It’s been a marathon LOST catchup weekend thanks to Netflix! In honor of reaching Season 2 (I jumped into the show at the beginning of Season 4), I made the above spoof on a Virgin America ad.

Hey funksters, I made you a funky supermarket. EAT FUNKY. BE FUNKY. STAY FUNKY.

After the Summer hiatus of Something Cool Every Day, I’m getting back into the swing of things with one I’ve had sitting around for far too long!  During a particularly interesting evening of 1vs100 a month back, Microsoft was kind enough to pose a question regarding a famous clothing brand (who didn’t see product placement coming?) , with one of the choices being American Ostrich Outfitters.  How could I not make this?

I’ve been enjoying my week off from SCED, but I felt I had to jump back in at some point. What better point is there than to procrastinate something that I should really be doing!

If you know me, I’m a huge Jurassic Park nerd. My favorite movie ever. Done deal. So after 8 years of seriously waiting for a *good* sequel, I figured why the hell not make a poster to torture myself even more!

I’ll get my Gnomon lectures watched and homework done tomorrow I SWEAR.

I did a few iterations of this one, to further harness Trapcode’s Flow particle system, and control the details. It’s supposed to be a play on Pixel Junk Shooter’s elemental features. I think I’ll try something cool with Particular tomorrow!

This is the effect I wanted to harness in the first Particle Test!

Still Alive (Teddybears Mix)
Original Song by Lisa Miskovsky

I started messing around with Trapcode’s Form today and I’m having a blast with it! Unfortunately, there are so many options, that I find it hard to settle on any one effect! Initially I tried to map the particle system to the gameplay video, but that never seemed to work out correctly. Running the particle displacement in Form didn’t work out, so I then broke down to do a displace after the fact, but that looked pretty disgusting. I ended up scrapping it and going with something more subtle (but I would love to know how to do that initial effect)!

Still Alive (Teddybears Mix)
Original Song by Lisa Miskovsky

One of my favorite things, if not my favorite part of GDC, was the Game Developers Choice Awards/Independent Games Festival. I had the pleasure of meeting one of the directors of the event at a pre-GDC kickoff party, Joe Markert, and he urged me to go. I am incredibly glad I made it out! So for today’s #SCED I figured I would try my hand at a new effect in AE and apply it to the GDCA.

I’m a huge fan of Palette Swap Ninja, and have been since they first started putting out their genius gaming parody songs. I’ve gotten to know Dan Amrich, half of the musical duo, a little bit over the past few months, and he’s a really nice guy (you can spot him on the 2nd episode of Crunch Time by the way). So my #SCED for today is a motion piece for them to use as they please!

My #SCED for today involved taking a page from the teaser campaign for Assassins Creed 2! I wanted to shoot for a different, more active look of going through weathered paper, and having the famous renaissance imagery fold in and tweak out, rather than burn onto the page. The music is from the Assassin’s Creed Soundtrack, an excerpt of “Flight Through Jerusalem”.

My #SCED for today is my take on a Borderlands title animation, experimenting with a few new techniques in After Effects.

My #SCED for today is my take on the titles for Team ICO’s upcoming “The Last Guardian” which doesn’t have a final logo or animation publicly released yet. The feather is an asset from the recently released trailer.

I have been way behind on my something cool’s the last week! E3 news and school happenings have consumed my life, but I will share something close to final, a motion intro for Crunch Time! Now if only I had some sick 8 Bit beats…*cough*…*ahem*…*feel free to send some*…

Well…I mean I was, weren’t you guys? Designers with poor eyesight heed the realization, you don’t have horrible vision, you just have to turn off the gaussian blur enabled on your face /designerd.

This concept popped in my head after considering the torture issue, and the recent PEW report that states the majority of practicing church going christians support torture. I didn’t want to bunch in everyone, but I know the fundamentalists out there hypocritically support it and I have a feeling it has something to do with this idea subconsciously.

Song by Elgar “I — Allegro maestoso”
Performed by by Carlo Curley

Look! It moves! I made something move! You are looking at my first ever After Effects animation. Look!

If only I could actually use the mechanics of Motorstorm 2 in the real world….then this mode wouldn’t have to exist. I’m hoping the radiating awesome pulsating within this JPEG makes up for yesterday’s SCED absence. By the way, this is in 1080p, so click it for the full size!

C’mon humanity, it’s not like we didn’t know we opened Pandora’s Box when we became completely transparent. There’s no going back! Now we’ll see when in the future the almighty bird bites us in the ass.

Here’s my Something Cool for the day of May 20th, 2009.

Tonight I went to an event put on by a tech meetup group here in LA. A certain executive said a few things that baffled me, classically towing company lines, so to this, I say, stop spewing bullshit. Please. Some of us are smarter than that.

To catch up to speed, I’m going to be posting some of the last few days’ SCED’s.

Shocking that I’ve been making this as the Trico news breaks, but this has consumed my thoughts all day.

Underlying image is a screenshot from Shadow of the Colossus 1, arted up all fancy like.

Last night the season finale of 24 heralded the end of my prime time viewing habits for the coming months. What mind melting programming will replace my current regiment? This is why humans should hibernate.

Sunday was my first earthquake, and it happened to be a 5.0! Needless to say it scared the piss out of me, but it also made me more aware. Aware of the impending threat of Zombie attack, and the facilitation an earthquake could play. You are forewarned!

What The Fuckery (WTFery for short) is a term that needs to be used more often. Defined in the image above, I believe it can surely find its way into our vernacular. For example: “There is some serious WTFery going on in here, that elephant just ate a penguin.”

My good friend Luis Hurtado sprung this one on me out of the blue. “They call me Lou the Crazy Glue cuz I keep shit together!” How could I not make that?