These are my links for November 18th through November 20th:

• Smashing Magazine - Founded in September 2006, Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for designers and Web developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in Web development: clearly, precisely and regularly. We try to convince you not with the quantity but with the quality of the information we present. That’s what makes us different. We smash you with the information that makes your life easier. Really.
• Massive Black - Massive Black is based in the South of Market area of San Francisco, where the team has learned to laugh, play, love, and live together. With our satellite studios in Shanghai and Bangkok, Massive Black is ideally located in areas known for art, culture, and enterprise.
• Marco Grob -
• Tan Jiong Hao's blog - Tan Jiong Hao
  Student, Freelance Designer, Member of Creative Crew,SG ,Adobe Photoshop user ,Adobe Flash user ,Netbeans user ,Themer(THeming plus programming SE themes)
• Vector Magic | Precision Bitmap to Vector Conversion Online - Vector Magic's flagship service is the online auto tracer available on this website. It converts bitmap (aka raster) images into vector images through an easy-to-use web interface - just upload your image and it will guide you through the process.

Dear Crew,
here’s Creative Crew Singapore’s official video.
Feel free to embed it in your blog and share.

Thanks to William, here’s Creative Crew’s new video tutorial. It’s a smart and flexible technique to coloring black and white images.

Ask your wuestions to WIlliam : waiaung @ hotmail.com

Go to William’s DeviantArt

On 14th November 2008, Adobe had it’s launch of the new Creative Suite 4. On the same day, Creative Crew had it’s first outing - To the launch of Creative Suite 4. I’d like to thank the members who came and join us for this very special event. For those who couldn’t make it, fret not, both me and Stefano will try to make the next outing either on a weeknight or on a weekend.

Going on to the event itself, I must say that it was way beyond expectations of what I had in mind of CS4. Our members who were there were awed by the ease of use of the new CS4 as well as the new features that were built into this version of this Creative Suite. Speakers included TIM COLE, KARL SOULE and PAUL BURNETT who kept the event lively with their prize “throwaways” as well as their impressive knowledge of the new CS4. Of course, not forgetting our ourselves, we have had lots of people signing up for Creative Crew. Let’s warmly welcome our new members!

We got some freebies in the goodie bag such as the cool CS4 water bottle as well as t-shirts from the sponsors when you drop your name card in the box. We took a photo with the remaining members who stayed around together with us as well as Marianne, Tim, and Karl.

These are my links for October 16th through November 11th:

• About | Weta Digital - Our team of digital artists are world-leaders in all areas of visual effects production, including animation, motion capture, crowd generation, modelling, compositing, and film scanning and recording.

  At Weta Digital, creativity reigns supreme. Our crew works in a relaxed atmosphere that belies their ferocious work ethic and professionalism. It’s the creative skills and commitment of our crew that keep our New Zealand-based company at the forefront of digital filmmaking, in Hollywood and around the world.

• The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences :: - Since its inception in 1996, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences has relied on the leadership and direction of its board of directors. These men and women, all leaders of the interactive software industry, have volunteered their time and resources to help the Academy advance its mission of promoting awareness of the art and science of interactive games and entertainment. Each director has lent his or her talent and prestige to the common concerns of the interactive entertainment industry.
• Visual Effects Society - The Visual Effects Society (VES) is the entertainment industry's only organization representing the full breadth of visual effects practitioners including artists, technologists, model makers, educators, studio leaders, supervisors, PR/marketing specialists and producers in all areas of entertainment from film, television and commercials to music videos and games. Comprised of a diverse group of more than 1,600 members in 17 countries, the VES strives to enrich and educate its own members and members of the entertainment community at large through a multitude of domestic and international events, screenings and programs.
• UrbanFaerie.Net - Luv Luv Baby - Lette Teodosio
• Text100 Entertains for pre DMfest event - itsReal « APLINK - itsReal -
• welcome • the dude's blog - carlsson, graphic, design, flubberzz, blog, dude

14th-16th Nov 08, Wellington Convention Center, Wellington NZ

“AnimfxNZ is a world-class conference dedicated to the state of the art in Animation, Games Visual Effects and Film Technology. The conference is held annually in one of the world’s leading cities for Digital Media creation, Wellington, New Zealand. Now in its third year, AnimfxNZ 08 brings together a mix of international speakers including animated feature directors, vfx supervisors, digital artists and game developers, to present, share and interact with attendees from all over the world. AnimfxNZ is organised by the NZ GAV Trust, a group of digital media professionals dedicated to advancing the Games, Animation and VFX industries in New Zealand.

Hosted in partnership with the Visual Effects Society (VES), AnimfxNZ is fast becoming the ‘must attend’ event for discovering new talent, networking with leading industry executives and learning about the exciting trends in the rapidly changing landscape of the digital media industry.”

Official website

Programme

Dolly Zoom is a cinematic technique in which the camera moves closer or further from the subject while simultaneously adjusting the zoom angle to keep the subject the same size in the frame.

The effect is achieved by using the setting of a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view) while the camera dollies (or moves) towards or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout.

In the first video I have created a digital Dolly Zoom effects using After Effects. There are three pre-composed sets of shapes, each 500 pixels away from another. Green, Blue and Red. The camera movements are all 500 pixels. The zoom movements 500 pixels as well.

Here some cinema examples from Vertigo, Jaws, Poltergeist, Goodfellas, and The Fellowship of the Ring:

This is a YouTube video on how to create a cheap dolly at home:

Interesting links and references:

MediaCollege.com

Wikipedia

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards“, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Directed by James Frost
From the album IN RAINBOWS

Go to: http://code.google.com/radiohead to find additional pieces of data to create your own visualizations.

Armchair Theorist published an interesting follow up to Digital Media Festival. In his demo, Jon talked about Contextual video advertising. A never sleeping advertising system. It was a coincidence that we both prepared something about it. My session was mostly audio oriented. Check out his demo here:

Takeaways from Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008

As some users asked, here’s the original man sneezing in 1984 video. I mentioned this video in my Digital Media Festival speech.

Cool links about Digital Media Festival Singapore 2008:

Claudia.sg
Dee Kay Dot As Gee
Packets of Consciousness

Digital Media Festival 2008 is happening now at The Legends (Fort Canning).

I just finished my demo about the new speech-to-text Adobe Soundbooth capability. I showed a video took from YouTube, downloaded as MP4, opened in my Soundbooth and then converted the audio to text. Speech-recognition. The scenario that I show is a future where people will be able to search video just typing the text of the words that they are looking for.

Image via Wikipedia

Another, more scary scenario, is content related advertisement. Since Soundbooth recognize every single word as a specific spectrum, maybe in future will be able to recognize the sound of a car engine. If this will happen, it will be sound-recognition, or noise-recognition. And when the recognition will be more more accurate, maybe will be able to tell the difference between a Fiat Punto engine, and a Ferrari engine. This can trigger absolutely content related advertising.

Let’s imagine you are watching a video on your computer. The actor sneeze. A Kleenex commercial pops up. Scary, isn’t it