Number 17

Surf’s Up makes an appearance as #17 on CG Society’s 2007 Retrospective–”the public-voted list of the most requested cool items for 2007″. They make note of the hand-held camera work and the innovative waves.

iWeb Color Profile Help

I had a simple task to accomplish using iWeb 2.0.2. I wanted to make a jpeg image that seamlessly blended into the background color. This should be simple but due to iWeb’s built-in color management, I could only find one workflow that allows colors in jpeg images to match the background color in all of the various web browsers. (more…)

Surf’s Up for Best Visual Effects?

Variety has an interesting article today on whether movies like Surf’s Up should be considered for Best Visual Effects in the Academy Awards.

What do you think?

One Million items

Installed Leopard and plugged in an external hard drive. A few minutes later, this appeared. Apparently there are over a million items being backed up right now. I’m not sure why I think that’s cool.

Feature Creep…

We recently got an HP all-in-one printer. It has a feature for red-eye removal. It’s a printer?

Surf’s Up @ AEAF

On Wednesday, November 14th I’ll be presenting a detailed look at the making of Surf’s Up at the Australian Effects and Animation festival. If you’re going to be near Sydney this November you might want to include AEAF in your plans–this has been an excellent conference in the past and it looks like another great lineup this year as well.

AEAF attendees or others with interest can download the referenced course notes from Sony Imageworks [14.3 Mb PDF].

Wordpress tag cloud formatting

I’ve written a simple plugin that removes the html line breaks (br) between tags when the command wp_tag_cloud() is called from within a post. This is useful for people running a hack like runPHP to be able to execute commands since this behavior doesn’t manifest itself if you run the command from within a template.

(more…)

Surf’s Up DVD #1

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Surf’s Up was the #1 seller on DVD in the first week of it’s release making $8.1 million.

Unix Shortcuts

Copy files with tar:

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -)

Backup and a restore a mySql database:

mysqldump -u username -ppassword database_name > FILE.sql
mysql -u username -ppassword database_name < FILE.sql

Figure out which process is “grabbing” a drive you want to unmount (from Donncha):

# umount /media/disk/  <br/>
umount: /media/disk: device is busy  <br/>
# fuser -m /dev/sdc1  <br/>
/dev/sdc1: 538  <br/>
# ps auxw|grep 538  <br/>
donncha 538 0.4 2.7 219212 56792 ? SLl Feb11 11:25 rhythmbox  <br/>

Sometimes when pasting code in vi, it over-indents. Vim.org has the answer for this:

All you need to do is “set paste”, then paste your stuff, and then “set nopaste” again.

Surf’s Up on DVD

Surf’s Up is out on DVD (Widescreen Special Edition) this week (also available on Blu-ray). The DVD has a lot of special features and I’ve noticed a lot of great reviews: (more…)