Well, what a busy old month I’ve had! I’ve crossed several time zones and been on more flights than I care to mention. But all for good reason.

Earlier this month I went to Gratz to record an After Effects training DVD for the amazing folks at Video2Brain. It was really good to be back providing training for After Effects again. I’ve been looking for a new method of delivery since I stopped updating my “Creative After Effects” books and Video2Brain provide the perfect vehicle for it. I’ll also be recording some Video2Brain titles for our very own GridIron Flow soon and will keep you posted on that one too.

GridIron Software have been very supportive too. It’s so refreshing to work for a company that actively encourages employees to keep real contact with the creative industry it services. I must say it’s too rare. There are so many occasions where I’ve seen creative people join software companies, only to be consumed totally by the business aspect of their job till eventually they struggle to use the products in a creative way or even understand the customers requirements. I’m very grateful to GridIron Software for having the foresight to avoid these problems and for allowing me to remain in touch with the creative aspects of my role.

I’m also happy to report that Adobe have also adopted a similar approach. I shared the training delivery with the amazing Todd Kopriva from Adobe. Together we recorded almost 18 hours of video based training in just over a week. It was intense but very rewarding. I really enjoyed working with Todd so thanks to Adobe too for allowing him to be involved in such a great project.

So I left Gratz, via Frankfurt, got home to Brighton and slept for a few hours and was then whisked off to Ottawa (via Halifax) the next day to meet with my new colleagues at GridIron Software. It was really great to meet the new team and have some face to face time with colleagues that I usually only meet remotely with.

On my way to the airport after four days of meetings I was then kidnapped by my friends and taken to a lovely cottage in the Canadian wilderness for a perfect wind-down weekend of swimming, fishing, eating and campfire singing. It felt very good to finally have some time off after four consecutive weeks of work.

I finally got home last Tuesday and it’s taken me a whole week to unpack and settle back into home life. It’s good to be home and be able to focus on my work again.

I’m pleased to announce that Nucleo Pro 3 is now available from our store. Those of you working in After Effects CS5’s 64-bit environment can now take advantage of Nucleo Pro 3’s phenomenal speed increases. We’ve had reports of users seeing an increase in speed of 400% working in After Effects CS5.

You can find out more about Nucleo Pro’s features on our product page. Upgrades from previous versions of Nucleo Pro are available from our store for $129.99. I look forward to hearing feedback from you about how Nucleo Pro 3 has made your studio faster and more productive, happy rendering!

There are a few nice pieces of software around at the moment that I want to share with you. The first is Beauty Box from Digital Anarchy. An incredible plug-in for video applications (like After Effects, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro). If you shoot interviews or wedding videos and don’t have a good make up person on hand to fix their spotty complexions, you can simply do it in post with this plug-in, it works miracles! Here’s an example where I’ve used it on a particularly blemish-ridden shot of me! This was a one-click job but Beauty Box offers you a multitude of fine controls to really perfect results, and remember this works across frames too, it’s pretty damned amazing!

The next app I want to feature is Red Giant Software’s amazing Plastic Bullet. It only costs a couple of dollars for your iPhone and does an amazing job of randomizing fantastic Holga-esque effects on your pictures. It’s addictive and makes nearly every photo a masterpiece in the click of a button. Those who want to apply similar looks in Photoshop or video applications can check out the more mature sibling applications, Magic Bullet Looks for Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Here you can see a range of effects that I applied to the pictures above.

Oh, and before I forget, just a note to remind my blog readers of our very own special software offer this month! We have recently released a new version of GridIron Flow 1.0.4, which is compatible with Adobe CS5 applications. To celebrate this release we’re having a very special launch offer on pricing till June 4th 2010. you can pick up a copy of Flow for the incredible price of $99.99 (MSRP $299.99).

I’d love to hear about your own apps of choice so please chime in with comments.

Recently a few people have been asking me about my blog. “What is it?” “Why do you do it?” “What is it for?” The funny thing is that most of these questions come to me via my Facebook page. This made me realize that there’s an ironic ignorance surrounding blogs by the general public. Ironic because Blogging is basically what everyone’s doing when they post information on their Facebook page.

The definition of blogging, according to Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online dictionary is this; “A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.”

People’s first experience with posting content online is often with the ubiquitous Facebook (or other social networking website). Hardly surprising, they provide users with simple methods for getting stuff online easily, no programming involved! You can create your own free account, upload messages, links, pictures and videos. Everything’s taken care of for you, you don’t have to do any site maintenance and most of the latest web technologies are implemented as and when they become available. But all this comes at a price, it’s a double-edged sword. These sites don’t provide all this for nothing so how do they make a profit by providing you with all this free stuff? (I’ll use Facebook as an example from this point on as it is currently the one most people will be familiar with but all these sites operate in similar ways.)

The simple answer is advertising. Facebook has built up a huge number of users. At the time of this blog there were more than 400 million users with an average of 50% active each day - a captive audience of sitting ducks just waiting to be sold stuff! As you can imagine this is extremely attractive to advertisers, they can hit millions of people very easily.

Facebook’s database must be one of the biggest and most lucrative in the entire world. By posting stuff on your Facebook page, you allow them to build up a detailed profile of you, so that advertisers can target their business towards your individual preferences and interests. If you’re not careful with your privacy settings, these personal details can also be passed on to other businesses making even more profit for Facebook and it’s affiliates. This may, or may not concern you. After all, when you sign up for a Facebook account you sign a Terms and Conditions agreement to agree with all this, you did read it before signing it didn’t you?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use these sites, quite the contrary. I have a Facebook account and think it’s a really great platform but I am very careful about my privacy settings and about the information I include. What many people are unaware of is that it’s not only you that can share your information. If you don’t customize your privacy settings your friends can distribute information about you to other applications that you may not want to join. Take a little time to read the terms and customize your privacy options, make sure you understand what you’re doing. There are websites that offer help with this, for example allfacebook.com

I’m aware how easy it is to express yourself via social networking, I think it has a place for sure. It’s a great means for sharing information quickly with a large group of people that you know will share similar interests. But if Facebook dissolved today, or if they changed the rules, forcing you to close your Facebook account, you’d loose everything, your whole profile would cease to exist. All the photos, contacts and messages that you’d built up over the years would be gone (but Facebook would already have all the information it needs from you about you, your friends, shared likes and dislikes etc.) I find it scary to think that all the effort I put into my Facebook profile could end up being a complete waste of time. Imagine if Facebook continues to grow and achieves it’s rumored ambition of controlling the internet. They could start charging for the service, effectively holding your memories and communication to ransom. This may seem like an unlikely scenario but I’m just trying to illustrate to you how non-permanent and insecure your profile contents could be.

So, what’s the answer? Blogging! You own your blog. You control what’s included and you can host it wherever you want, making sure it’s secure and backed up forever. It provides you with a great platform for uploading your thoughts, pictures and links, you can even feed information from it to your Facebook page, giving you the best of both worlds. All you need to do is set up a free account. My favorite is Wordpress but there are others including Blogger. Once you have your free account you can begin writing. Some people use a blog like a diary, adding to it every day. Others only blog when they have something specific to say. Many great authors have been produced as a result of blogging. One of the most famous was the case of Julie Powell who wrote about the recipes of food writer, Julia Child. This story was eventually made into a hollywood movie.

Blogging really is a great way of expressing yourself, I think everyone should have one! Next time I’ll talk more about the benefits of blogging. I’ll give you some tips and techniques and show you how you can use RSS readers to build up a network of your own favorite blogs to take inspiration from.

Angie’s shuffle track of the day; Express Yourself - N.W.A. - Listen free on we7.com

I was describing a friend of mine as suffering from creative constipation recently. It’s a common complaint, many designers suffer from it and it can be the result of multifarious causes; tight deadlines, the distractions of every-day life, worrying about friends and families, an untidy desk. All of these have been my obstructions at one time or another, preventing my creative juices from running freely.

Fear of failure is the main culprit though, not just failure in the eyes of others but more importantly, failure to oneself. As a creative I’m cursed by the desire to create, it’s a necessary ablution - required to purge my brain of the incessant busy-ness it experiences on a daily basis. I have important things to say, I need to communicate!

But it’s not just a simple case of drawing, designing or writing just any-old-thing, it has to be good, to mean something, to make sense and, most importantly, to inspire and evoke reaction. This pressure I place upon myself is enormous, it’s enough to make me seize up into a foetal ball - like a anally-retentive hedgehog.

Luckily I’ve discovered ways of dealing with this potentially crippling condition. When  a bad case of CC kicks in, the natural response is to sit in front of a computer screen in a frozen state of panic, waiting for that elusive “idea” to formulate. This will never happen. OK, I lied, it might happen but chances are that, if it does, it will be a crappy idea.

In order to free your mind and to come up with the best ideas you just need to get working. If you are a writer, just start writing! Any old rubbish that comes to your mind will do, whether it’s related to the subject or not. The exercise of writing will free you up and you’ll find that eventually you will start to incorporate the subject at hand and little gems will appear amongst the sentences. Once this happens, go over it again, delete the rubbish, elaborate on the good stuff and craft it into something positive.

If you’re a designer or artist, get away from the computer! Pick up  a sketchbook and start drawing. If you can’t draw then go out and take some photographs or even Google images for inspiration by typing in key words. Drag what you find into a a document to create a mood board (I use Curio for this as it maintains links to the original files).

If you’re working on a design think about the individual components separately as this can be less intimidating than thinking about the job as one, huge, insurmountable project. Spend an hour playing with fonts, not just fonts on your computer but looking around at shop signs, magazines, anywhere you see type. Tracing letter-forms from magazines can be a great way of “feeling” a font instead of just liking it. Spend another hour with some paint, playing with it, experimenting to find color combinations that please you or convey the feeling you want to get across.

From these experiments your ideas will grow, some will be awful but elements will shine through that you can use in the current, or future projects. The ideal is find time to do creative exercises like these on a regular basis, even when there’s no deadline. Modern life and work pressures make this very difficult but a good employer knows that to get the best out of creative talent, employees need inspiration and time for experimentation. Most creative agencies make sure their staff are looked after fairly well with generous time off (compared to other industries) and a good working environment. (Why do you think most production companies have fridges full of wholesome food, drinks and the odd bit of alcohol?)

If you’re a freelancer, remember that you are your own employer so don’t be too hard on yourself. Allow time for experimentation and inspiration. Avoid stress, look after yourself and don’t forget to have the odd bit of fun. Finally, once the ideas start coming, enjoy it but don’t get too cocky or over-confident. You want to be freed up by these exercises but not to the extent where you’re producing nothing but a vast quantity of digital diarrhea!

Angie’s track of the day - Free Your Mind - En Vogue

I apologize for my recent silence in the blog-o-sphere but I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to my forthcoming book, “Design Essentials for the Motion Media Artist“.

It’s funny, I’ve written books before. Software books, teaching people how to use Adobe After Effects to be specific. I was commissioned to write these books, at the time there were very few books on the subject and there was a growing demand for them. I must say, I hated writing them, the process was so bogged down with technical checking and they had to be written in a very standard, linear way which I found stifling.

I’m pleased to say that this book was different. It’s about the principles of art and design, a subject very close to my heart, something I live and breathe so writing it was very hard work but also, a real pleasure. That is, till it came to illustrating the book. Creating my own images and diagrams was fine, no problem. But when it came time to adding photographs of famous inventors, artists, artworks and examples of motion graphics, the nightmares started.

I tried my best to get clearance for the images, but to no avail. First of all I had to find out who the copyright owners were, this is not as easy as you may think. In some cases several people claim to own copyright so how do I know which one to believe? Even after finding out and writing to them, I’d often get no response. One day I rang the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Italy to ask for permission to use a reproduction of The Flagellation by Piero Della Francesca, I greeted them in my best pigeon Italian (which admittedly is pretty poor!) I asked if there was anyone there who spoke English and they promptly hung up on me! This happened three times!

This was an extreme example but fairly typical in that nobody seemed interested in my offers to pay for written permissions to use their work. It seems that everybody wants to protect their work but nobody wants to sell you the rights to use it, so what’s the point in protecting it, what are they protecting it from exactly?

I have no intention of stealing anybody’s work, using it for any obscene publication, claiming that it was mine, all I wanted to do was pay tribute to some of my favorite pieces of work, and their creators. I presumed that copyright was intended to prevent the creators from losing revenue but if they’re not making it easy for people to pay, how do they expect to make any money? It seems very sad that the creative outpourings of artists and designers are surrounded by a cobweb of bureaucracy that prevents them from getting exposure, making money, providing inspiration for others and being shared, loved and developed into the art and design of tomorrow.

Since encountering this situation I have read up on copyright and want to share a couple of really interesting articles on the subject. The Abolish Copyright website explains why this system is so antiquated and has some great links to other articles. Anyone who is planning to provide web content in the UK should read up about the Digital Economy Bill which is being pushed through parliament as we speak. It’s likely to make matters a whole lot worse by propping up and supporting bad business models by giving unprecedented power to private entities to impose sanctions based on suspicion rather than due process. They can even take away your internet access if they suspect you of having copyright items on your website, it’s crazy! But, it’s not too late to act, The Open Rights Group will help you fight this insidious and draconian bill before it’s too late!

Finally, as a celebration of those brave individuals who stick two fingers up at copyright law, and as a tribute to Malcolm McLaren, a true eccentric Englishman who helped change the face of music. Bow Wow Wow’s fantastic “C30, C60, C90 - Go!” - listen free on Last FM.

I’m busy preparing to leave on a mammoth journey to San Fransisco to speak at the Macworld 2010 conference for the first time.

I’ll be talking about production workflow, specifically broadcast production as that’s where I spent 12 years of my life freelancing as a motion graphic designer/ animator.

I’ll also share some of the challenges I’ve faced in the transition from designer to creative director, and my methods for overcoming those hurdles.

The talk is part of the users conference (session code: US964) and is titled “Creative Video Workflow - From Storyboard to Completion“. It’s taking place on Friday February 12th, between 15:00 - 16:15.

Of course I’ll be talking about the software I use in my everday work, and will share some top tips and tricks. But my main focus will be on my creative processes. How do I come up with ideas? What do I do to make sure my skills are up to date? How to I collaborate with others and manage remote working?

If you’re interested in finding out more use the priority code TWEETMW when you register to get a $15 Expo pass or 15% off of any conference package. Onsite expo passes are $45, so it’s a great deal!

I hope to see you there!

I’m interested in the trend of decoupling going on in the world of TV and film production companies. It’s the world that I used to live in so it’s close to my heart. Decoupling refers to the process of reducing costs to the client by outsourcing some of the work to freelancers or external services, rather than providing them in house. Decoupling offers big opportunities to everyone in our industry from company directors to freelancers and runners, if we can be brave enough to embrace it.

Increasingly, over the past 20 years, production companies have been expected to be able to be flexible, pressurized to increase their skills, enabling them to deliver every possible service and format to their clients. This entails increasing staff to cover all areas of production, extending the capabilities of the company so they can also generate content for new and emerging mediums (web, mobile devices, games etc). The result is increased costs due to wages and also investment in bigger studio spaces.

The inevitable has happened, the work that was plentiful during these times of development has somewhat dried up. Production companies are competing even harder for the same jobs and clients find it harder to differentiate between companies as they all offer essentially the same services. Frustrated freelancers who weren’t finding the right amount of work (or satisfaction from it) started to create their own collectives which for a while injected some new life into the industry but they too have suffered from what I call the “jack of all trades syndrome”. Feeling that they must offer all services in-house, often stretching the capabilities of their employees and making the work suffer as a result.

Of course there are pros and cons with everything in life, this is no exception. On a positive note, decoupling could provide the opportunity to return to an industry where craft specialization matters. Instead of all production companies offering essentially the same services and competing for every scrap of work, each could become king of a particular area, passing work onto other companies when the work is more suited to their specific skill-field. A certain amount of this already goes on within Soho but I really believe this could be extended. It would improve the quality of work, employee morale and confidence within individual companies.

By letting some of their in house designers go and instead using freelancers, companies could open up to diversity, calling on different specialist skills appropriate for each job. It could create healthy competition between freelance creatives but also opportunity to create alliances and a network for swapping skills. In house designers can sometimes find it hard to maintain focus and motivation, so those more suited to a freelance lifestyle could benefit greatly here.

However, I worked as a freelancer in the industry for over 12 years so I know, only too well the challenges that can be faced. Remote working is not easy, you need to be motivated, focused, pro-active and willing to network. Ideas can be harder to develop on your own, it’s amazing how much creative development goes on during breaks around the coffee machine or meetings in the pub after work for production companies. Get rid of your in house team and you risk losing the teamwork that’s so valuable for the development of ideas and a sense of company identity. It can also be hard to find the right people at the right time to work on a production, they may be busy with another company.

On the whole though I see decoupling as an exciting prospect. It increases the unknown to the equation. Risk and uncertainty can be scary but embrace them and you often find new exciting challenges that, combined with a bit of initiative, can be the impetus to creativity in it’s truest sense. I’d love to hear the thoughts of other design professionals about the whole debate associated with decoupling, and also any stories about the challenges associated with remote working. What are these difficulties and how can we find ways of making it work?

Tomorrow I’ll be in Manchester talking about Final Cut Studio and GridIron Flow integration. Please click on the link below if you are interested in attending. It’s free to attend and should be a great event.

Join us in Manchester and experience the latest advances in video production and audio creation on the Mac. This exclusive event will showcase the new versions of Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio, along with the expanding ecosystem of solutions that make the Mac the creative platform of choice.

The event is free to attend but spaces are limited so you should register now to be sure of your place.

Manchester - November 24
The Printworks
Withy Grove
Manchester
M4 2BS

Reserve Seat

I’m hoping to see a few of you at MacWorld 2010 where I’ll be speaking next year. I love San Fransisco so will be taking a little extra time out to hang out with my old friends, Amacker and Nina at the Lucky 13 bar on Castro. I also hope to catch up with all my other SF buddies, it’s always hard to fit everything in as there are so many people I love in the bay area!

If you’d like to attend you can click on the banner to the left to get a discount. Click on the Register button and then just use my personal priority code, ATAYLOR when you register.
Below are details about the talk I’ll be delivering;

Users Conference US964: Creative Video Workflow - From Storyboard to Completion - Feb. 12, 2010    3:00 PM - 4:15 PM

Angie Taylor will take you on a journey through a typical video project, showing the entire process including the creation of sketches, brainstorms and storyboards, audio production and clean up, editing, and producing the final project. Angie will also discuss how creative professionals can bring unity and clarity to complex creative projects. Aspects of automating time sheets, liaising with clients, auditing jobs and packaging final files for delivery will be explored within this session.

Anyone with personal or professional interests in creating digital videos and working with tools such as After Effects, Flash, Flow, CS4, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and Soundbooth, will benefit from this session.

If you are interested in a streamlined way to look at the digital video process including tips and tricks using various software tools that will help maximize the creative input and minimize the project complexities, then this session is for you!

Angie’s Shuffle Track of the Day: San Fransisco - Scott McKenzie - listen free on Last FM

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released the Flow 1.0.2 update to provide support for Quark Express 8 plus Final Cut Studio 3!

Check it out by clicking here!

Your installed application should automatically update but you can double-check by Opening Flow and going to Help menu > Check for Updates.

Enjoy!

Angie Taylor - Creative Director, GridIron Software

Angie Taylor in 1975 - two years before discovering punkrock!

Growing up in Scotland in 1975, I had no idea what was going on the other side of the Atlantic. Little did I know that American women there were in the process of breaking ground so that people like me could find a voice an be accepted despite our inherent idiosyncrasies!

The first woman who I remember having the ideals and attitude that define the category of “punk” was the wonderful and truly original, Patti Smith. I’m sure Patti hates labels as much as I do. In fact the majority of folks labeled “punk” would kick and scream against having it safety-pinned to them. Sadly it’s human nature to feel the need to classify so, Patti, sorry for calling you a punk but please see it as the badge of honor it’s intended to be!

Patti was 29 in 1975, a veteran in punk terms, when she released Horses, her debut ground-breaking mix of rock and poetry. Lenny Kaye, the bands guitarist was also a writer. Lenny has been accused of instigating the use of “Punk Rock” to describe the raw, basic, gut-formed music that was desperately in need of a genre-defining moniker.

Horses is one of my top albums of all time. It fits into my elite category of “albums I never get tired of hearing” (of which there are only about 20). She continues to record and perform today and her recent albums are just as compelling as they ever were. She’s one of those rare individuals who, as well as writing her own fabulous originals (like title-track Horses) can take other artists songs and make them completely her own, take for example her cover of Them’s Gloria or, more recently, Nirvana’s, Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Patti also had a big influence on the “Punk look”, and on design. She was the first woman I remember seeing wearing a biker jacket, jeans and cowboy boots, just like the guys, and she looked great with her straggly hair and gaunt beauty. She lived with photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe who produced countless iconic images of Patti, including the album covers.

Patti was part of the legendary CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City scene in New York in the the early seventies. The scene was frequented other great notaries of the punk scene like Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, The Ramones, Wayne (Jayne) County and of course Debbie Harry who started out as a waitress at the clubs and went on to form 80’s supergroup, Blondie. Debbie Harry brought sex to the Punk Rock movement, most female punks were considered unattractive by regular guys but Debbie Harry toyed with their affections by pouting at the camera, then following this with mocking, teasing gestures. Sadly, partly due to her cuteness, I think she never got the recognition she deserved as a top song-writer and performer. She and Blondie write some of the greatest punk love songs of all time including “Picture This“, “Denis“, “Hangin on the Telephone” and “In the Flesh“. After all, punks fall in love too y’know!

Nico became noticed as part of the Velvet Underground/ Andy Warhol scene at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Her gorgeously, deep, flat vocals can be heard on Femme Fatale, I’ll be Your Mirror and All tomorrow’s Parties as well as others considered to some of the best Velvet Underground tracks. Although the Velvets can’t really be considered punks their influence on the punk movement can’t be underestimated. People like Siouxsie Sioux had ground broken for them by the likes of Nico with her fusing of 60’s Berlin beatnik, Marlene Deitrich style deep vocals and a passion for the art of singing that can also be seen in the likes of Beth Gibbons from Portishead.

There were countless other acts that influenced me and others, and still continue to do so. Joan Jett was a rock chic of the highest order, as was the Pretenders, Chrissie Hynde. You just have to look at the amazing Alison Mossheart of The Kills, Discount, and more recently, Dead Weather to see their influence carried down the generations.

Without these ground-breaking women we wouldn’t have had PJ Harvey, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Madonna, Bjork who are mainstream pop icons of today. And we definitely wouldn’t have any of the women that formed the UK punk scene who we’re going to take a look at in the next installment. I hope you enjoy my little nostalgic trip down memory lane. Please listen to the music and please feel free to chime in if you think I’ve missed anyone!

After receiving good feedback for my blog on the influence of punk on design, I thought I’d keep on subject and write about the women of “punk” who inspired me personally, not just creatively, but in almost everything I do.

I went to see my old friends The Slits last week in Brighton Concorde 2. They were just as amazing as ever, I don’t know how Ari, Tessa and the others have the energy to get up there every night and do their thing, as well as travelling. I was lucky enough to work with The Slits a few years back, producing and directing a live shoot of their gig at the Royal Festival Hall, part of Morrisey’s Meltdown Festival.

It’s funny, I was slightly concerned that it may be a mistake to meet my old punk heroes after so many years (I originally met them briefly in 1979) but I needn’t have worried, they were just as inspiring, revolutionary and refreshing as they ever were. Still continuing to break new ground and fighting against a music establishment that still considers it a novelty when women can write and play innovative and accomplished music.

what I really loved about The Slits, growing up was their originality. They were unlike any of the other “punk” bands. They didn’t seem to want to conform to the usual punk stereotypes of girls in fishnets and bondage clothing, their dress sense and music was taken from a wide range of different styles and cultures, uniquely “Slitsy”.

Their lyrics were confrontational, witty and anti-establishment in the most personal and positive way, they sang songs about the lives that “Typical Girls” led. They looked (like me) as if they would have had trouble “fitting in” before the punk movement came along, I could identify with them. And on top of that, I loved their music, a mix of reggae, dub, punk, soul and all sorts of other influences meant there was nobody else quite like them. Their rendition of Marvyn Gaye’s “Heard it Through the Grapevine” is still one of my favorite cover-versions of all time.

It was a funny old day, the day of the Brighton gig. I regularly take my niece out on a Saturday morning, we go down to our local beach cafe for breakfast and to talk about life, the universe and everything! And who should we bump into but Ari, Tessa and co having breakfast! So we sat with them and they invited my niece Frankie along to the gig that night.

We all popped along there in the evening and had the best night out ever, The Slits were amazing, the crowd were lovely, lively and very friendly. Ari looked after us well, making sure that we got a safe spot, right at the front so that Frankie, and her friend, Faye didn’t get squashed.

They have a new album out, Trapped Animal, which I haven’t yet heard but has got good reviews. And Island Records are re-releasing their brilliant, seminal album, Cut as part of their “top 50 Island Records”.

So, it’s inspired me to start a series of blogs on women who have inspired me in my work. I’ll start with the ones considered to be “punks” and see where that takes me. Next week I’ll go back in time a little and look at some of my musical heroes from across the pond including Patti Smith and Nico.

I went to Amsterdam earlier this month, with the Gridiron gang, to attend IBC 2009. I had several meetings to attend, demo’s to do and an interview or two to give. So I packed my suitcase with all my usual accouterments, everything I would need for a business trip in a distant land! I get especially nervous when packing for a trip like this, what should I bring, and what is it OK to leave behind?

These seem like life-threatening decisions in terms of the anxiety they produce. The bag mustn’t be too heavy, otherwise I may aggravate my old shoulder injury. On the other hand, I mustn’t be caught short in front of my colleagues by forgetting a vitally important piece of equipment. I need to make sure I have backups of every item in case a cable stops functioning, or a hard drive breaks down so I usually pack two of each small item. Bigger items, like my Macbook Pro cannot be duplicated so they are packed in my carry on bag along with other fragile items.

Then there’s the bloody palaver with liquids to contend with! Do I take shampoo, or do I use the crappy ones the hotels provide? And what about conditioner? I’ve just had a fresh bleach-job done on my hair so I’ll need that too. So I pack all the lotions and potions I could possibly need, end up using a very small percentage of them, and then over-packing my bag for the journey home with more bad-quality toiletries pilfered from the hotels, it’s craziness. Plus, I’m always tempted by those cute little 100 ml containers of essential gunk that they sell to us in the airports - Listerine have made a fortune out of me in the last six months!

Anyway, after a day of decision-making, un-making, then re-making. Irritating my partner with “do you think I’ll need this?” every two minutes. I finally decide on the perfectly packaged selection of items and board the plane with a sense of relief. Time for my customary British Airways G&T, I can finally relax. “I’m sorry Madam (I hate being called Madam!) we no longer serve ice and lemon in standard class” I’m told by the air steward. So, my one solitary treat that I allow myself to make the ordeal of packing and flying bearable has now been removed by British Airways and their continual penny-pinching ways. That’s it, the straw that finally broke the camels back, I’ve flown with BA regularly for years but that’s it, no more am I paying a premium for a service that’s no better than the budget airlines. Sorry, digressing but had to get that off my chest! I mean, it’s not a G&T without ice and lemon, really!

So, finally I make it to Amsterdam and the RAI where I’ve attended IBC, and other events for the last 12 years. I love this city, and it’s people. In fact if I was to live anywhere else in the world than my dear, dear Brighton, it would be Amsterdam. IBC was really good for us at GridIron, we were partnering with Apple on a few events and briefings at the Miranda Pavilion which were very well attended by an excellent, highly qualified group of individuals. We showed Flow and had amazing responses from them. Apple also hosted a party for us at the pavilion where Mark Coleran gave an excellent presentation on his journey from Screen Designer on holywood movies to becoming the graphical interface designer of Flow.

I also saw some cool stuff, I was impressed by JVC’s HM series of cameras (and I’m a Sony-girl!) These cameras record direct to SD cards in MPEG (for ingest through Log and transfer) or Quicktime for direct drag and drop into the Final Cut Pro timeline. Very nice indeed. Adobe Story looks like an interesting product for scriptwriters, a new market for Adobe, interesting to see how it fairs. Object Matrix is a compelling product that you must see if you’re at all interested in affordable, scalable, secure storage, they make it a piece of cake. And of course the improvements made to Apple’s own Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Server continue to impress.

So, of course I came home with a much heavier suitcase, packed with brochures, receipts, giveaways and all sorts of other flotsam and jetsam. That was two weeks ago and I’m only just unpacking now! In fact I’ve done two other events since returning, have stayed in two other hotels and now have two suitcases to unpack! It’s a sorry state of affairs when you have to have rotating suitcases - two cases, each with enough clothing, toiletries and other essentials so that you can leave on a second trip before you feel like you’ve completed the first. I really am a trolley-demo-dolly!

Angie’s shuffle track of the day - Another Girl, Another Planet, The Only Ones - Listen free on Last FM

I’ve had many careers in my lifetime, one of them being a deejay in the 1990s London club scene. I regularly deejayed at clubs like FF at Turnmills, Mix it at Heaven, The Fridge, The legendary Bell in Kings Cross, and the good old Market Tavern. I gave it all up in about 1993 to follow my heart and find a way of making a living from my art, through motion graphic design. It’s taken me to places I never expected to be and here I am, Creative Director of a software company - sometimes I wonder how the hell I got here!

Anyway, next Sunday I’ll be marrying two of my worlds. We, GridIron Software, will be at IBC next week, partnering with Apple to show how our products can integrate and improve the production workflow. I’ll be working with Apple, showing how to get the best from Flow and their new Final Cut Studio.

Apple and GridIron will also be partnering on some other stuff that includes our IBC Party. We’ll be celebrating with our industry friends, the success of Flow which has recently had some amazing reviews. We’ll have a short introduction from our CEO and founder, Steve Forde, followed by a talk on Screen Design by our very own Mark Coleran, who designed screeen graphics for hollywood movies such as Tomb Raider, The World is not Enough, and the Bourne Identity. Mark left his career in Screen Graphic Design and joined GirdIron Software to work on the user experience and interface for Flow.

I’ll be dusting down my headphones, providing the MC services and also deejaying after Marks talk. I’ll be playing a mixture of music to suit everyone but please feel free to ask for requests by using the comments section below. The event is for pre-registered guests only but we have a few spare tickets available at the exhibition. So, if you want to come along, please make your way to the JVC stand in hall 10 (stand 10.D41) at the following times;

Friday – 12.00-12.30, 14.30-15.00
Saturday – 9.30-10.00, 13.00-13.30
Sunday – 9.30-10.00, 16.30-17.00
Monday – 9.30-10.00, 16.00-16.30

Please make yourself known to me. You can always request some music and I’ll try my best to play it for you!

looking forward to seeing you there!

Angie’s shuffle track of the day - Panic, The Smiths - listen free on We7.com

Flow 1.0.1 gives full support for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) as well as many many feature enhancements for both Mac and Windows users.  I recommend all current users of Flow to download the update on both Mac and Windows.

The auto updater will be posted shortly - so if you already are a customer or have the trial installed - Flow 1.0.0 will update itself.

Here is a link to the trial (which will work for licensed users as well) if you want to download immediately.

http://www.gridironsoftware.com/free_trials/flow/register.html

Let us know what you think!

S.

Just a quick link for all those attending IBC in Amsterdam - We don’t have a booth this year (doing some pretty neat offsite stuff with Apple though) as we chose to host a kick-ass party instead!

Date: Sunday, September 13th

Time: 5:30 till Whenever….

Place: Miranda Paviljoen

Miranda Zaal
1st Floor
Amsteldijk 223
Amsterdam, 1079 LK

So - if you are going to IBC - you are invited!  Come one - come all, and check out some cool integration between GridIron Flow and Final Cut Studio 3.

Make sure you register as space is not infinite.

There will be folks from GridIron, Apple and also our own Mark Coleran will be showing some cool ‘movie stuff’.

Click the image to go to the registration page!

Click here to register for the party

S.

One feature of GridIron Flow I’ve seen people really go nuts for is its ability to "roll back" a Photoshop document to a previous version. (Flow creates versions automatically.) I think the reason for this enthusiasm is the numerous ways in which you can inadvertently "harm" a Photoshop file - permanently altering (or deleting) data. Sometimes, this is intentional, but occasionally it’s just a byproduct of the creative process.

Here are my top "gotchas" in Photoshop and how you can avoid them. (Even if you don’t avoid them, Flow can get the data back for you.)

1. Flattening the document

People seem to think that they need to flatten a file before saving it as a JPEG or another "flat" file format. Photoshop is actually pretty smart about this. If you choose "Save as", and you choose a format other than TIFF or PSD, Photoshop knows that you’re saving a COPY of the file. It will, when creating the export file, flatten a copy of the document and save it out leaving your original in all its multi-layered glory.

2. Resizing a document for the web

Hopefully, this isn’t as much of a "bad habit" as it used to be, but I’m amazed at how many people still resize their SOURCE Photoshop file, save a JPEG copy of it, and then simply don’t save the resized results. This is pretty dangerous; if you step away for a minute (or for lunch), you could easily come back and save over your original data. Provided you don’t close the document, you can still "undo" the resize, save the file, and restore the data.

Instead, if you’re resizing a file to create a smaller JPEG for the web or for emailing, use the Save for Web command. It may complain that your file is too big, yadda yadda, but doesn’t crash like it used to. On the right size of the SFW window is a "Resize Image" function (this changed a bit between CS3 and CS4). It’s important to note that Save for Web assumes you want to save a COPY of the file for the web. Hence, nothing you do in this window affects the original document. If you enter a resizing value of, say, 600×600, Photoshop will resize the image so that the longest dimension (width for landscape, height for portrait) is 600 pixels. Then, you can save out this copy of the file without risking harm to the source.

3. Merging two (or more) layers.

There are times when you need two layers to become one for various reasons. This is another situation where you are deleting data, so the goal is to preserve the original information while creating a single layer on which to work.

Rather than merging the layers to each other, you can merge two layers to a third; achieving what you wanted, but still maintaining the original data.

To merge two layers, make those two layers visible and hide the other layers.
Then, create a blank layer.
With the blank layer selected - hold down the Option key (Mac) or Alt key (Windows) and choose "Merge vislble"

Photoshop will merge the two layers into the blank layer. If you’re merging a large number of layers, you can place the originals in a group (Folder) and then close the folder so you only see the folder layer and the merged layer you created.

4. Rotating a layer or image

When resizing an image, it’s possible to leave a certain precentage of the original pixels intact if the scaling percentage is very small; say, 1-5 percent or so. Likewise, if you rotate an image just slightly, you aren’t affecting a majority of the pixels very much.

But we only occasionally tend to scale or rotate an image in such subtle ways. It’s usually a bit more dramatic. In those cases, every single pixel in the document is modified. If the information is placed as a smart object, all of the original data is still intact. If not, it’s… not.

In those instances, rotation or resizing is a permanent change to th file (once it’s saved). And, if you scaled the wrong layer or simply change your mind about the design, you need to go back to the original document and recreate the layer - a tedious (and sometimes impossible) task.

The biggest defense I’ve already mentioned - convert a layer you plan to modify into a Smart Object. You can alwas double-click the layer to edit the contents. If you forgot to make it a smart object, GridIron Flow can let you revert back to a previous version with the layer intact, save a copy of that document, and you can drag and drop a replacement layer in.

5. Rasterizing Type / Converting Type to Outlines

Lots of workarounds for these; the most obvious is "If you need to rasterize/outline type, duplicate the layer FIRST, and rasterize/outline the duplicated layer." But it’s really easy to rasterize/outline type "just for a second/to try something" and head a bit too far down a design path from which you can’t backtrack.

The loss is actually two-fold - 1. You’ll need to spend time resetting type, including leading/tracking/kerning tweaks and 2. Photoshop "forgets" what font was used to create that layer. If you need to come back a year later and edit or recreate the file, you need to first figure out of that font is Galliard or Garamond.

Here again, Flow would let you go back a version or three and grab either the type layer from it, or information about that typeface.

6. What RAW file did this come from?

RAW files can be placed in Photoshop as Smart Objects allowing, at any time further down the process, you to go back and edit the RAW adjustments performed on it.

Again, this requires forethought and is (ironically) not the way Photoshop assumes you want to work. (Placing another file within a Photoshop document does default to being a Smart Object.)

If you’re more of a copy/paste kind of person, it’s pretty easy to lose track of which RAW file EXACTLY was the source of a layer in a Photoshop file. Photoshop keeps no record of which file it was, and the RAW file has no knowledge of where it has been used.

Flow will track the relationship between the RAW document, any other files into which it was copy/pasted, and any resulting JPEG files created from it. In short, you have a "bread crumb" path of where a raw file has gone.

Last week I spoke about the Punk revolution in the UK and how inspiring it was to young people like me. Today I’ll talk about some of the great designers who emerged from that scene. I’ll start by looking at two of the key players who defined the style of the Punk Rock movement in the UK. 

There’s not one person responsible for the style of Punk, it was a coming together of minds and styles. A collective, group activity gained momentum, and as a result, the various styles of the people involved merged into an established fashion. But the pivotal people were the ones who recognized the elements that would excite and brought them together with style, panache and, of course an eye for design.

The punk movement grew out of a basic disillusionment, with the establishment, the music scene, fashion, the media. What better way to show your dissatisfaction than to tear it all up and start again? That’s exactly what punks did. Essays on design refer to this as “Deconstruction”. This wasn’t a new concept, post-modern art movements like the Dadaists and, ironically, the Constructivists used techniques of disassembly and reassembly to shake up the status quo and embrace a new way of looking at things.

In New York in the early seventies, bands like the New York Dolls would dress up in womens clothes in an attempt to shock away the apathy that existed in the music scene. Richard Hell was the one who became a blueprint for thousands of young punks, defining the spikey hair and ripped t-shirt look before anyone else. But it was really Vivienne Westwood who took the look and developed it into a recognizable style. Now one of our top designers, she started off with a small clothes shop on the Kings Road in London. She and Malcolm McClaren owned “Let it Rock”, a shop selling biker gear and teddy boy clothes. In 1974 this was revamped and renamed SEX, catering to the S&M scene and positioning itself nicely to shock the nation and take punk rock to the headlines.

The Sex Pistols hung out in the shop and that’s where the whole thing took off, the band formed, McClaren became the manager, and Vivienne designed clothes for them under the label, “Seditionaries” - it was a symbiotic relationship. At Art School Malcolm McClaren metJamie Reid, a political activist and Situationist who was producing a radical magazine called Suburban Press. He used a cut and paste style of graphics in this magazine, and it was then that he defined his trade-mark ransom-note lettering that was made famous by the Sex Pistols first album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols“.

In the next installment we’ll take a look at the designers who emerged from, or were directly influenced by the Punk movement. 

Patti Smith - Smells Like Teen Spirit, listen free on Last FM