For the last four years, I’ve been having a pumpkin carving barbecue (appropriately called the “carv-a-que”) at my place in Hoboken. Last year we created a time lapse video of the party. This year we had about 30 carvers and decided to reprise the recording. Below is the result.
A while ago, I posted the link to The Vendor-Client Relationship, in Real-world Situations. It raised a bit of awareness to the hypocrisy of the design industry, where clients and contractors over-expect liberties from creatives. I firmly believe this is inherently an industry problem, not one that plagues specific people or firms. Read more
Google Plus has been auto-awesoming photos for a while, meaning that they’ve stitched together images with similar composition into animated gifs. See my cover photo with Banksy, for example.
Well I was excited to see that they also auto-awesomed some photos from my 2013 to create this cute little video. Log-in to your Google Plus to see your version of 2013, auto-awesomed.
Featured in this video are (in order of appearance): Me, Sara Higgins, Tara Fournier, Tim Jones, Drew Higgins, Jim Higgins, Lorie Higgins, My fourth grade class at Langtree Elementary School, Aidan Dunfey, Sarah Greer-Pennington, Greg Rogers, Alicia Samfilippo, Audra Fournier, Dennis Duffy (Dean Winters), Simona Rodano, Luigi Rosa, Mike Citarella, Angie Melvin, Sarah Roddis-Martin, Jacqué Citarella, Giammario Piumatti, Francesco Piumatti, Lauren Citarella, Steve Farjam, Sue Fleming Citarella, Jeff Arcara, Agnetta Citarella, Allie Citarella, Jules Feiffer, Frank DeGrazia, Katie Bacus, Thompson, and Ian Warner.
New York City, summer of 1939: Lou Gehrig announced his retirement from the Yankees, the city hosted its first World’s Fair and, as always, it was really, really hot outside.
Recolored by Romano Archives
After just having returned from a month researching my family in Italy (we were able to trace our family back to 1200 when previously we couldn’t get past 1860), I noticed the prevalence of the green man over The States’ preference for the red word “Exit”. But I also saw a number of signs that I felt were funny. Here’s one for the “waiting area” of an airport. In a place where iconography is especially important due to so many international speakers around, I initially thought this was a sign for the bathroom.
While working on a new project for ERA404, I received a great tip from Zeh, my Flash Obi Wan whom you’ve no doubt read me gushing about in the past. The site (which will be launched at the top of 2010) is centered around a video loop. The loop began as a 208MB raw Quicktime video clip shot by one of ERA404’s video directors/editors, Greg Stadnik (you may remember his work from our Beautiful Children viral video that was featured in Gawker and AdRants last year). The clip was then scaled in 1/2, compressed using the On2 VP6 codec, imported into flash and then manipulated manually. The final SWF was 3.12MB, but the quality suffered terribly.
This is when Zeh clued me in to video smoothing. It’s the same principle as bitmap smoothing, since embedded video clips are technically just an image sequence. The result was night and day. The left half of the below screenshot shows video smoothing set to true, where the right shows smoothing set to false.
Figure 1. Video Smoothing – Click image for larger/detailed version
Note that this is just the beginning of this site with the radial gradient and scanlines stripped away to accentuate the smoothing detail. Overall, it’s an easy way to preserve quality without increasing loadtime, memory or processor demand. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was by the result.