Freelance Tips to chew on this weekend…

I’ve been signed up on Freelance Switch.com’s newsletter for about a month now. They consistently have great articles, but so far this most recent has been the first I really want to point out to you all. Check it out… 6 Warning Signs of a Problem Client.
Along those same lines, Go Media (that same company [...]

Safari 4 stole my idea…and that of a billion other people…

…because who hasn’t dreamed of a start page that wasn’t just one single URL. For the longest time I’ve had CartoonSmart.com as my start page, not because I like visiting my own site, but because I like knowing its reachable (i.e. not busted) . If I wasn’t forced to go every time I open a [...]

YouTube, you’re out. Vimeo, you’re in!

Since last weekend I’ve been trying to get all of CartoonSmart’s free & demo videos up on YouTube. First problemo is I can only upload 10 minutes chunks at a time. That’s YouTube’s cap these days for time, which isn’t too cool for the lengthy college-lecture-ish CartoonSmart vids, So I had to break up the [...]

Awesome Animation at AdobeCards.com

One of my AE instructors just showed me this very, very cool animation at adobecards.com , and after doing some quick googling of approximately these terms,  “adobecards.com wtf” , I see plenty results from mid last year, so I guess this isn’t that new of a site. But its new to me, so I’m sharing. [...]

That 3D street art guy…

You all have probably seen  Edgar Mueller’s street art before, but this is the first time I’ve seen a video showing how he and his crew do it (there’s an HD version too if you view it on YouTube) 

Also check out this other recent piece below. How cool is that car on the [...]

Zoomify Brian Z’s workz!

Couple cool things today.  I’ve mentioned Brian Zaikowski  before on one of the past CartoonSmart blogs, he does some very detailed poster size work, well he returns again with another great one. You can check it out here. 

Also I noticed he’s using a Zoomify picture utility I hadn’t seen before, and it looks pretty snazzy [...]

CartoonSmart’s First Photoshop Tutorial!

YES! The site finally has a Photoshop lesson. But why right? I mean everyone already knows Photoshop, don’t they??  Well I thought I did. Or at least thought I was an intermediate level user. WRONG. I got schooled watching this tutorial. And over and over again. It was humbling seeing how little I really knew [...]

New! After Effects Dynamic Text Tutorial released!

After Effects instructor extraordinaire, Jeremy Hicks teaches his latest lesson (he also taught the Arrivals Board tutorial)  This time the theme is on broadcast quality title bumpers, made easy though, by using dynamic text in After Effects. Dynamic, meaning text that is stored in a .text file outside of the actual AE project files. Unlike [...]

Flash Catalyst: Prepare to have your mind-grapes squeezed!

Imagine creating Flash apps without doing a lick of coding. Crazy right. Imagine starting in Photoshop, then converting your layers directly into interactive elements like buttons. Unbelievable, you say.  Imagine, yours truly, teaching an application course without any coding. Oh how sweet. 
Here’s some words from the source… 
Adobe® Flash® Catalyst is a new professional interaction design [...]

“The Simpsons already did it”… or wait. Did they?

So I’m a few days behind on my DVR, and just saw that last week’s Simpsons had a new HD-ified intro. Want proof? here it is. (don’t miss the “watch in high quality” toggle below the video) Looks to me like the animators had to start from scratch, not only just to widen it for HD, [...]