Seasons Greetings, Vriends!

Wow--I can't believe we are only less than a week away from Christmas. I have been working so many hours and so hard on this video for EMC, that I have barely had time to lift my head up and away from the computer screen. And now I only have a few days before Christmas, and I still have some things for Mary that I need to order! It looks like I will have to shell out for the express deliveries...

One of the most interesting things I have done in the last few days, was learning about the state-of-the-art in algorithmic painting. I was approached by a producer with whom I just finished a project with, and he said he had a potential client who was interested in having some rotoscoping work done. This is a technique that has been around for many years (in one form or another) that involves drawing on top of the frames of a piece of video footage or animation. It has recently been featured in a couple of films: "The Scanner Darkly" and "Waking Life." Also about a year ago it showed up in some interview-type commercials for Charles Schwab.

So I had to do some research so that I could put some budget estimates together, and hopefully it will all result in a new contract for the start of the year. (Fingers crossed, because I really enjoy doing roto work.) But as part of the research, I needed to see if there were any ways to impart an artistic style onto a given frame of a video, to make it look more like a piece of artwork. For years Photoshop has had some filters known as the "artistic series," but the results were always rather bad. However, I have found out that there has been a lot of exciting work done in this area!

This led me to look at a number of different apps and web sites, but the one that stands out in my mind is called Dreamscope. It has over a hundred filters that you can apply to a photograph that you upload to their site. The filters range from simple effects to actually emulating the styles of given artists--or even particular paintings. Some results are better than others, but some are simply amazing. I did a test case where I took a quick selfie with my webcam, and then ran that photo through dozens of different filters. Some of the images blew my mind--they looked so good! Some are so amazing I have been considering having them printed out and framed to use as self-portraits!

But aside from that, and freaking out about Christmas, there is not much else to tell here. So with that, I will bid you all a very Merry Christmas, and we'll talk to you in a week!

Cheers, VacaDude

p.s. Oh, and I wanted to explain a bit about the holiday card design I put on Zazzle. I had tried to access my old account with CafePress, but I am finding that many things have changed there. In short, I could not even figure out how to design something and make it available for sale! The process used to be so good there. What it seems like is that they took a lot of the controls out of the design process, perhaps to make it simpler for the non-designers. What it means is that for those of us who HAVE designed there in the past, the new stripped-down design controls means that you cannot totally get the products to show up the way you designed them to.

So basically, I gave up and tried setting something up on Zazzle (a site I had heard good things about). However, I never really seem to have gotten that to work 100% either, so I'm just not sure how successful this is going to go. But in the event you are interested in seeing the greeting card design I came up with, the link is here: VacaDude