Steff's BLOK

What do you think I think about Brainstorming?

2010-09-29T07:19:00.001+02:00

Recently I read a post about Brainstorming from Mark McGuinness at Lateral Action portal. Brainstorming is a method of generating ideas and as any other technique, it has a rules. But, aren't rules restraining creativity? Neverending diversity of such opinions on this technique made a smile on my face again. So use it, or not to use it? And what do you think I think? Read on.

I think brainstorming matters of timing, space, people and psychology. Timimg means that one day you might feel good for social discussion - you are able to find or expand the solution within group of pepole, the other day might be better when being alone. By Mentioning space and people I mean that somebody has some strong gene of "I-never-want-to-be-alone-and-I-want-to-talk-about-it" (one who likes brainstorming), and somebody has much more "loneliness" genes (hates brainstorming). I don't care if I like or dislike brainstorming, I'm opened to any communication and I can work alone too. My question is, if brainstorming doesn't sometimes lead to BAD or POOR results.

I think we should attend brainstorming, at least to try it's environment first. Then, knowing ourselves and the environment, we should decide whether to use or not to use this technique. Individually.

Most of time, I hate meetings at time when I don't feel well, I hate meetings with people I don't know and I hate meetings with people those are talking too much or immediately, without logic. It's my psychology, and no great idea falls out of me in such debates. Finally, something jumps out of my mouth. Something, I don't care much about. Is this principle ok, when we want to achieve something good? Sadly, those "anything bla-bla's" form the result. The fact that I have the right to talk, anything, doesn't mean my speech will lead somewhere. When working alone, my mind tells me clearly if I'm going the wrong way, and immediately I'm trying to forget it, not to mix my way to a result. Well, my time is everything I have and I have to spare it, that's why. As opposite, at brainstorming, it stays written on the board, it stays in ears and there's a possibility to mix the things too much if it's the case of more brainstorming attenders. I'm not telling it happends always, but often. And I personally don't like mixing not appropriate ideas.

How to avoid this... If brainstorming has to lead somewhere, minds of attenders have to be connected. Even if discussing quantities of different ideas, all of them have, and their creators too, have to be connected to a desired result. And to be connected, you have to feel good, understand the problem and most of all, you have to be a human at the right place, with right people.

I find brainstorming very useful. Talking about the problem and about the solution is very essential, but it needs a psychological connectivity since this technique is based on, well simply said, bunch of talking people. I'm thinking of how people at IDEO can have always productive brainstorming, as it's written at Lateral Action blog. I don't think it's possible without respect.

Steff Matus Gaal
http://www.stef.ke-mafia.com/

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flock testing and installing on Linux Ubuntu

2010-09-27T01:28:00.003+02:00

Do you know Flock?

I've already heard about Flock web browser, but until now I didn't tried it. Until I haven't heard, it's a best choice for social networks browsing. I wanted to try it immediately. Why? Because sharing of my opinions, while retaining meaningful, became my nightmare.

Flock looks like any any other modern browser. You can compare it's menu bar with other browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome in following image.

Menu bars of modern browsers

After first run, Flock browser immediately displayed "Getting Started" page with most favourite Social Networks listed on one tab, and "MyWorld" page at another tab. By default, search engine for Flock is Yahoo, and I wanted to change it immediately into Google, but I choosed to try the Yahoo's engine for now. As a standard modern browser, by default Flock blocks Pop-up windows, and has enabled JavaScript and Java.

Flock - Getting Started page

I logged into my Gmail, Twitter and Blogger account. While browsing, Flock kindly displayed me some helpful instructions at the top of GUI, offered "How to do this, or do that" links, or asked permissions if he can store and remember accounts to fasten social browsing. So, introducing process wen just fine. I was very curious how the browser will use my infomations later to simplify my social networks browsing.

Flock and blogging

While logging into Blogger, Flock told me via it's interface, that I can write blog from any page or about any item on the net while being on the net (right-click on some item and choose "Blog This"). I wanted to try it, so I'm writing this first experience in the Flock's popup window interface. Currently now writing, at the left pane I can see "Web Clipboard" - a place for storing Images, Links or Texts via drag-and-drop interface. I visited my portfolio homepage and dragged some images into Web Clipboard pane. So now, I suppose I can use the image links while writing this blog. I also tried to drag-and drop images from my filesystem, but it wasn't working, so I suggest this Web Clipboard can use only media stored on the web via links, so no additional storage is needed for this service.

Web Clipboard pane

Wu-a-la, here it is... image link, dropped via "Web Clipboard", showing sketch of my artwork called "Human Horizon" in progress.

Human Horizon

I find Web Clipboard quite useful, it could be storage of links for your mostly used images, for example your logo, or avatar. For occasional usage, there's no need to use Web Clipboard; you can drag images from opened web page into your blog-writing-window directly. Simply said, now I can re-use my images or another media stored at one place at totally another place, with a single mouse move. Nothing new, but the amount of mouse moves depends alot.

Share shell

Until now, I found it quite tough to organize my sharing media. Remembering at which sharing portal my asset which I'm currently looking for is,
remembering all those passwords, logging in, copying links, pasting links etc., many troubles. Flock brings sharing possibilities on one screen of the browser, with drag-and-drop features. Now, I can search for my media in one window, or put link from one social portal into another social portal. It's a great move towards simplifying tasks in social networks environment. Well, this content-sharing in Flock has some limits for sure. For example by providing access to only some of preferred, or widely-used sharing portals, but it could be only the question of time.

To make social networks connected, to make Flock being a social shell, Flock needs to store your accounts on one place. Then, the accessed content is displayed to end-user via user interface, and it happened to be a web browser. Realise, that it could have been anything else in term of usage interfaces. But web browsing, web sharing and web blogging went this way - displaying all the content via web browser. Flock, via web browser interface is ready to access all your media, emails or another assets within a few user's steps.

To give you an example, currently there's an E-Mail icon shining at the menu-bar of Flock - telling me that I have new, unread email. Maybe I'm wrong, but I find it very useful.

Flock - Email flyout

Notes on usability

Flock beeing a social networking browser, in Preferences has also a section offering to show or hide Digg flyout in the interface, nearby Location Bar.

Flock - Digg flyout

Browser in menu-bar also offers sharing content via email, or subscribing to feeds, just for example. I don't think
I will use this features very often, as I'm not the digging one, I also don't like abusing my friends with every page I like (as I'm browsing too much), and feeds I choose to retrieve, I'm choosing very properly. But for sure those items have their meaning, and I will use them from time to time.

After installing, default Home Page for Flock browser is "MyWorld" page. MyWorld is some kind of shell for your social needs. Offers direct access to preferred Search Engine, your Favorites, currently updated Feeds or Media from your lists, access to Photo Uploader and Blog Editor. Simply told, it's an collection of links, as described at Flock pages. But sadly MyWorld looks to me as nothing new and it will be the last thing I will look at. It is trying to simplify the access of the user to his most relevant sources of his interest. You can see something like this also in Firefox, Opera or Chrome start pages, often displaying when new window or new tab is opened. iGoogle page is also something similar. These "grab everything and put it to one page", or "try to recognize my favourite pages by yourself" systems never solved my problem and the problem is: as my browsing experience grown, I've subscribed or visited more and more of "feeders", ending up with a huge amount of feeds, when I by myself cannot choose what to read, and I don't expect the machine will know it better. Preferably, I enjoy simple starting point, like Google or Gmail, and I always browse by "what I need to see" clue, not by "what have I read yesterday" or "what reads today my best friend" clue. Choosing content the other way could lead to loosing connection to quality and value of information. Also, I find these systems very slow while fetching content, and it's content extremely large to display or browse, not speaking about reading it all.

Maybe MyWorld could change it, but I think it's more about managing your tasks and needs by yourself - of course with a great help of user's interface, and this is the point where Flock can help. It's interface should try to handle my informations as simply as possible. I don't know how to achieve that, but mirroring it in reality, home page is something like my workroom in my house. I always want it to be clean, intuitive and ergonomic in common use of my profession, very well organized. Every book has it's place and they are closed by dafault, only waiting for their use. Chairs and table - opinion sharing tools - are suitated in a quiet and inspiring zone. During the work, scraps and sketches are all over the room, but the default state, when I'm entering or finishing the job, it shouldn't be the case. Applied to tools aswell. This is what I want, nothing more, nothing less. Hope Flock will help me to keep my workroom well-organized.

I hope, Flock's interface will be as simple and intuitive as possible. Simplicity is the key, and managing such a huge libraries I have built through the years, and those I want to share, is a tough tast. The first meeting with Flock was great. Hope, Flock will help me to connect all the assets into one great sharing experience.

--
Have a nice, sharing day,
Steff

Notes on installing on Linux

Flock on it's web http://www.flock.com/ currently tells that it's available only for Windows, and that Mac and Linux versions are coming soon, but you can find quite good support at download/versions subpage, including Mac and Linux, with some languages support (September 2010). The Mac and Linux releases are in beta testing, and they might crash at any time, as it happened to me and I had to reinstall it.

I'm currently running Linux Ubuntu on my PC. Installing Flock wasn't hard, since I have some basic knowledge in command line editors. I'm only beginner at Linux, and as always while working with terminal, also this installation learned me something new. I've downloaded tar.bz2 file (something like "flock-2.0.3.en-GB.linux-i686.tar.bz2"), and as described here, - in Terminal I browsed to folder where the flock's "tar.bz2" currently downloaded, then pasted (Ctrl+Shift+V in terminal) this command:

sudo tar -C /opt -xjvf flock-*.linux-i686.tar.bz2

The command extracted Flock into root's /opt directory

Installation was succesfull, so I run Flock browser for the first time, from the terminal:

/opt/flock/flock-browser

The rest of options and optional resources are described at following address:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingFlock

Blogged with the Flock Browser

About visual rhythm

2010-06-23T05:36:00.039+02:00

As a motion designer, I spend lots of time playing with the rhythm. In visual presentation where audio is present, focus on the audio rhythm is not always needed, but in many of the cases it's the way to support the feeling of the artwork. I'm sure that trying to display such objects or scenes, those possibly could support the feel of the song, makes a sense. For motion designer it's a must-be to fit the whole video with scene cuts, depending on the rhythm, representing global sounding of music with characteristic visual/visible style or motion emotion. I'm always trying to support the meaning of the text, or to give there another, parallel meaning, while the music is telling you it's own story. Next few lines are about this script-to-rhythm assemble process using animated video for Zóna A.

At the beginning, there was the script for this video. It was written by Slovak writer and scriptwriter Agda B.Pain, and basically it told me which stories, objects, environments etc. the final video will have to contain as they are critical to visually interpret the story, the script.
The script tells a short funny story about misinterpreted emotions and relationships, often going wrong way until the point of the definitive end when something new starts, that in this world of growing dump business we must face endings and beginnings many times, and that's a recycling at the end. Ending something is like throwing it into the trash, but what to do farther? Recycle.
This idea, representing a never ending recycle process, some unbreakable circle of love and hate, beginnings and endings, came from the director and it was the thing that had to be reinterpreted in the rhythm of the song. The recycling idea visually held its place at the the logo of Zóna A. The letter A was interpreted as a recycling logo, found on every Cola can.

The elements defined in the script, basically were: singing trashcans, young punker kicking the bunch of newspapers, facing the simplified troubles of world while living his own troubles, throwing people into the trash, later throwing anything into the trash and at the end throwing trashcans into the trashcans. These and some more objects or situations were defined as a must be at the very beginning of the whole creation process. Another cast characters or situations were quite open during the production, step by step they filled the video.

And now back to assembling the animation and design to fit the rhythm of the song. First of all, the creation process needed to divide the song's structure into elementary parts those could be used in artwork. In case of "Prečo to tak vždycky skončí", the structure is common, here is the basic continuity: Intro, LaLaLa part, text part, refrain, LaLaLa part, text part, refrain, guitar solo, repetetive ending refrain. Depending on this global rhythm, I decided to break the song's animation and visual style onto layers, described as follows, creating an order, a rhythm. A visual rhythm:

0. Introduction
Bearing in mind that first part of the video needs introductions to characters and situations and second part will need more action, first dividing was:
- introductions and initial stories will be told until guitar solo during the texts and refrains
- after that point will come the action, gradation and the explanation.

Further cutting - visual rhythm dividing came from smaller parts of the song:

1. Intro - The first contact
During the intro of the song, animation and illustration environment is introduced - the dirty city, and the main character - the punker. Main character runs down into the city for his daily walk, kicking a bunch of newspapers in front of him, beloved, thinking about his beautiful girlfriend.

2. "LaLaLá" - The trashcans
The trashcans are displayed. Singing trashcans. A special type of composition was used to interpret this layer, due to more reasons: -to differentiate and define the trashcans as another main character, and also -to contrast "trashcans, the dirty habitants" versa "clean white city". The trashcans look totally happy singing this song, as they are living in a paradise, they have no worry for a hunger in such a place. These simple abstract scenes were later used also in promotion of the video - DVD covers, print materials and the website. Green trees, the bright elements of the city support the recycling idea in this composition.

3. The text - the story
In animation, it's time to introduce the cast characters, in their common situations - the grandmama and grandpapa on their daily walk, the workers working on the street and also the animals. As the song continues, situations between cast characters grade, characters are becoming angry, fighting each other. Main character walks on, seeing this anger, kicking his bunch of paper on. While kicking the paper bunch, sometimes the newspapers splashes on the screen unhinding content - the girlfriend's photos, or some old stories about his favourite punk group - telling another, parallel stories. During the first text part the main character is in love with a girl as it is shown in splashes, but as the time flows and he sees things happening (the second text part), he starts to hate her as he wants to have some quiet and a beer with friends.

4. Refrain
During the refrain, the singer is asking "Why always end like this?" My visual response to these rhythms is displaying the cast characters making their final decisions - throwing their partners into the trashcan. Nothing better to display when you hear "Why always end like this??".

5. Solo - Action!
Since this point, rhythm of the animation and telling the story changes, reflecting song's gradation. There are 3 babies thrown into the trashcan by their own mother, continued by stoling this trashcan from the street by a thief. Second part of the solo begins in the dump, where the thief sells the stolen trashcans to mafia, when police reveals the deal and drifts the mafia apart.

6. Song ends - Wrath grades!
There's a long repeating refrain at the end of the song, you can hear "Why always end like this??" 16 times in total there. Visually, it's time for gradation - main character, walking back home, seeing all this happening becomes angry and starts to throw the staying rest of the cast characters into the trash. When there's nobody else left, his anger cannot be stopped, he continues throwing: trashcans into trashcans.

7. FIN - After the fight...
In a few last seconds he sights his girlfriend, (accidentally naked ???). She is in the trashcan, but he has no doubt to jump after her, glad to run away from this city.

To gain that visual interpretation could be as close to text meaning, even in parallel meaning, the rhythm helped me again. Take care, think of your future and recycle!

Stef

From story to animation - The Long Story

2009-10-08T16:36:00.015+02:00

Recently, creative group KE mafia produced an animated video for Slovak punk rock band Zóna A. Two and half minutes long music video uses drawn illustrations combined with cut-out photo pieces, composited into 2D computer animation. I co-worked as an illustrator, designer and animator. You can watch the result at it's own promo address http://ke-mafia.com/zonaa/video2009/

I'm quite happy these times since production lasted for 22 months and a lot of things changed since we begun production of this piece. Song's name "Preco to tak vzdycky skonci?" translation is "Why always end like this?", and funny but truth, many things went down, in my personal, and professional life too. At the end, I feel like being the part of the video, part of the never-ending ending process, always starting again and again, recycling. It was quite a hard work even for a "long distance runner" like me, but I enjoyed designing the video a lot.

Now let me travel some time back. After receiving a script in august 2007, first 12 months of production started with sketching characters, situations, planning storyboard, environments and style. One of most important things in this stage of production was to prepare the technology workflow. After testing and previewing some first animations with scriptwriter and director of the video Agda, workflow stabilized at what else than Photoshop used for graphics preparing, character painting and cutting parts for animation and After Effects used for animation, compositing and image post-production, and. My hands should be also credited for a huge amount of work and we want to thank them this way.

As patterns for environments were prepared from photos, preparing sceneries hugely included "Vanishing Points" feature of Photoshop CS3, where on a photography you can define a depth for objects in shooted composition. Vanishing points could be afterwards imported into After Effects - original photography cutted into pieces appears distributed in a 3D space, recreating the depth of original composition. These partly prepared environments and animations of characters were finished first and I kept them inside separate AE projects, prepared for later use. Also, as characters in the video shake their heads and bodies with the rhythm all the time, AEs motionscript and it's 'loopOut'-'cycle' and 'wiggle' function was the right choice for simplifying this animation task.

Next part - work and work and work, little by little, finalizing parts of animation, the whole one next year of production was focused on compositing. The worst thing of it all was, that to force the unified style I had to keep all the animated video (2'26'') in one ae project, as I don't know how to use some kind of referencing of another ae project instead of importing it (pls give me some idea). I could have prepare pre-renders to simplify the workflow, but I didn't had much time to render as I was doing everything on my cheap laptop and one old desktop, and besides, the animations or illustrations were often slightly changing. So, the only possible way to keep an eye over the video globally was to have all the animations opened, not rendered, in one project file.

As animation continued, being circa in the middle of the production process, AfterEffects project became big, circa 65 MB and my computers started to overheat and shut down. To solve this problem, I had to split the project in two projects and due to this fact every basic storytelling aspect of the video had to be definitely closed for changes at this time, because changing some of these elements could have lead to time-consuming problems if there were need to change it in the other project file too. The elements fixed and closed for changes since this time were for example animation style, characters, repeating environments and backgrounds, singing of the trashcans, and other mostly used and repeating objects. Next, it was finally the right time to cut-edit and fine-tune the animation to tell the story with the rhythm.

Having all the environments, characters and animation style prepared, the last 3 months of production were filled with cut-editing animations and scenes and adjusting them to follow the song - "adding a rhythm to the video". For every one single shot, which has to tell something to the audience, we had circa 3 seconds, totally counting 666 shots/cuts for this 2'30" song. At this final stage I was also gently touching the illustration, animation and environment details to unify the look and motion of the video.

Nearly before my laptop, myself and the director went crazy, the video was finished. After consolidating the project footage and collecting the files, ae working projects had 50MB each, with 360 linked footage files in total. Happily, we rendered the video, unhappily, the project continued.

Postproduction lasted one week and included applying color grading or stylization masks, e.g. desaturation, increasing yellow tones to correspond with old paper and "recycling" creative message, movements of crumpled paper were used as overlays... I also tried get closer to the older one stop-motion animations with these steps, as this video is nothing else.

2 final versions were rendered at the end - Full version and a TV version, where naked girl at the end of video must have masked breast. To promote the video, we made also "The Making Of Video" (with English subtitles here), a 2-minutes documentary with the band speaking really nice about the video and featuring time-laps screenshots taken every 10 seconds during some stages of production. Music video promo kit contains "Classic" teaser and a very special "Tomorrow" teaser.

The very first sneak preview took place at "Anča Fest 2009" International Animation Festival on august 16th 2009, where I was also speaking about the production process shortly at Pecha Kucha Night and I have to thank the audience as for me stuttering there they were really great support. Finally, the official premiere of the video took place at Rock club Randal during the special double-concert of the band on september 25th and 26th.

Legend since beginnings in the communists era, Zóna A is this year celebrating it's 25th anniversary. Zóna A's first own animated video "Prečo to tak vždycky skončí" created by writer Agda B.Pain and designer Steff was produced by independent creative group KE-mafia. I want to thank the creators of the song Koňýk & Leďo, scriptwriter and director of video Agda, guitarist Revo, drummer Tuleň, cast Karči, Elvis the Cat, Julius Von Fontana the Superferret, Luky, Alki, Arta, Gejza, Daasha and everybody for waiting until this end.

Well. This video isn't a perfect one, specially in this 3D times, but I'm glad it has some freshy and recycly style at least. Storytelling possibly could also be more story telling, but there's always some "if-else". And, as you can see me on my profile photo, I don't have two heads, four arms, or, I don't live on a planet where the day has hundred hours. Even though I would like to have it all.

Take care, think of your future and recycle!

Steff

Well, welcome

2009-10-08T14:09:00.002+02:00

Well wellcome at my Blok, this happens to be my very first blogging post ever.

I will post here some of the news those will happen on my 'way out'.
Posts will be close to my life: design territory, graphics and motion design, illustration, advertisement and technologies used in these fields. If you want to look inside my mind, keep in touch.

Steff

Well and now, let's live on, let's see what time will bring...