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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking to see what I do when I'm not blogging, visit jmx2.com for a taste. Thanks for stopping by!

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How To Make A Particular Particle Effect In After Effects

At JMX2, we recent completed a fun project that let us spend a lot of time in After Effects working with the particle generator called Particular. The project was to create 2 synchronized ad banners. In the 1st banner at the top of the page, photos in picture frames slid out of their frames while dissolving into pixel-like particles then followed a predetermined motion path into a phone, in the 2nd banner, where they regrouped into showing the original photo.

The Original Project

You can see what we ultimately delivered to our client here:

How did we do it?

Jon and I talked about a variety of ways of executing this animation. We built a pure Flash version of the particles for a version that had tight K size limiations, but when we were given the opportunity to build a richer version, we put on our After Effects hats and got to work. We chose to Particular as our particle engine because it's flexibility and power. You can download a demo version for free at the Red Giant site.

We won't post the files made for clients, but I've put a small demo movie together, complete with all the source files, for you to get a understanding of how cool and powerful Particular is.

The Example

Here's a final output of the example file I've posted. I've taken a still shot of Mario and had him explode into a cloud of mushroom shapes based on the colors that Mario is created with. Near the end of the explosion, I've had more of the mushrooms use their original color.

 

Download a ZIP file of full package for this After Effects project here. If you don't have Particular installed on your machine already, but sure to download it as well from the Red Giant site.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

iPhone 3G S Unboxing

I had my video camera set up waiting for Fed Ex to deliver my phone. Let’s unbox this thing.

As a followup the video. After waiting about 5 hours for my phone to activate, I called AT&T. It seems some numbers in the activation codes were incorrect on my account. The guy was really helpful and nice. He had my phone working in about 10 minutes. Excellent.

iPhone App cliqcliq Colors: A Color Palette Is Where You Find It

Most of my time is spent creating, designing and coding things that live online. Having the right color palette for a project always plays a big role in making something look right. Some of the best color palettes I’ve ever worked with are taken directly from my surroundings. Colors from cliqcliq is an iPhone application I’ve started using that makes the process of getting colors from out in the world into my computer easier than I’ve seen before. That makes it easily worth the $2.99 it costs. (Here’s a link to it on iTunes.)

It’s really simple to use. You can always just create a palette from scratch if that’s what you want to do, but I’ve been taking photos and creating a starter palette that I then manipulate. The following screen shots will show you how easy it is.

1. After opening the application, click the plus sign in the lower left hand corner of the screen to bring up the screen you see below. I chose to select a photo that was already in my iPhone’s library.

2. The photo can be zoomed in or shrunk by pinching as in most iPhone applications. I chose the upper left corner of my photo because I liked the color palette Colors created when it picked up some of the reds in the background.

3. I wanted to alter one of the colors and you’ll see a blue highlight around one of the colors on the 2nd row on the right.

4. With that color selected and HSB (hue, saturation. brightness) selected, I increased the saturation and brightness of that color.

5. Finally, after naming the color palette, I emailed myself the colors which I can use in my computer. It actually provides formats friendly to more than just Photoshop and Illustrator as the screenshot suggests. I believe there are PowerPoint palettes for both PC and Mac, plus the static image of the palette you see at the top of this post.

If you’d like to see how the palette above works as something you can import into Photoshop or Illustrator, I’ve posted them. To download it just click here.

The 7 iPhone Apps that Made My Vacation

I’m just back from a weeklong vacation to the Pacific Northwest. In an attempt to “get away” I didn’t pack my computer to go with me, but I did have my iPhone. If you know me personally or just have stumble across SuperGeekery, you’d expect a little gadget adoration, but I wanted to share the 7 iPhone apps that helped on my trip. (I didn’t take the above photo with an iPhone. It needs a better camera, but that’s a reason to upgrade to the next version of the iPhone, I suppose. I used my Canon SD880 IS for photos.)

1. The TripIt app is an extension of the Tripit.com Web site. When booking any trip, I just forward the email receipt to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and they end up in my itinerary. The site then builds an organized calendar with my full travel plans, hotel and car rental confirmation numbers, directions to where I’m headed. It’s all in one handy spot. Get it for FREE

2. The Google Maps application on the iPhone is obviously handy. I use it quite a lot in everyday life, but the moment it came in really helpful on this trip when the GPS unit in the rental stopped working when driving around the large building in Seattle and Vancouver. I just fired up the Maps application, had it pinpoint my location and give me driving directions to where a friend lived. The directions were better than what the GPS unit eventually came up with when it started working again as well. Already included on your iPhone and FREE

3. This vacation wasn’t filled with pre-planned activities. We just got a place and had a vague sense of what we wanted to do. HearPlanet Free came in handy because checks the current location and then finds Wikipedia articles of nearby spots. It gives you the text and an image from the article plus it will read it to you, hence the word “hear” in the app’s title. We were in a small town in Washington state and it pulled up a lot of interesting bits of local history. Get it for FREE

4. I listen to a lot of podcasts on through iTunes and my iPhone, but when I’m away from my computer, I can’t easily listen to podcasts because they first come through my computer before reaching my iPhone. Apple has added the ability to the iTunes app on the iPhone to download Podcasts, but if you’re not on a wireless connection, it will refuse anything larger than 10 megabytes. RSSPlayer doesn’t have that restriction. It claims to allow you to download the podcasts directly from the RSS feed of any blog, but I just use it to stream the episodes I want to hear. Get it for 99¢

5. Being in Canada meant dealing with an exchange rate. It’s not that big of a deal, since the valuation of the US dollar and the Canadian dollar are pretty stable and very similar, but I did use 9-Toolbox and it’s Currency feature app to check the exchange rate. It automatically updates the exchange rate when you use it. Get it for FREE

6. Everyone knows about Skype. Internet phone service, blah blah blah. You know the story. What was really cool though was being in a Vancouver coffee shop that had free wifi and calling friends in New York, Illinois, and Wales and not having any phone charges outside the standard Skype cost of calling a land line. Sweet. Get it for FREE, no charge to call other Skype users, small fee for calling land lines and mobile numbers.

7. We were in Vancouver, and as I mentioned earlier, we didn’t really have lots of concrete plans, including places we wanted to go for a nice meal. OpenTable to the rescue! It used our location, retrieved by the phone’s built-in GPS, and displayed top-rated restaurants that had available tables for when we wanted to eat. It even makes the reservations directly through the app. It led us to CinCin, http://www.cincin.net, and the food was delicious. Get it for FREE

How to See If Your DoubleClick Spotlight Tags Work in Flash.

This video is a follow up to my previous post about adding tracking to an ActionScript 3 project. In this video, you’ll learn how to monitor whether your Flash project is doing requests for DoubleClick’s Spotlight tags using Firefox and the free add-on Firebug. Visit the Firebug home page at http://getfirebug.com.