Puppet Kaos - a blog by Kelvin Kao about puppetry, video-making, and other randomness

I’m going to start including links that I found interesting that week every weekend.

Related to puppetry and/or video-making:

Digital Forensics: 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo
This Scientific American article talks about how to spot Photoshoped images. I found it to be quite an interesting read. The “send in the clones” section actually describes what I do at work all the time. I work as a computer programmer for cell phone games. On many occassions, I have been asked to port games from a smaller phone to a bigger phone. Without larger images provided to me, I often had to enlarge the images myself. A trick that I did many times was to enlarge graphics by drawing useless things in the extra space. I often do this by copying portions of the original graphics and blend them together. Yesterday I just created a forest out of a small patch of trees that was in the original graphic to fill up some extra space. Also this article talked about the lighting stuff. It also reminded me to be more careful when I’m compositing images in my videos.

Indy Mogul: DIY Film Making
This site has a lot of tips on video making and I wish I had discovered it sooner! It talked about many different things, like how to build stop-animation models, how to build a clapperboard (slate), and so on. I’m not going to actually make a clapperboard, but I’m thinking of including a sound effect that sounds similar to a clapperboard clapping when I do voice recordings, so it would be easier for me to synch video and audio after I film.

Muppetcast: Tribute to Jim Henson
Muppetcast is a podcast about Jim Henson’s work. Last month was the 18th anniversary of Jim Henson’s death. The Muppetcast interviewed Frank Oz to talk about Jim. What touched me most wasn’t Frank’s interview though, but the other people talking about how much their lives had been influenced and inspired by Jim’s work. He really did make a difference with his vision and charisma. A true great man.

Other stuff:

Cartoon vs. Man or Fun vs. None
This one is about coloring books. It actually made me want to color again. And the author is right. I wouldn’t want to color those “realistic” ones at the bottom. It just didn’t look right.

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