The Backend
Let’s revisit another cringe-worthy video project back from my SAE days about a fictional product: Adobe Catering .
(Bunch of copyright infringements may apply)
Wow! I totally forgot I still had the storyboards! Here we go:
Trivium: The characters’ names are Torben and Bruno… 😂
Good old times!
Inspired by Adobe Photoshop’s new generative AI capabilities, I gave my SAE thesis project back from 2007 the «Special Edition» treatment and made some minor changes I wasn’t able do the first time around when I was attending the digital film and animation school.
Especially one scene at the end never was as bombastic as I’d planned it to be. After some upscaling and with the help of some generative AI-magic the frame was extended and new details were added.
For dramatic effect I tried to generate some smoke-simulation in Blender but I was quickly reminded of the fact that one doesn’t just start up a 3D-software after years of absence without browsing through a handful of tutorials.
After hours of struggling and rendering, the first results were less than underwhelming and I went the old-school FX way of simulating smoke: Capturing footage of some milk dripped in water did the job just fine. When I cropped, enhanced and flipped some of the footage I had taken inside my kitchen cupboard earlier, there was no going back to Blender – for now.
It’s been 16 years since the original version of Aurora – a fictitious trailer, my very own homage to high concept disaster movies à la Independence Day but it hasn’t lost an ounce of its soul, enthusiasm and – admittedly – cringiness:
I give you: Aurora – Special Edition:
Maybe the next version will finally get its own soundtrack without all the copyright issues…
In the meantime, here’s the original version and some bonus content:
Not only Arnie is back these days… It’s that very special time of the year:
This content is not sponsored. (I wish…)
If you ever tried to build an HTML5 video player from scratch, you might encounter the following problem:
The «oncanplay» event doesn’t fire (the video readystate remains 2 instead of 4 («HAVE_ENOUGH_DATA»). In my case, Firefox 43.0.4 just woudn’t work.
After hours and hours of frustration I’ve found the rather simple cause of this behavior:
The video’s readystate 4 had been reached even before the eventlisteners where added to the video-object (probably because the video was already cached in the browser in some way or another). When the listeners finally where added, it was too late because the readystate had already jumped back to 2.
The solution is even more simpler: Set the video’s «autoplay» property to «false»:
The readystate will stay where you want it to be (4) and not jump back to 2… Everybody’s happy:)
(The picture above doesn’t show the «source« tag because I added it later by javascript. And there’s an end tag missing, of course).
My second attempt at a time-laps video. Rammstein and others at «Allmend Rockt»
Slightly better than the first one, but this time the exposure was off …Still learning. But Rammstein must’ve been delivering a great concert as far as I could tell from where I was standing. (And iMovie managed to suck even more balls than yesterday.)
Disclaimer: I just replaced the first video with a second, hopefully better version, with less picture brightening, the original aspect ratio, different sound and in 4k resolution.
How the new Header Pic was made:
Another «gem» back from 2004: Based on some cel animation exercises in art school: «Dust’n’Air»
10 years ago, I produced one of my first (stupid) videos (with lots of copyrighted material). Wouldn’t be the last.
I give you: «March of the Penguins II»
Enjoy!
Fun fact (which makes this badly aged clip somewhat interesting): As I later found out, this video may have been intended to be pure nonsense, but there is (was?) a thriving penguin population on the Falkland Islands because «penguins aren’t heavy enough to set off the mines [back from the Falkland Islands War], but because sheep and humans are, the little guys have the minefields all to themselves» (Source)
And here some screenshots because of the copyright blockage:
While you’re here, check out my SPECTRE «review» and the Daniel Craig supporter site back from 2006: craigisbond.rafeman.com