Category: Updates

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Toy Halls of Fame

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Click the image above to see highlights of a project that I recently worked on.  The animations are featured on several screens – one screen 26 ft. tall – at the Toy Halls of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play.  The work was done through Northern Light Productions over a 5 month period and I created over 5 minutes of animation for such classic toys as Raggedy Ann, G.I. Joe, Barbie, Teddy Bear and others.

Needless to say, animating such iconic toys was a dream come true and the project itself was a joy to work on.  It was probably one of the smoothest projects I’ve been a part of.  Not least of all, I got to work with some wonderfully talented people – friends both old and new.

We spent a few hours at the museum recently and I highly recommend it.  Beyond the Halls of Fame is the classic arcade, the comic book section, Sesame Street and a number of other fun, interactive exhibits.

About the Bogs

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This morning I decided I needed to clear my head.  I have too many things going on in my life at the moment.  They’re all good things, just too much for my little brain to process all at once.  It was time to force my brain onto one topic and one topic only.  So, while it was still cloudy and relatively comfortable, I grabbed the camera and headed out to the cranberry bogs.

This time, I loaded my Canon 60D with a Nikon AF-S 28mm lens that I bought for stop motion.  I really wanted to bring the Nikon 50mm instead, but couldn’t manage to get the adapter off the 28mm.  Whatever.

Again, I embarked on my mission to get up close and personal while reducing the background to a colorful haze.  The Nikon goes all the way down to f2.8 which gave me a nice, short depth of field.  I also prefer shooting on cloudy days as I find sunshine makes things to contrasty.  (I also don’t like the sun on a personal basis).  Clouds give objects a more pleasing diffuse shadow.

I admit, one or two of the images don’t quite fit with the others, but I liked them so I included them.

 

Vermont

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On a recent visit to Vermont, I wanted to take up close and personal images of nature.  They say God is in the details.  I don’t know about that, but there is so much beauty in the details.  My thought was to get as close as I could to an object and take a picture with a shallow depth of field, turning the background into a blurry haze.

I’m pretty happy with the results, even though I brought the wrong lens with me.  I should have used a 35mm or 5omm prime lens with which I could get really close.  I didn’t, so I did the best I could.  Next time.

I’ve also been using Lightroom more and more and had a fun time getting lost in the image and marveling at the enormous change to the image that a tiny adjustment made to a single parameter made.  There was a certain zen in tweaking and tweaking, gradually working towards the final image.

 

Crates

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I’ve been waiting for the skies to cloud up to take a photo of this wall of cranberry crates.  We’ve had such a long stretch of dry weather and/or torrential rains that I wondered if it was ever going to happen.

Finally, on Saturday, it clouded up with only a little drizzle to contend with.

Dog Gone

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We said goodbye to Elsa and Josie today.  Otherwise know as Ethel and Lucy, we acquired them several weeks ago with the intention of keeping them.  Unfortunately, we quickly realized they were going to be much more than we were prepared to handle.  Admittedly, our timing for adopting dogs was not good.  With life a little up in the air, adding such a large responsibility was a mistake.  On top of that these sweet, loving animals were not only not house broken, but didn’t know any commands at all.  When we set out to adopt, we were clear about the dogs being a little older and used to living in a house.  Elsa and Josie are about three years old and loaded with energy.  They are loving and calm down very quickly, but just too much for us to handle at this time.

They are currently being boarded at Eva’s Play Pups and enjoying life on a 30 acre farm while they await adoption from the right family for them.  We wish them well and miss them.

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Ben Franklin Museum

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Now that the Ben Franklin Museum has opened in Philadelphia, I can share some of the work I did for it.  Under the direction of Salvatore Raciti at MemoryCollective, I built several animations using Maya and After Effects to educate, in an entertaining way, the many aspects of Franklin and his impact on history.  I learned a lot about Franklin and enjoyed the process of animating the different pieces immensely.  I developed a great workflow to build these 2 1/2D animations, using illustrations by Katherine Streeter, rigging and animating them in Maya, then composting them in After Effects.  I hope to do more work like this in the near future and even have plans to try the same process but with paper cut-outs stop-motion animated.