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Author Topic: Your Website Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-03-2004 06:29 PM                        Joe - I think I was talking about the actual forums logo. I think you guys were probably just tweaking it this way and that and it finally wound up the way it is now. I don't know, I was probably full of vodka at the time.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 04-03-2004 07:17 PM                        I did that with Ray Dream Studio (yes Bobby, full version with a HUGE box and a GIANT manual. You should see the 4 GIANT manuals that Final Cut Pro alone comes with). But the thing is, I only remember doing one (the current one). So it was probably the vodka. Braden, where are your new graphics?  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-04-2004 01:49 PM                     Joe, I wouldn't doubt you having full versions of your apps. Anyone that can afford near five grand for a Canon XL-1s should be able to buy software legit. FCP comes with four big manuals? Wow. That's almost unheard of anymore these days. I'm getting used the anemic, thin litte manuals, such as that poor excuse of an express manual that comes with Macromedia Studio MX. I guess they want you to spend an extra $50 to $100 per app for after market manuals that really should ship in the box.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 04-04-2004 04:26 PM                        Yup! Check 'em out: Nowadays lots of programs come with PDF manuals instead and they expect you to print them out with your own 5,000 sheets of paper! Either that or view them on the computer screen (not tremendously practical).  |  IP: Logged Braden Mailloux Film Handler Posts: 19 From: Sonoma, CA, USA Registered: Feb 2004 posted 04-05-2004 12:57 AM                    Well. Teach me or something. I mean you can't expect me to get any better. And its harder than hell to pay for professional software when its so goddam expensive. Also, I have all of my work believe me, mainly because I know that I have no talent and I try not to follow all that trendwhore crap that is out there on the internet. Believe me when I say that I want to excel and get my degree in this field and this stuff I am doing know is only helping to expand my knowledge in the programs that I am trying to use such as Flash and Photoshop and I am trying to also learn illustrator and 3ds max although 3ds max follows the trendwhore path unless you know what you are doing, and I am tryin.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-05-2004 06:00 PM                     I'm not personally attacking you, Braden. But if you want to do professional work (get paid for it, and perhaps even get paid fairly or paid well for it) you should be expected to get better. [edit - wrote a bunch of stuff, but deleted it for the following] I have not seen your work. But I have my rather strong attitude about the state of art and design in America mainly because lots of people have got into the field and they are not really trying to do credible work. I see a lot of laziness happening. Much of this is the fault of the business world. They get what they pay for. Send the degreed professionals packing and hire some temps or interns instead. Here's one example. Consider signs and billboards. I like to gripe about things like "font murder." You don't have to drive far to see lots of cheap ass signs with Arial Bold squeezed all to hell, made to fit any given space. Lazy. Any sign company with a vinyl cutter has access to thousands of fonts through any number of applications they run. Instead of finding something appropriate, the $6 an hour vinyl dude just tortures Arial all to hell. A real designer with any modicum of talent would never do this. That's just one of hundreds of sins I see all the time. The nice thing about formal education, training, etc., is it makes you more demanding about your own work. You demand more of yourself. You tell yourself, "I'm not going to be like those other hacks out there; I will be proud of what I did and know I didn't just sluff off."  |  IP: Logged Brian Michael Weidemann Expert cat molester Posts: 944 From: Costa Mesa, CA United States Registered: Feb 2004 posted 04-05-2004 08:26 PM                        I read an article recently from a professional, old school typesetter about the state of "fonts" today. This was essentially his take as well, and I agreed with this sentiment completely. The art and craft is lost because computers make it easy and, consequently, quality diminishes. There's something called pride in one's work that can't be taught in the downloading-software approach. I see it prominently in a different industry, but it's the exact same phenomenon: music. These days, anyone who can work a pull-down menu can "create" music. Especially for "loop-based" applications with "randomize" features, there is no creative skill, craft, talent, or even brain-power required; and so, like anything that's not NEEDED, it gets left out more and more often. If I see one more "No music experience required! Anyone can make professional recordings ... EVEN YOU!" tag line (or derivation thereof) in a "professional" software application ad, I'm going to I wouldn't call myself a professional, but I take pride in laying down my own actual guitar performances and working with the recordings ... very few pull-down menus involved, and NO randomize features!  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-05-2004 09:29 PM                     Back when everything was produced analog, both music production and art production demanded a lot more discipline. Computers have removed much of that and allowed laziness to run wild. Adobe Postscript and Aldus PageMaker were the things that gave birth to "desktop publishing." Before that, you had to deal with actually planning out pages in advance, conceptualizing ideas before wasting hours going off in a direction that would turn out to be unproductive. You had to figure out what was going to work and then get out the rubber cement, Haberrule, X-acto blades, Rapidograph pens, ruling pens and more. You would spend long evenings in darkrooms, breathing in those chemicals to see what would come out of the Photostat camera. The process was slow and even hazardous, but the creative payoffs were better especially when all the advance planning paid off. There's still a good number of talented designers today toughing it out. And I would say most (if not all) do some strong brainstorming, doodling thumbnails and all sorts of other problem solving stuff before they ever start launching Illustrator and Photoshop. The idea and end result of visualizing that idea is all that matters. No one should give two shits about what computer programs were used in the processs of getting it created. Unfortunately, many of the business people buying commercial art these days have no clue about that fundamental truth. So they just keep reading app lists on resumes.  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 04-08-2004 09:18 AM                       I concur with everything Bobby said. I can imagine he feels the same way many of us did when the craft of projection was deprofessionalized. I remember feeling a great deal of resentment towards the people who waltzed in off the street, and into a job that I worked and studied long and hard to get. Bobby is also right that there are many people who simply cannot comprehend the relationship between pixels, resolution, and image size - yet they are in key positions. A "graphic artist" sent me some raster images to use in a trailer, and completely ignored the mechanical requirements I clearly outlined. When I told him the resolution of his images wasn't high enough, his solution was to send files that had been scaled past 100%! quote: Well. Teach me or something. It's not up to him to teach you. You're the one who said you could make graphics. Btw, I purely love Illustrator. Vector files should be the only consideration when designing logotypes and artwork. All my stuff begins there. A remastered animation drawing, using vector artwork (of course, rasterized here as a jpeg):  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 04-08-2004 11:07 AM                        Vector files can be pretty limiting for artwork, especially if the art has photographic elements. The drawing above definitely looks computerized to me. It lacks the natural flow of something that is hand drawn.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 04-08-2004 08:30 PM                     There are two tricks to making vector artwork look more natural. First, you really need to start with a good hand-drawn sketch. It is counter-productive to make "organic" looking artwork using a mouse. It's like drawing using a brick with a cord attached to it. Wacom tablets are nice, but even they are not all that great for creating drawings. There's just no substitute for getting out the pencils and paper and going to work. The old analog way is actually faster too. Second tip. Once you have a good source drawing to scan, you need to go about vector digitizing it in the right way. Often that means digitizing more paths/colors into the artwork. Line handling is important. If your source drawing has a lively variety of line thickness that will help. This is one reason why some artists actually create ink drawings using a paint brush. If your line work is all monotone (the same thickness all around) it will have that dreaded stale computer clip art look. You have to take more time to digitize paths accurately. That doesn't necessarily mean pigging the shape with 4000 control points (objects with too many points may be disregarded when printing, or it may fail to load in the drawing program). Just follow the source drawing closely. If you want the sketchy look, you have to follow it very closely. Scan it into the computer at a good resolution and then use something like Photoshop's pen tool to map out the paths with good accuracy.  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 04-08-2004 11:29 PM                       Actually, the drawing did start out as hand-drawn animation. It is highly magnified; the Indian maiden appears very small in the frame in the sequence, and she is in motion on ones. You can't have a lot of detail in things that appear small on the screen, or it has a tendency to run together. But, because it's vector artwork, it can be magnified thusly. The clean, uniform look is intentional. [ 04-29-2004, 10:32 AM: Message edited by: Tim Reed ]  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 04-09-2004 02:18 AM                       quote: I did that with Ray Dream Studio Btw, Joe... have you been able to get RDS to run in XP? The menus blank out on mine.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 04-09-2004 03:31 AM                        No I've only ever used it on the Mac. I have version 5, and it is even dual processor aware! I can't believe it is, being that it is ooooollllllddddd!  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 04-09-2004 07:39 AM                       I did that intermittent movement animation in RDS, and I wanted to re-render it at a higher resolution some time ago for some reason or another. Oh, the program "works" okay, I guess, as long as I don't have to do anything or click on menus! Guess I'm going to have to take the time to learn 3D Studio Max or Maya. Just not enough time anymore. The outfit that took over RDS has a new 3D program that's supposed to be a lot like the old Ray Dream, but I haven't heard much about it in the groups, so I'm leery of investing in it. Btw, I know what you're saying about having photographic elements in artwork. I'm doing cartoons and such, and I do use Photoshop for backgrounds, but for "inking and painting" digital animation cels, you just can't get those sharp lines like you can in vector form. Flash actually works best for this. Its autotrace is much better for converting animation drawings, and the timeline features are setup for cel timing, but I haven't been able to change over to it yet. Lastly, I completely disagree with you. I think she flows just fine. And, one of these days, I'll finish it.  |  IP: Logged

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