Month: November 2011

Nokia N9

I shall not drill in too much into the specifications of Nokia N9. You can find them from Nokia Singapore official website.

Nokia N9 is a touch screen smart phone, running on MeeGo. N9 seeks for simplicity, sleek and thin in design. It is available in 3 colours: pink, blue and black.

Nokia N9
Nokia N9

Nokia N9
Nokia N9’s Front Facing Camera At The Bottom

I did 2 hands-on videos with Nokia N9, featuring N9’s: three home views screen and camera feature.

When every mobile device goes for 1  home button design, part of the mobile lifespan is highly dependent on this tiny hardware. N9 is buttonless, except for power, volume control, lock button. User only need to double tap on the screen to WAKE UP the phone. How great!

N9 has only 3 home views:

  • Main menu view
  • Feeds view
  • Multi-tasking view

Swipe left to change the views. Main menu is where all your utility applications are, feeds view are customizable to show what you want to read, and multi-tasking view reveals what are applications are running simultaneously.

Being an anal freak, I love CLOSING all running applications after use. With N9, you can simply do so by press and holding the screen in multi-tasking view.

Swiping through these views are spontaneously smooth. But sometime, it seems like this can be more accurately done by swiping edge to edge across the screen.

Camera in Nokia N9 has quite a decent number of settings user can play with:

  • Image capture setting
  • White balance
  • Exposure compensation
  • Color filter
  • ISO
  • Image aspect ratio
  • Image resolution
  • Face detection
  • Allows geotagging

The front facing camera is placed at the lower right hand corner. It is a pity I can’t activate the front facing camera. It requires 3rd party applications which make use of this to turn it on.

N.E.mation! 6 Bloggers’ Animation Workshop

Time really flies. N.E.mation! is running their 6th nation-wide animation competition this year. Competition has already started. The theme this year is ‘NS: From Fathers to Sons’.

N.E.mation is a yearly affair. Students who are keen in animation shall represent their secondary schools to participate in this nation-wide animation competition. Organised by Nexus and Animagine, teams will pitch their stories to the panels. Top 10 teams are selected to  produce their animation in 3 weeks in Nangyang Polytechnic. After which, these clips are judged by the panel of judges and open to public for voting. The Champion team wins a fully sponsored trip to DreamWorks USA!

I have a chance to experience how paper cutout stop motion can be done. Tools needed: webcam, tripod, computer, blue tacks, paper, stationery and a playful mind.

SAM_1620Setup

SAM_1621Webcam Setup

SAM_1633AniMaker Software to capture stop motion

SAM_1635The craft papers

Before we begin, we learn the theory behind how animation works: persistence of vision. An afterimage continues to stay in the retina for one twenty-fifth of a second. If the next image is flashed quick enough, the brain and eyes will connect both images and perceived them as a continuous motion.

SAM_1628Persistence of Vision

We begin our paper cutouts after receiving storyboards and template sheets. Working in relation to A3 size paper, we produce a 640 x 480px animation. Different movable pieces are made separately then reassembled back during animation, planning ahead and following these storyboards are extremely important.

SAM_1643Our character, Mr Pumpkin

SAM_1641Paper Cutouts

To begin, you’ll first have to secure the background and the paper elements with blue tack. These elements are moved manually by hands into new positions, capture them with webcam, move again, capture again to stimulate motion.

The process is very tiring! We take turns to animate and play around with the paper cutouts. Our animation ended up with some human cast shadows. And to see how much and what you’ve moved, you’ll need to turn on the onion skin function in the software. This works pretty much like tradition pencil drawing animation where you need to flip between pages to see how your character should move in next frame.

SAM_1646Laily Animating

SAM_1647Onion skin to reveal what is underlying each adjustment

We have 200 over frames for a mere 13 seconds of animation. But we have lots of fun! See our completed stop motion below.

SAM_1653Rendering & Complete

SAM_1640Fun!

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