A new issue for an old year, about old issues from older years. Don’t tell anyone, but the issue title font is wrong.
Next year, I’d like to start sending out a new serial that I’ve been dwelling on for a long time, and try to get over the idea that I’m bothering my subscribers by sending them the thing they signed up for. You could always become one of them, you know. Nothing drowns out the publishing guilt with not-publishing guilt like a new subscriber!
As Arthur C Clarke once said, sufficiently advanced manual labor is indistinguishable from AI. Or, something. Anyway the bosses asked me to use some generative AI, whip up a few dozen VFX shots. I gave it a try.
In the first round, it told me that I can’t use image editing features on anything that involves a human with a face. Okay, so let’s cover up the human and try again. Maybe we’ll get something we can matte into the original shot.
I mean, the mic stand is gone.
Pretty sure my job is secure for a little while longer.
I help strangers on the internet to make things in After Effects. Here are some quick sketches and experiments I’ve made along the way.
Two quick and general purpose tips:
1) There’s no shame in using multiple layers when you need them, and often no real benefit to breaking your back in order to minimize the amount of layers in a project.
2) You don’t have to make stuff you can’t see. Part of that is that you don’t need to rig up things that don’t move during the shot. The lines-and-nodes shot was very quick to make because no part of it responds dynamically to anything. There’s no reason why it should, unless that’s what your experiment is about.
