After Effects Most Wanted

So you've got a copy of After Effects and an idea of what this professional motion graphics and effects tools can do...but what can you really do with After Effects? How far can you push it? What are the best effects that you can create? What are the essential skills and techniques that you need to really make your creations stand out? After Effects Most Wanted answers these questions in a refreshing and practical way. Looking at a wide variety of projects, the original artists tell you why, and exactly how they created their masterpieces. The authors, all professionals who use After Effects to make a living, share with you the secrets of their successes and extend beyond that to give you the reasons why they did things the way that they did. Moreover, the accompanying CD has their creations available at your fingertips and the simple, step-by-step instructions in the book show you how they created these pieces. The projects covered are diverse, from a thought-provoking work by renowned and controversial artist Simon Tsyko, a work featured by Adobe in their motion gallery, to a television commercial for McDonald's and Coca-Cola by Peter Reynolds. Other authors include: Joost Korngold (www.renascent.nl) and Chris James Hewitt, whose Relokation Ne is the featured work on the BD4D (By Designers For Designers) web site, Christian Darkin, a digital video journalist and author, and Mark Towse, who offers two pieces, one for TV and one for the cinema. Without long, redundant discussions of tools and application packages, After Effects Most Wanted is a book that delivers the techniques, skills, and effects that will let you bring your creations to life.

This book provides the world's first and best guide to marrying After Effects and Flash technologies together, starting by taking the reader through the creation of a video project from concept to upload, with emphasis on making their workflow as efficient as possible. The rest of the book focuses on specific techniques and special effects that the reader can walk through and build, and then adapt for use on their own projects. The book supports the latest versions of After Effects and Flash.

* The author is closely tied to the community; the content and format is produced in direct response to real world experience and feedback from Illustrator users The skill level appeals to both industry professionals and hobbyists looking to hone their skills

There is no business like show business!

"This is the definitive story of Whitey Bulger…a masterwork of reporting." —Michael Connelly, best-selling author of The Wrong Side of Goodbye A New York Times Bestseller A #1 Boston Globe Bestseller An instant classic, this unforgettable narrative, rich with family ties and intrigue, follows the astonishing career of a gangster whose life was more sensational than fiction. Cullen and Murphy have broken more Bulger stories than anyone, and Whitey Bulger became front-page news, revealing the mobster's secret letters written from Plymouth Jail after the sixteen-year manhunt that led to his capture and offering unparalleled insight into his contradictions and complex personality. The afterword covering the results of the dramatic and emotional trial provides a riveting denouement to this "eminently fair and thorough telling of a life, which makes it all the more damning" (Boston Globe).

All the most common and popular uses of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 have been brought together in one volume. Each section provides a useful guide to techniques, a summary of the tools used and several step-by-step projects to clearly demonstrate each effect. There's also a wealth of tips and tricks to help you get the most out of this latest version of Elements. We've searched forums, looked in magazines, spoken to users and asked the experts at Adobe, to find out exactly what are the Most Wanted ways to use this versatile application. Everyone from ethusiastic amateurs, hobbyist photographers and business users will find invaluable advice about using this amazing image manipulation tool. Whether you are new to digital imaging or have been experimenting for several years, you'll find a wealth of information that you can immediately start putting into practice. Topics covered include: restoring and retouching photos, maipulating and merging images, creating your own artwork, sharing your pictures with others and even creating your own of web pages. On the CD that accompanies the book are all the source files to recreate the examples shown in the book, and a fully functional tryout of the latest version of the software.

Take your After Effects skills to a new level! Twelve step-by-step tutorials, designed by industry professionals, explore a variety of creative approaches as they teach useful design concepts and production techniques. Updated for After Effects 6.5, this new edition covers the most significant Version 5 and 6 features including 3D space, cameras, lights, parenting, text, animation presets, paint, and expressions. Each carefully structured project presents the "why" behind the steps, so you can adapt these techniques to your own designs and motion graphics work. All contain timeless concepts that will be of use for many years to come. After Effects in Production also contains six case studies of commercial projects created by award-winning studios such as ATTIK, Belief, Curious Pictures, The Diecks Group, Fido, and the authors' own studio, CyberMotion. These detail the integration of After Effects, 3D programs, live action, and a variety of animation techniques, revealing the artistic concepts behind the spots as well as the inventive techniques used to execute them. The enclosed DVD contains QuickTime movies of each of the final animations, allowing you to step through them frame-by-frame so you can examine them in detail.

The absolute cutting edge for application development at the moment is using Macromedia's Flash MX (the premier software for designing fantastic looking interfaces) with Microsoft's .NET framework (tremendously powerful server-side technology). Combining these technologies has been greatly aided by the release of Macromedia's Flash Remoting MX, which is covered fully in this book. Designers and developers involved in the creation of this technology impart their knowledge to you in this book through extensive case studies. Flash Remoting is not the only way to combine these technologies, however, so this book will fully cover Flash/.NET integration using ASP.NET. This book is for readers who are looking to integrate their Flash movies with a .NET-enabled back-end. It assumes no prior knowledge of server-side technologies, but does require knowledge of Flash MX and ActionScript.