Clay's Blog » Flash and Flex

Speed, Flash, and Traffic: SIGGRAPH 2008 Wrap-Up

Clay McGovern — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:46:02 +0000

Well, another SIGGRAPH is history. It’s been a terrific creative battery recharge. Thursday and Friday highlights include a really cool Production Session on how the various visual effects companies that made Speed Racer went about replicating the look and feel of anime in a live action motion picture, a very entertaining and interesting overview on the use of Adobe Flash for animation, and an absolutely fascinating class on transportation visualization.

I generally try to go to one or two of the large Production Sessions, where panels that worked on digital effects for Hollywood productions give a behind the scenes look at the technology and techniques that are used to make the latest year’s movies. The technical papers given at SIGGRAPH are directly implemented in these production pipelines with astonishing speed, so this year’s special effect was often last year’s technical paper at SIGGRAPH. This year I attended the session on Speed Racer, which I haven’t yet seen, and, as the panel joked, nearly nobody else in the room had either. The presentation was very interesting, and it was, in fact, one of the only sessions of this type that I walked away from with the thought I might be able to implement something from the presentation myself. There were two cinematic effects in particular that were used in the film that helped to give the movie a more anime-like feel. The production team used QuickTimeVR to create spherical camera movement effects and they used diagonally shifting composited backgrounds with a foreground chroma-keyed subject. Both of these effects worked with the kind of “unrealistic” camera perspectives which give anime productions their essential feel. I’m going to try to implement them the next time I work on editing my example piece for our Digital Storytelling project.

On Thursday I attended a Computer Animation Festival Talk called “Flash Forward: A forum on Flash’s Increasingly Vital Role in Games, Online Entertainment, Art and Academia.” There was a great panel for the talk that included Evan Spiridellis, one of the co-founders of JibJab and Cartoon Network’s Greg Araya who has worked extensively on “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.” It was a nice mix of demonstrations of great character animation, web interfaces, and entertainment, as well as an interesting peek into the Flash animation pipeline for major productions. It was really kind of pitiful, though, that nobody from Adobe was anywhere to be found either in the session or on the Exhibition floor.

And finally, on Friday, I attended an extremely interesting class on Transportation Visualization. The instructors for the class were Theresa-Marie Rhyne from North Carolina State University, Michael Manore of AEC Visualization, and Ronald Hughes from North Carolina State University. All three are members of the Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Visualization in Transportation. The instructors were very interested in starting a collaborative dialog with graphics professionals and to express the need for assistance from the SIGGRAPH community. Visualizations have taken the form of 3D models and fly-throughs for construction projects, abstract data visualizations using real-time graphics, and others. The class focused on a series of examples provided by the instructors. As an introduction to the current needs in transportation visualization, the class was very successful. There was a great discussion during the Q&A with a researcher at Carnegie-Mellon who was interested in developing Augmented Reality applications and asked about RFID tagging and available sensor data in current construction and transportation projects. I’ve been interested in data visualization in general for some time, but I will be working on a project next summer with Professor Paul Barron in the Law School (and current Tulane CIO) during which we will be working with approximately 5 years of peer evaluation data from his Negotiation and Mediation Advocacy course. I’m working on implementing Flash/Flex charting and learning Processing (an open source programming language aimed at visual designers). I’m looking forward to having a good time playing around with ways to visualize the data.

Tag Galaxy 3D Flickr Visualization

Clay McGovern — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:49:22 +0000

Just heard about a really cool flickr visualization called Tag Galaxy (Thanks, Mike!). When you visit the site you can search flickr for a particular tag and then build a stack of related tags to narrow a search. Related tags are displayed in a 3D visualization in the style of a planet with each related tag displayed as a smaller satellite object orbiting the original “planet.” As you click through each additional tag in the stack, the process repeats narrowing the search. When you are finished narrowing your search, you simply click the central “planet.” Images meeting your search are arranged as the outer surface of the sphere. You can click and drag to rotate the sphere and click on individual images to pull them out and show them in front of the rest on the sphere. Another click brings the full image up and provides some of the flickr metadata and a link to the flickr page for the image.

As a visualization that provides an easy way to browse a large number of related images quickly, this tool is very successful. Often, 3D interfaces do not provide the most efficient means to accessing data. But in this case, there’s and excellent fit. Take a moment to check out the site. It’s definitely worth the bookmark.

http://taggalaxy.de/

Embedding YouTube videos in PowerPoint 2007

Clay McGovern — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 15:14:26 +0000

In preparing for a class on PowerPoint 2007, I ran across a little tutorial on YouTube outlining how to embed a YouTube video in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. Unfortunately, the audio in the tutorial is really poor, so I thought I’d list the steps here and create a Captivate animation for it as well.

To embed a YouTube video in PowerPoint 2007 follow these simple steps:

First turn on the Developer Tab on the Ribbon by clicking on the Microsoft logo at the top left of the window and selecting PowerPoint Options all the way at the bottom of the menu. Next put a check next to the unchecked item to show the Developer Tab
Go to YouTube and select a video to embed
Copy the URL
On the Developer menu choose “More Controls”
Select Shockwave Flash Object
Click and drag on the PowerPoint slide to add the Flash object
Right Click the object placeholder and select properties
Set the Movie property to the URL you copied
In the URL delete “watch?” and change the “=” sign to a ⁄
Adjust the options for Looping or AutoPlay if desired

Make sure to test the presentation and keep in mind that the video is streaming from YouTube, so an Internet connection is required at the time of presentation.

Adobe Launches Flex Cookbook Community Site

Clay McGovern — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 16:40:38 +0000

Yesterday, in my post about Adobe’s CSS community site, I mentioned that a similar site for Flex development was on its way. Well, the site is now live. Check it out at:

Flex Cookbook beta

Here’s hoping some good stuff makes its way onto the site. Thanks, Adobe!

Adobe Apollo and Flex

Clay McGovern — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:23:21 +0000

Just watched a demo of Adobe’s new Apollo cross-platform runtime environment. The developer’s release is due out in 1st quarter 2007. We have several projects in the works that will benefit greatly from this new tool. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it. More information is available at Adobe Labs.On a related note, I am going to be doing a crash course into Flex Builder 2 and ActionScript 3 for a project with Tom Klingler (from Tulane) and Amanda La Fleur (from LSU). We’ll be building an online course for Cajun French. One of our target audiences is young Cajun musicians who would like to learn Cajun French to be able to practice their craft better.

I’d like to build the site with a combination of HTML and Flex with a MSSQL Server backend. I think Flex will be a nice fit, especially for the interactive exercises and multimedia presentation. I figure the less time I have to spend inside of the Flash 8 Pro IDE, the better. Looking forward to getting to know Flex Builder 2.