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| A* Episode 5, Daily 177 | Sep 10, 2009 7:50 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Got the urge to revamp the A* animated title to something that takes advantage of the full gray-scale route I'm going now, and is closer to the black-on-black-with-white-back-lighting style I've been using in recent versions of the A* logo. I've placed the result of this overnight design fit in the episode 5 gallery; click this low-color cropped icon version to check the full thing out:
It isn't quite as high-contrast, "arty," and dynamic as the old title intro, but I think it's a little more polished, and easier to read...maybe a little darker and more ominous, too! Oooh dark.
The version you can see in the art gallery is the full 256 standard gray-scale; the "color banding" effect you see in the swirling cloudy gray stuff, particularly toward the beginning, is an artifact of the Gaussian Blur Photoshop filter I used to make the clouds, and that artifacting gets more pronounced when you layer semi-transparent layers, which I did a lot of in this to get the effect of movement.
If I'd have been smarter or more resourceful I'd have used something smoother, I guess, but I've convinced myself I like these artifacts ;); I do tend to prefer art that includes the "rough edges" allowing you to see the hand of the artist and how they put it together, like individual pencil strokes in a sketch. It reminds me of the law of conservation of information, which says that even something sucked into a black hole, completely crushed, mangled, melted, atomized, sub-atomized--in other words, entirely disintegrated--could, in the full course of time, be retrieved and reassembled (Stephen Hawking, as you'll see in the book that link above goes to, didn't agree with this at first, but he eventually showed that black holes *do* release their mass back into the universe at large through a process he described with quantum mechanics, and which came to be known as "Hawking radiation").
Good matter for science-fiction, but the only use of it I can say I've seen was in the most recent Batman movie, where Bats recovered a fingerprint off a bullet that had been shot into a wall by somehow scanning the bullet fragments in the wall and using a computer program to calculate their physics backwards, thus reassembling a perfect 3D image of the bullet pre-firing, complete with fingerprint. There is absolutely no way that we have anything close to the knowledge and data gathering and processing power necessary to accomplish this (I tend to think we never will; computing knowledge and physics prowess aside, there's still a little thing known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle standing in the way), and it's ludicrous for the movie to try passing it off as something conceivable with roughly modern-day human technology and resources. Oh well, I'm sure someone will come up with a better conservation of information story implementation one of these days.
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