Another hot Summer day

Today was a really hot day. A ridiculously hot day. That's quite unusual here, in Santa Barbara. Fortunately, we don't have skyscrapers; imagine what might have happened...



This was made in Photoshop and After Effects. I started with a stock image of a skyline (found on stock.xchng and a picture of one my girls holding a watering can. I isolated the buildings in Photoshop and placed them in 3D layers in After effects. I animated the buildings with the puppet tool, and the arm and the hand with keyframes. I followed this tutorial  for the clouds, and played with lights for the shadows and the sky colors variation. Finally, I used Audacity for the music, modifying a short excerpt of "Cripple Creek".

Fly, raspberries, fly...

Raspberries season is almost over. Too bad: those little fragile red things are among my favorite fruits.
Hopefully those eight will reseed themselves. Fly, raspberries, fly!

I used three pictures for that image: my hand, a cloudy sky, and raspberries on a white background.
I duplicated the sky twice and played with the blending modes, converted the sky and my hand to black and white, saturated the raspberries and added some motion blur.
Makes me hungry...

Happy B-day, Bro!

Today is my brother's birthday! Happy birthday, Aurélien!



I used Photoshop for the pictures (transorming a double burger into a taller one, make 22 candles from 20, and isolating a flame), and After Effects for the animation (the flames, the camera move, and the text).
Bon appétit, Aurélien!

Why are there stars in the sky?

My oldest daughter is four, and my youngest is two. Can you guess how many whys we are asked every day? Unless you have preschooler triplets, you're probably not even close. Fortunately, we always know the answer (just kidding...).
This was a visual explanation to "Why are there stars in the sky?"

This is a frame-by-frame animation done in Flash CS4.

A Californian Bouquet

I have been living in California for several years, and I met other expats who have now gone other places. I'm sure they miss californian palm trees, so I wanted to offer them a "californian bouquet"...

All was done in Photoshop CS5. I took three pictures: palm trees, blue sky and my hand (originally holding straws). I removed one palm tree from its background, dropped it onto the blue sky, duplicated it, bent the three palm trees with the new and very cool "puppet tool", added my hand (without the straws), played a little bit with light and colors, sharpened the trees... et voilà. A cure against homesickness?

Thanks for stopping by!

Hello! Thanks for stopping by!
So here it is: my first blog. And in English, s'il vous plaît!  Let's be honest: this post will most likely be the wordiest (so you might not even notice if I surreptitiously switch to French!). Later posts will mainly consist of visual explorations: photography, animations, and little movies.
Hope to see you again soon :-)