I spent the day putting together a DVD to be played in the about-to-open Kamloops Children’s Museum. Local artist/designer Vaughn Warren and his team have done an amazing job redesigning a few sections of the Kamloops Archives Museum upstairs, including the Secwepemc First Nations section and the Kamloops Victorian section, and in addition creating the new children’s museum in the basement. A puppet theatre has been made in the basement with a background of clouds painted on the walls. They’ve installed a projector mount from the ceiling and I was asked to provide a background visual DVD with a variety of loops, basically a demo of what might be possible or to get some ideas flowing. So, I dug through a lot of the content that comes with the Motion software by Apple (comes with the Final Cut Studio suite) and pulled out loops for things like potential magic shows or outer-space themed puppet shows, as well as lots of clouds.
I dropped by the museum and took a few photos, some around the puppet space, and then a few shots of the museum floor, which doubles as a game-board (for a fur-trading game) and an area map:

Kamlooops Childrens Museum puppet booth

I also did a set of motion-screensaver type things, animating the museum logo. I really like how it sets up so well for stained-glass-type effects once you start playing with the blend layers. My favorite logo animation is the one where it looks like the logos are spread out like leaves on a tree, and the sun appears to be shining through them.
If you’re passing through Kamloops, be sure to check it out.
My animation skills are pretty minimal, but I did make a simple cloud loop animation which I embedded below. To do this, I created a blue-gradient background in the Motion software, used the bezier tool to draw the hills, give them a radial gradient and a drop-shadow, and then using the bezier-tool, again, drew the clouds. I added a wriggle effect to the clouds to give them the feeling of movement and shifting. Simple stuff, but fun.

I’ve posted the occasional video here from vidtionary.com, the online video dictionary I’ve been making. I have also used the exploration of this idea as my graduation project for my Master of Education degree at Thompson Rivers University. I’m happy to say that on February 12th, 2010, I passed the defense. I recorded my presentation that day by screen capture, and here is the recording of the presentation.

I did these videos for Vidtionary, the video dictionary site that I am working on. I post them here as some of my first examples of exploring the 3D space of the Motion software, which only lets you 2D shapes in the 3D space. I created the walls and floors of these spaces by searching for textures online, and then inserted in royalty-free objects and animations. See also the incomplete video I’ve been working on for Visions Creeping by local Kamloops band Sleeps With Matches.
Putting these two videos together makes me wonder what a museum and prison have in common. Quite a lot, I think. Both have walls and cells which contain things to be gazed upon.
The 3D software is particularly well-suited for creating a prison, as you can really quickly replicate the cells. Next, I want to do a video for “office.”

I made this for a school project in the M.Ed program I’m enrolled in now at Thompson Rivers University in Canada. We’d done a bunch of readings related to education and power, so I plumbed the depths of youtube and came up with this.

Sam goes to the science museum and the day gets remixed.
How this came about is my friend Ryan Gerard took the student he was tutoring to a science museum. When he came by my place, I was showing him my VJ software (Arkaos), and we loaded in his photos into the software, then linked the VJ software with a keyboard in the Logic music software, so the sound and the images are pretty much synchronized. See my recent video Han River VJ Demo for another example of this linking between the VJ software and the music keyboard.

I made this video as a demo for English teaching purposes. It’s not particularly great animation, but still I think my students would enjoy it. I’m actually really amazed that I could even make this. I look forward to trying some other motion graphics like this. I’d love to build a whole set of videos for teaching like this.