The videos were produced by Stepping Stone Media with editing, grading and graphics from the Mike Afford Media Village.

Here is an example of a Beef Goulash with a squash and sweet potato mash. Yum!

More examples from Waitrose on their YouTube Channel or over at Waitrose TV

Waitrose TV Easter

The graphics were once again created from some live action footage with graphical elements added from the current Waitrose Easter branding. Built from two SD frames – a wide shot and close-up of flowers – stuck together in faux-3D in After Effects with some depth-mapped defocussing, lighting effects and camera wobble added.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, below.

Weather Icon Packs

All of my Weather Icon Packs are now available to buy at the World Weather Online Developer site.

World Weather Online have recently launched their new Developer Portal and have moved all their API management and execution on to the Mashery developer platform.

Better still, they have have very kindly listed all of the Icon Packs from my store on their own site. This includes the brand new Symbol Set 12 which is based closely on their own icon set and comes bundled with a special extended 96 icon version.

Moon Phase Symbols

I’ve also put the whole set of Moon Icons available for sale in my store. Each set comes in 3 sizes 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256 pixels. PNG format with 3 different backgrounds (including transparent).

You get the standard icons for New Moon, Waxing Crescent, 1st Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, 3rd (Last) Quarter, Waning Crescent plus the additional THREE icons between each.

Waitrose TV Live was the first ever live streamed online show for Waitrose and was produced by our good friends over at Stepping Stone Media. The show came live from the Waitrose Cookery School in north London and could be watched live via Waitrose TV and Facebook.

Waitrose TV Live

The graphics were created from some HD footage specially shot at the Cookery School using Christmas trees that had been decorated in line with Waitrose Xmas branding. I created a single super high-res environment that I could pan around in After Effects and added some extra twinkling lights in the background using particles in 3D space.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, and a trail, below.

The trail below ran on the website on the days leading up to the live show itself.

UEFA Champions League Studio

The curved backdrop is again rendered as 5 seamlessly looping movies (4 x HD and one SD). Twinkling cityscape lights created using Trapcode Particular. I also added a little movement to the floodlights (or at least those that appear in shot on close-ups).

I can’t take credit for the stadium and floodlights or any of the brand design for the Champions League itself – proper respect to Radiant for their ‘Ultimate Stage’ concept.

© boysandgirlsshop.com

I’m always interested to see how my weather symbols are being used, so I was delighted to get these cool photos from Kati at boysandgirlsshop.com featuring some familiar looking weather icons and some cute children wearing cool organic kids clothes.

I like the fact that they use (quote) “just normal kids (not models) for their marketing images to allow their individual personalities to shine through”.

Designed for Urban Living and Created with Care, Boys&Girls is a bright and brilliant combination of stylish, practical and affordable kids clothes made from fairly traded and organic cotton.

Launched in March 2011, the Boys&Girls team wanted to create a kidswear brand that was ethical, cool and accessible. Each garment is created with care using GOTS certified organic cotton and organic dying processes for extra feel-good factor and with a view to reducing the impact of manufacturing on the environment and the people that come into contact with the cotton all the way through the supply chain – not just the consumer.

Here are a few more images, but you can see more over at www.boysandgirlsshop.com

 
Boys&Girls is available through www.boysandgirlsshop.com or through their 50 stockists Worldwide.

Monochrome Weather Icon Set

This time it’s a complete set of weather icons in a single colour – black versions for light backgrounds and white versions for dark backgrounds.

This pack includes 42 icons as transparent PNGs – one set black, one set white, each at 2 sizes (64×64 and 512×512 pixels).

The set also includes vector artwork in Illustrator (CS5) and EPS8 formats.

A special bonus Photoshop file has every single symbol in a separate layer as a Vector Smart Object, so it’s easy enough to resize the entire set to any resolution you like. I’ve opened the Photoshop file in CS3 to CS6 and it works fine – probably earlier versions too.

By the way – I’ve nicknamed this set ‘The Monochrome Set’ in honour of arguably the greatest band of all time…

Euro 2012 Virtual Studio

 
I can’t take credit for any of the branding – as far as I can tell (from literally minutes of research), the broadcast toolkit was produced by the Lambie Nairn agency (of course), based on the original brand design by BRANDIA CENTRAL. This guy – Ed Walker has some nice examples of the stuff he did while at Lambie Nairn which seemingly landed them the broadcast gig.

I suppose most of my time was split between re-texturing the set to match the Euro 2012 ‘look’ , and also building some massive new animations to go in the ‘virtual’ screens. The ‘broadcast toolkit’ had a couple of looping animations supplied, but neither looked great blown up across the equivalent of five HD screens. Anyway, in the end I just bit the bullet and rebuilt a load of stuff from scratch. I was quite pleased with the results, and more importantly it got the all clear from UEFA.

I have to say – the broadcast toolkit itself came in an exquisite little package with a lovely little branded hard drive. Really wish I’d taken some pics of it before I sent it back…

* When I say lucky viewers, I mean lucky that they live in Australia. Last I heard this VR set is only going out on Setanta Sports Australia and Setanta Sports Singapore – possibly elsewhere in Asia, but definitely not here in Ireland.

Golden Ratio Weather Symbols

These example images are all at screen resolution (and hastily comped together), but the artwork was built originally using vectors and all my calculations used way more decimal places than was strictly necessary.

The cloud is a similar ‘4-circle’ design that follows some of the rules of the ‘True Golden Ratio’ cloud. The sun has a diameter equivalent to 1, and so is in ‘golden’ proportion to the circle within the cloud immediately below it. The top point of the raindrop is exactly where the horizontal and vertical golden sections intersect.

The bounding box of the cloud shape is centred within the overall square (phi X phi) with the result that the lower section of the square defined by the first horizontal ‘golden section’ is halved exactly by the baseline of the cloud. There are probably more ‘happy accidents’, or coincidences I haven’t noticed yet, that are nevertheless based solely on the underlying mathematics.

Golden Ratio Weather Symbols : Price € 15

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I’ve included the vector artwork (complete with all the guide layers) as part of this bundle – you can find out more details over here in my store.

The vector project file itself makes a handy starting point and/or template if anyone fancies designing their own ‘Golden’ graphics.

So here is the ‘School Pack’ – designed for anyone who wants simply to print out some weather symbols for kids, or perhaps use them as illustrations for children’s weather worksheets. I figured that a set of symbols as individual PDF files might be the most versatile and useful – they can be scaled up and printed poster-size if you want, or easily embedded as illustrations in other documents.

The pack consists of 20 of the most ‘classic’ weather symbols (sunshine, sunny spells, white cloud, black cloud, light and heavy rain, snow, hail, sleet and thunderstorms, and the equivalent versions for ’showers’ with a bit of sun peeking out). They are each saved as an individual PDF file – the symbols are in vector format, so can be scaled and printed at any size. There are two versions of each symbol too – a full colour one and a special set of one-colour versions.

As always, these are royalty free for personal or commercial use, and are designed specifically as a safe and legal alternative to the (copyrighted) BBC ones.

You can get the Weather Symbol School Pack right now from the store along with plenty of other symbols to choose from, or simply click on the button below.

Weather Symbol ‘School Pack’ : Price € 10

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Incidentally, the School Pack is also included as part of the complete Weather Symbol Vector Collection – which contains the full 48 symbol set with both coloured and transparent backgrounds in a fully named and layered document in Adobe Illustrator (v9 and CS5), EPS 8 formats. There’s also a PDF of the full ‘grid’ of symbols.

If you’re not sure which set is the right one for you – please do get in touch.

I’m someone with more than a passing interest in cloud icons, so this got me wondering…

The actual value of the Golden Ratio (a.k.a. Golden Section, Golden Mean, Divine Proportion, and often written as the Greek letter phi, φ) is (√5+1)/2 or 1.6180339887… So why would the Apple iCloud icon use a value of only 1.6? Perhaps by accident, rather than by design?

I mean, if you’re going to the effort of basing something on the Golden Ratio, wouldn’t you try and get the number right, or at least use a better approximation? It’s not as if graphics software can’t handle more than one decimal place…

Would the real iCloud please stand up

To find out if 1.6 really is close enough, I thought it might be interesting to see just what a ‘true’ Golden Ratio cloud icon might look like.
How easy would it be to tell them apart? And might one be more ‘beautiful’ than the other?

How to build a ‘True Golden Ratio Cloud’

First we need a bounding box to fit our cloud in. This time, the ratio of height to length needs to be exactly 1:φ

The ratio of the diameters of our first two circles needs also to be exactly ‘golden’. A very quick and easy method is to halve the width and height of the bounding box and use these values as the diameters. The circles are now precisely in ‘divine’ proportion.

The first circle sits exactly on the line that divides the length of the box according to the golden ratio. The second circle is placed so it’s touching the baseline and the right edge.

We now need two more ‘divinely proportioned’ diameters for our remaining two circles. Surely it would be churlish not to make them 1/φ and 1/φ²…?

Let’s place the larger of them on the baseline at the left. The smaller one can sit in a number of different and potentially ‘pleasing’ locations, but let’s try putting it on the line that splits the height of the bounding box according to the Golden Ratio. We can position it so that its left edge lines up vertically with the centre of the other circle.

The centre of the small circle also sits exactly halfway along a unit square horizontally. That’s the beauty of sticking to an accurate value for the Golden Ratio – inevitably ‘happy accidents’ tend to be exact.

So what does that give us…??

Well, as you can see, my ‘true’ Golden Ratio cloud is different, but not wildly different from the actual Apple iCloud symbol.

I guess there’s a few possible explanations.

Maybe it’s just pure coincindence. The designer of the original Apple iCloud logo just created something that looked visually pleasing to him/her with NO (intentional) reference to the Golden Ratio.

Maybe the designer intended to use the Golden Ratio, but felt that 1: 1.6 was near enough. Or mistakenly thought that phi was 1.6000000…

Or perhaps the original design of the iCloud logo WAS based precisely on the correct value for the golden section, but for reasons unknown was altered slightly somewhere down the line.

Who knows.

Conclusion

Is there a conclusion…? I’m not sure.

But I suppose my point is this. You don’t have to look very far to find designs with proportions that are ‘close to’ the Golden Ratio. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually based on anything at all. Any particular ‘beauty’ they possess may simply be the result of good judgement by the designer. And even when the Golden Ratio IS used as a precise starting point, subsequent revisions ‘by eye’ may produce a MORE aesthetically pleasing result. ‘Divine’ proportions aren’t necessarily better than mundane ones.

So, finally, lets see if we can answer the original questions above.

Q. Is one of these clouds the real Apple iCloud icon?
A. Yes. It was the one on the right.

Q. Is one of these clouds more ‘visually pleasing’ than the other?
A. Well, you decide. Which is it? Personally I think the Apple one is still better – somehow more ‘balanced’.

Further Reading

You can read the original article by Takamasa Matsumoto here (English version) The law of beauty hidden behind the iCloud icon

I was also inspired by Scott Hanselman’s article There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe

You can read about some of my own work for BBC Weather on the BBC’s cloud icons here

'One might need an umbrella...'

Yes, somewhat bizarrely, that’s Prince Charles weather presenter extraordinaire during a visit to the BBC in Scotland yesterday.

Seems he did a pretty good job – you can judge his efforts for yourself over here on the BBC site. By all accounts it’s also causing quite a stir on YouTube.
 

‘A heart full of songs. A van full of idiots.’

The film is described as ‘a darkly comedic love story, set in the west of Ireland and New York about a musician, Sean O’Malley (Sean Maguire) who writes an album for Amy, the girl he loves (Lorna Anderson), in an attempt to redeem himself. The album takes him on a roller-coaster journey of self discovery, where he is both helped and hindered by his misfit band mates.’

The story, written by Fiona Graham, was inspired by the music scene of the west of Ireland. The film follows, largely in flashback, the joy and heartache behind Sean’s songs and the events that led him to write each song.

‘Songs for Amy’ has a great soundtrack (see www.sonnyandskye.com/productions/music with tracks by Jim McKee, Ultan Conlon, Alabama 3 and the wonderful (and incidentally, fellow native of my wife’s home town of Keshcarrigan!) Eleanor Shanley.

‘Songs for Amy’ is directed by Konrad Begg, written by Fiona Graham and Produced by Fiona Graham and Angela Murray.

And my own contribution to what looks to be great music-inspired Irish independent movie were a number of ‘visual effects’ shots, that (all being well) won’t be noticed by a single person.

For more information about ‘Songs for Amy’ see www.sonnyandskye.com

You can join Songs For Amy on Facebook

Premier League Studio

Here’s the new set for the Premier League. The imagery features a couple of super-hi-resolution 3D renders of the premier league trophy (kindly supplied by David Phelan at Mode Vision Ltd), mixed with a load of additional layers to provide a little gentle (and seamlessly looping) animation. And finally lens flare effects using Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug-in of course.

GAA Allianz Leagues Studio

And here’s the new GAA set.

It uses the same 3D studio model as the studio above, but with a new set of animating screens inspired by stadium floodlights (which figure prominently in the title sequence). I built an HD looping crowd animation and used it to fill up a high-resolution daytime (empty) stadium shot, before giving the whole thing a dusky twilight feel, replacing the original sky with one taken from outside my studio in Leitrim. And finally, of course, plenty of optical flares.

Once again, the screens and additional textures have all been built within, and output from, one mighty After Effects project.