The Day Today

I’ve been saving this for a lazy day, and I almost forgot to post today so check out these cool free icons at Smashing Magazine. Hopefully I’ll be back to the full length posts next week!

This is a technical blog and I try not to go off subject, but I don’t think I’m too far off when I comment on some of the best computer-generated imagery I’ve seen. In any movie, the best special effects are the ones you didn’t even notice. This is because you’ve just accepted them as is and didn’t even think “That was a cool effect”. I think David Fincher is a master at this, a great example being Panic Room, where the camera appears to fit between pillars on a banister and then later through the handle of a coffee pot.

What I didn’t realise was exactly how many special effects were in Zodiac. I saw this when it came out and apart from feeling that the running time was a bit too long, I thought it was a very decent movie. The following video is a compilation of several scenes that expose the effects - this is probably most appreciated if you’ve seen the film, however there are no spoilers.

Unfortunately this video doesn’t include a scene that stood out for me, in which a taxi cab is followed from directly above - possibly because it’s more obviously a special effect as the motion is so fluid.

The other day I needed to resize a few dozen images. I was using someone elses laptop and as I didn’t have Photoshop to hand I had to improvise. I had already downloaded GIMP and used it (for the first time) to do some simple cropping and cloning, and so decided to look into creating a script in much the same way as I would have used an action in PS. After a bit of reading online I discovered that the performance of GIMP scripting in Windows was less than ideal and came across another Wordpress blog that mentioned ImageMagick, which is free and allows image manipulation from the command line.

The mentioned blog entry contained a batch operation, which will convert all images in a specified directory. I have improved this command for use with files that contain spaces (as mine did).

for /f "tokens=*" delims= " %i in ('dir /b *.jpg') do convert "%i" -resize 50% "%i"

Note that if you are using the above in a batch file, variable names are indicated using double percent symbols (%%) instead of just one.