This Blog Is Retroactive

I was browsing through the pages of Nick Campbell’s blog, Greyscale Gorilla, the other day when I came across the iPhone app he created called ShakeItPhoto.  Basically, it takes your iPhone pictures and makes them look like a Polaroid photo.  As a fun little bonus, the app makes a Polaroid sound when you take or make the photo, and the more you shake your phone, the faster the image “develops”.  It was only 99¢ so I thought I’d give it a try.  I really like it.  I took some time to use it on a number of photos I already had on my phone, with some really satisfying results, shown above.  What is it about placing an image inside a white square border coupled with subtle vignetting that instantly makes a badly taken picture look better?  I don’t have the answer, but I like the result.  If you feel like sharing your iPhone Polaroids there’s also a Flickr group and a webpage called PhotoShakeDown.  Thanks Nick!

There are many things that I’m passionate about but visual stimuli, technology, and music are definitely on the short list.  So, when these three things get combined into a brilliantly engineered hand-held device like the Tenori-On, I can hardly contain myself.  What is the heck is a Tenori-On anyway? Is it like a Keepon? No, it’s not, but I do love those things.  The Tenori-On is a 16 x 16 LED button matrix performance instrument with a visual display that allows anyone (hey that’s me!) to play music intuitively.  They have a great website that will tell you all about it.  Check out this demonstration below.

I don’t have a Tenori-On.  I would very much like to have a Tenori-On but I don’t have $1000 to drop on one.  Not to worry, because I’ve found the next best thing.  It’s not as advanced, and it’s not hand held, but it is easy, and lots of fun, and free.  It’s a website with a 16 step sequencer called iNudge.  Now, everyone all over the internet is raving about Andre Michelle’s Tone Matrix, which is cool enough, but iNudge is better and I’ll tell you why.  iNudge has eight different sound layers, including drums and electric organ, and I can embed iNudge in my blog, or send a link of the song I’ve created to my friends.  I’ve spent the better part of my Saturday fiddling around with it and come up with some really entertaining and satisfying results.  Try it out for yourself.

As I said, I’ve been playing around with this thing all afternoon.  Below are a couple iNudges I came up with.  There are quite a few 16 step tone matrix sequencer apps on iTunes as well.  I used the free version of TonePad to compose one of these on my phone in about five minutes.  Then I went to iNudge and popped it in and added a drum beat for a little more depth.  Like I said, this first one was thrown together in a manner of minutes, and is kind of silly and whimsical sounding, but I really like it.  I think it’s a testament to these little tone matrix sequencers that it’s so easy to compose something catchy and melodic so quickly.

This next one sounds a little more dramatic. I was really trying to make it sound like something else, and it didn’t work, so I just decided to try a bunch of other stuff. I’m actually quite pleased with how it turned out. I originally composed it at 120 BPM, and then realized I could slow it down to 72, so I did.

So, if you haven’t already, go here and get your nudge on.  Paste the links to your nudges back in my comments.  I’d love to hear what you come up with!

Mardi Gras from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

I know in the last post I said UNIQLO’s website was the best use of tilt-shift I’ve seen to date but this video by Keith Loutit is a very close second.   What a brilliant way to capture all the fun and craziness of a Mardi Gras parade!  My friend Reed directed me to another of Keith’s Vimeo videos yesterday.   I saw this one there and I had to share it.  I know it’s seven months old but it’s new to me.  Thanks Reed!

The picture you see above may look like a tiny, scale model of a shipping company truck yard, but it’s not.  It is in actuality a photo of a real, life-size truck yard in Tokyo, Japan.  This photo was created using a technique called Tilt-Shift, first pioneered by Italian photographer, Olivo Barbieri.  Tilt-Shift, or more precisely, Tilt-Shift Miniature Faking, is a process that allows you to make a photo of a life-size location or object look like a photo of a miniature scale model by simulating the very shallow depth of field normally associated with macro focus.

Tilt is when the camera lens is tilted in relation to the image plane. The image plane is where the image is captured at the back of the camera with film or a digital sensor. The lens and the image plane are typically parallel. Tilting the lens will create a blurring effect at the top and bottom of the image, thus simulating a shallow depth of field.

Shift refers to the camera’s movement up or down in order to minimize the appearance of perspective. This is important in tilt shift photography because the less perspective you have the more your image will resemble a scale miniature. Perspective is only apparent with great distances, but with close ups of miniature scale models there’s virtually no perspective at all because the distance is so small.

The tilt-shift effect can be achieved with traditional photographic methods using a special camera lens, or with Photoshop using a gradient mask and the Lens Blur effect. Unless you’re a professional photographer I doubt you’ll want to invest the time or money it takes to create these images using traditional methods. I prefer using Photoshop fakery. The end result is just as good and I think it’s an approach that almost anyone can master. You just have to make sure and start with the right kind of image.

Below are a few I’ve created myself.

Photos taken from high above your subject work best.  In addition to using the Lens Blur filter, you’ll probably want to increase the color saturation and contrast, to simulate the bright paint often found on scale models.

Below you’ll see a tiny example of hands-down the best use of the tilt-shift effect I’ve seen anywhere.  I saw this on Pink Tentacle.  It’s an interactive online calendar for a clothing company called UNIQLO.  They’ve taken tilt-shift into the fourth dimension, using dozens of carefully crafted time lapse videos.  Click on the calendar to see the webpage full size.  Genius.

Tilt-shift is a relatively simple process that nonetheless results in images that are both delightful and fascinating. I think the reason I like it so much is that these images remind me of the beginning of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a show I wager many of us enjoyed as little kids.  You guys remember that don’t you, with the little trolley?

See some more great examples of tilt shift photos here and here, and here.

Go here for instructions on how to make your own!

Arch Viz, or Architectural Visualization, is a boutique industry within Architecture, or within Computer Animation, depending on which way you look at it. Either way, it’s an industry I was a part of for the last eight years, until this past January when I was laid off (again).  You might think this editorial is colored by my bitterness towards the field that rejected me, and you could be right.  However, the truth is I haven’t felt good about the direction Arch Viz has been heading for some time now, and it’s my honest opinion that this industry is on its last leg.

Let me just say, I mean absolutely no disrespect to any of my friends or colleagues still working in the viz biz.  I respect the work you do and appreciate, enjoy and value the renderings and animations you produce.   I’m just not sure anyone else does.

I think one of the main indicators of the demise of this industry is that the only company around that seems to be growing, or at the very least maintaining the status quo, is one that outsources all the real work to China.   I won’t name any names but they are, in my view, the Wal-Mart of Arch Viz.  Their modus operandi is to swoop in, with lots of money and resources, and do the work you used to do faster and cheaper, and frankly, better.  Rest assured, there’s nothing any small studios can do about it, except perhaps adopt their practices.  This is how the downward spiral begins.

I actually interviewed with this company.  They do employ some artists over here, just to put all the final touches on their renderings and movies.  They didn’t offer me a job, thank God, because I just might have been desperate enough to take it.   They expected me to work twice as much as my last job for two-thirds of what I used to be paid.  That’s what this industry has come to.  To stay in it, we’d all have to work for just as long and just as cheap as all those people they outsource to in Asia.

Another problem is that the architects and developers that hire Arch Viz artists don’t take them seriously or value their service as much as I think they should.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Macro-economists say that the market will always adjust accordingly and that the price something sells for is always the right price.  Perhaps that’s the problem.  The “right price” is not nearly enough to justify the amount of work that goes into it, and that doesn’t bother architects or developers in the slightest.

An architect I worked with once said to a group of us, “Let’s face it, 3D visualization is a skill, not a talent”.  I don’t even remember the context of it.  I didn’t take offense.  It’s actually true, and it’s also demonstrative of what architects think of those of us that do this.  We are tools, not artists. We’re not designing, we’re not creating.  He didn’t say that we weren’t talented.   He was just referring to the work we did, not what we are.

We should face it.   Arch Viz is not where we planned on ending up.  No one plans on doing that.  Unless you’re an architect that creates renderings and animations for your own projects, Arch Viz is probably something you just fell into.  We’re all just displaced artists from different backgrounds.  A couple of guys I worked with were fine art majors.  A couple others were architecture majors but they went right into visualization.  Another guy I know is a self taught motion graphics/video editing guru, and a couple more are like me, with a background in computer art and 3D modeling.  I would venture to guess that all of us would rather be drawing, or painting, or modeling characters for video games, or creating visuals for television or film, or designing a website in flash…almost anything besides going through the fourth round of an architect’s design revisions and fighting with weird rendering artifacts at 3:00 in the morning.  If what I’m describing sounds like nonsense to you, that’s probably because it is.

Back in the summer of 2007 I was in San Diego at an Arch Viz conference, and we met a guy who worked for the company that developed RPC (Rich Photorealistic Content), David Silvernell.  He had since started a new company that sells a variety of 3D resources.  He had some interesting insights into the industry and I found it hard to forget when he said to us, “Get out now.  There’s no future in Architectural Visualization for production artists or the studios that employ them, especially now that everyone’s started outsourcing to people in Asia”.  At the time, I thought it was a bunch of paranoid gibberish, but I was still rankled by it.  Mostly, I think, because deep down I feared it might be true.  Looking back and knowing what I know now, I’m surprised I was so incredulous.

Go here to see the Arch Viz work I used to do.

I also posted this article on the CG Architect forums, and I think it stimulated some really good back and forth discussion about the state of the industry.

Go here to read a 5-part series on the 3D Visualization industry by Andy Catterick that is way more thought out and informed than mine.  Kudos Andy!

LG, makers of chintzy, gimicky pieces of crap for years now have finally come up with a mobile device that I really, really want.  The geeky teenager that sleeps on the couch in my subconscious will always be a sucker for futuristic techno-gadgetry and the LG-GD910 is par for the course.  It’s a freaking two way wrist communicator, okay, with video phone capability.  It’s just like on Venture Bros! If I had this watch phone I could finally talk into my wrist without looking like a crazy person.   Also, if it has a calculator function, I could finally get rid of my Casio CA53W.   According to CNET all you have to do is live in the U.K. and pony up £500 (about $825) and you too could be the proud owner of the LG-GD9610 watch phone.  The future is here folks.  If this is any indication of what’s to come, flying cars, rocket boots and pizza re-hydrators should be just around the corner.  I’m going to start saving my pounds sterling today!

Until I have enough to buy one from LG, the watch phone I fabricated last night will just have to do.