A post-mortem on the PewDiePie fiasco. The always-on, always-producing YouTuber culture sounds exhausting.
Posted March 17, 2017
Blog
The three reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber
entr(1)
A lightweight Unix CLI for automating tasks. Intended primarily for test automation but probably a useful replacement for the Linux-exclusive inotifywait. (Via)
Posted March 16, 2017
HTML5 Up
Tons of free and paid HTML 5 templates to use and dissect.
Posted March 15, 2017
Disabling auto-playing video on OS X
Hinges (a webcomic)
Meredith McClaren's charming adventure story about a city of clockwork people concluded in February. (I burned through it in one sitting.)
Posted March 14, 2017
New video for Explone, King Of The Mist
Speaking of video compositing, I never posted the latest video I did with Explone, for our song "King of the Mist" from Suicide Fences. I used some of the same techniques (simplified, since I'm very much a novice) to place us in a spooky forest, conjuring spirits with our music by firelight.
Come walk into the nighttime woods with us…
In a future post (or posts) I'll explain how we made some of the effects for this video. And buy Suicide Fences on vinyl here.
Posted March 13, 2017
VFX Games - The Art of Compositing
Unbelievably cool video demonstrating video compositing techniques.
VFX Games - The Art of Compositing from Roy Peker on Vimeo.
Posted March 13, 2017
How to implement scrollytelling with six different libraries
Two things: 1) "Scrollytelling?" Really? 2) the library I used to create the motion-comic effects in Red Moon is called Skrollr and is no longer being maintained, so these are some cool-looking alternatives. I'd love to build a motion-comic toolkit on top of one of these. I'd love to do a lot of things.
Posted March 10, 2017
How 'King Kong' Movies Changed VFX History, Over and Over Again
Embedded in this short overview of the influence of the original King Kong is this amazing clip detailing some of the effects that Willis O'Brien had to invent to bring Skull Island to life. The clip where O'Brien combines dioramas, matte paintings, rear-screen projections, real-time smoke, water effects and stop motion into one shot is nearly miraculous given the time. I wish I knew the source of this clip because I really wanna watch the whole thing.
Thing I learned: King Kong failed to win an Academy Award for visual effects -- because the category didn't exist until 1938.
I can't wait to see the new Kong movie even though I totally expect it to be super-dumb!
Posted March 9, 2017
In Defense of the Most Worthless, Helpless Creature on the Planet
A funny treatise on the ocean sunfish, one of nature's weirder experiments. I laughed.
Posted March 8, 2017