if you want to be an artist on the internet,
Congratulations! You already are. Keep making whatever you like to make.
If you want to be an artist on the internet who is popular-
if that's what's important-
then you must find a balance between what you like to make and what the crowd wants to see from the likes of you.
The elusive viral coefficients
So an artist works hard and tries different things. He might start out making some incredibly labor-intensive hyper lapses of buildings
But not receive much of a reaction so he moves on to stop-motion animation and funny
This is how I effects with varying degrees of audience appreciation, but he's still not Vine royalty. And then one day on a whim
He posts a trick loop that changes everything
Are you watching closely?
A game of catch with his own reflection
Ok. What?
Every web community has their own way of dealing with
challenging content. The Imgurians of the west will post gifts that convey complex emotions
They're otherwise incapable of expressing. The Tumblrs of the north will point out ways in which your creation might be
culturally offensive. The 4Chans of the south will find and post those pictures you sent to that one girl.
And the citizens of the floating Metropolis of Reddit will team up and try to figure your trick out
through the time-honored tradition of easily distracted debate
The two schools of thought on the mirrorball video seem to be that it's either a staged shot
and there's no mirror at all, just two people really tossing the ball to each other.
Or that there is a mirror and some sort of
VFX witchcraft is involved. Since my help on the matter has been officially requested
I'm here to officially inform you that it's the latter, but before you burn the young creator of the video at the stake
let's examine exactly, how he did it?
it's a clever trick because it uses physics and optics to do most of the work and just a touch of
digital manipulation to complete the illusion
Thrown at just the right trajectory and with the right amount of force the ball hits the mirror at the apex of its arc
So that the bounced reflection looks identical to what it would have looked like if the ball
continued to travel past the mirror. What seems like a toss into the mirror and back is actually two
Identical bounces against the mirror. During the first the camera follows into the reflection. During the second
it follows back to the hand. Of course there's a second copy of the ball visible during every part of the journey
And often the best use of visual effects is not to add things into the scene
But to subtly take existing things away. Some judicious frame-by-frame
cloning of the background is enough to hide the real ball during the second half of the first bounce
and the reflected ball during the return bounce
okay, let's give this a try
Oh God
Ok. Let's give this a try again
Cool, you'd think the camera shake would make it a challenge to mask the ball
But it actually helps hide the imperfections
filming while performing a series of bounces in a row and then picking the most
Symmetrical pair makes it possible to create a seamless loop that's highly addictive to watch
ladies and gentlemen please welcome
YouTube personality Captain disillusion
Web videos
A seamingly random jumble of ones and zeros converted into moving pictures have the power to amuse
outraged and arouse us
some even have the power to do all three at once, if you know what I mean
And the winner of today's Internet is
Mirror Ball by animator Kevin Parry this is the first award and 426 nomination for Kevin Parry
coming up King Bach and Zack King