dumped to my HDD, I go through and rotate all the pictures by opening the folder in thumbnail view. This gives me a good idea of what I shot on that day and if they need to be subcategorized. Example: If a shot a park, then my friend dancing, then a waterfall, each of those would get their own folders. These folders are prefixed by the date and then a letter and then the subject of the pictures.

Over the years, I’ve taken about 50 GB worth of pictures. Archiving them becomes an issue. How do I retrieve the pictures from the 50 or so CDs (now I’ve moved to DVDs)? I physically metatagged each CD with the date and the folder structure. I then put this same information into a spread sheet and numbered each disc, essentially creating an index.

Why not use software? Because most software creates its own database of the pictures. I’m also not looking to tag each individual picture. This solution also makes backing up things a lot easier because it’s application independent.

You can download my simple script. ***Note: You have to have Perl installed on your machine.
Download the Perl script

-Penguin

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Tags: Archiving, Downloads, Free, Guides, Metadata, Organizing, Perl, Photography

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Penguin May 12th, 2008

Wired has an article on AudioTool:

This free online electronic music studio lets you compose with two TB-303 Bass Line generators, Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and two banks of effects pedals including three delays, crusher, detune, flanger, reverb, a parametric equalizer and a compressor. By clicking the mouse button, you can drag virtual cables between any output and any input to customize the setup.

If you’ve ever wanted to create beats for the next great track or poop pop song, here’s your chance. You have basically everything you need to start making phat tracks with none of the investment.

Check it out.

-Penguin

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