Earlier this week USA TODAY released a seven chapter documentary about the Inauguration of President Barack Obama. It was a very, very long week for everyone on the documentary team. For myself, the week included a night sleeping under a desk at the downtown Washington, D.C. office, multiple 12-13 hour work days, and a diet of roasted pecans and half a cup of water on Inauguration Day.

3D Photo Animations
I’ve been waiting for the right project to use a visual technique that I refer to as 3D photo animation. The concept also helped to drive home the theme of our project: To document the individual journeys to the inauguration as well as the journey that we, as one nation, have made in our history. The 3D fly-throughs were made using a single base image and cutting out multiple layers of foreground, middle ground, background in Photoshop. I added the layered Photoshop documents to Apple Motion, spread the layers apart in 3D space, and walked a camera through the digital scene. Textures and vignettes were also added in Apple Motion.

Steve Elfers, video director at USA TODAY, and I decided early on to not mix content from multiple images. The 3D animations allow the viewer to see the scene from an entirely possible perspective, had he/she been present in the photograph. The trick was to essentially hide each duplicated piece of the scene by flying the camera around and through foreground and middle ground elements. Without these limitations, the possibilities are endless in terms of 3D scene depth and layering. These ethics made the animations very difficult, but it was ultimately worth the trouble.

Canon 5D Mark II
This was my first major project using the Canon 5D Mark II as my primary video camera. The camera has so many positives that the negatives seem trivial. The image quality is astonishing. The flexibility is unparalleled. I was able to shoot HD video, still photographs and capture 360 panoramas using one camera. Last year, that would have required three cameras.

I used a Sennheiser transmitter and receiver combined with a Tram lav mic for all interviews and natural sound. While the audio is one of the major things holding this camera back, I found the combination of using the Senheisers and the Tram lav mic very acceptable. Obviously, the fact that the 5D tries to normalize all audio levels can create problems, especially during interviews.

24 Hour Inaugural Day Timelapse
I knew early on that I wanted to document the entire inauguration day using timelapse photography. The problem was, locations with quality perspectives of Pennsylvania Ave. were limited. Josh Hatch, a fellow multimedia producer at USA TODAY, milked some of his connections at the Newseum and secured a prime location for the camera pointing east at the U.S. Capitol. We crunched some numbers and decided one frame every 15 seconds would be suitable to capture at least one frame of Obama’s motorcade in the foreground of our shot and also provide ample image to create the timelapse. I used a pocket wizard as the intervalometer, plugged the camera into an AC outlet, mounted the camera on a magic arm and teethered the camera to a laptop inside the Newseum. You know the drill. I wrapped the camera in bubble wrap for insulation and weatherization and taped a hand warmer pack onto the pocket wizard so the battery wouldn’t freeze overnight. God save the hand warmer.

Earlier that week, I wrote a script that would automatically copy, resize and automatically FTP the images in real time back to the USA TODAY servers for virtually live posting on our Web site. Everything went according to plan up until the teethering. Apparently, the 30 feet of USB cable carrying images from the camera outside in 20-degree weather simply didn’t have enough power to reach the computer. So, we ditched the teethering approach and inserted a large memory card.

Props
I worked with some amazing folks on this project and I can’t wait for round two. Rhyne Piggott followed an intimate story about a Tuskegee Airman. Garrett Hubbard documented a million-dollar benefactor who purchased 300 hotel rooms overlooking Pennsylvania Ave. for the less fortunate. Rhyne, Garrett and Steve were amazing to work with. We had above a dozen video journalists who contributed content for the documentary. The full list of credits appears at the end of chapter seven.

This weekend, Phil and I sat down to rethink, redesign and reevaluate both the Super Rat website and the future business model of Super Rat’s online operation. If you ride BMX, or are at all interested in online business, you should keep tabs on Super Rat Machine Works in the coming months. Just yesterday, we launched the new website, which uses WordPress as the CMS and a modified version of my Monochrome theme that I sell at Graph Paper Press. You can expect some innovative products from Super Rat Machine Works in the coming months.

Note: Some of the ideas in this post build off of light diffusion ideas available at Strobist.

What you need:

• Cardboard Box
• White cellophane (trash bags work too)
• 11 x 17 white office paper
• Clear tape
• Box cutters (the terrorist-free kind)
• Three 60 watt lamps

1. Open the box
2. Cut away windows from three side of the box
3. Cut your white diffusion bag/cellophane/paper to fit the three windows
4. Tape the diffusion onto the three sides
5. Bend and tape the white paper to the bottom of the box, creating a seamless curve down onto the side of the box that was not cut.
6. Set up the three lights, one on each side of the translucent white diffusion panels on the lightbox.
7. Set your camera’s white balance on the incandescent setting (the light bulb).
8. If shooting small products (lets say less than 6 inches tall), then set your camera on macro focus
9. Start shooting

Total construction time: 15 minutes
This won’t win you the Pulitzer Prize, but it might earn you some sales.

During the month of December I…

1. Traveled to Atlanta for three days for a photo shoot
2. Traveled to Minneapolis for Christmas
3. Worked well over 160 hours at my 9-5
4. Designed and launched Graph Paper Press
5. Designed and launched four WordPress theme designs for WordPress
6. Hosted two small “get togethers” with friend and family
7. Photographed a friend’s wedding in Kansas City
8. And finally, I raked my yard. Yikes!

Yes, I’m tired. But, I’ve never been more excited about life, work and what I like to refer to as “play work.” Luckily, I received the Tolstoy of all phones for Christmas: The iPhone. It’s proving to help keep me organized, on top of email, and constantly distracted. So, in the mean time, take a peek at a few of the things I’ve produced during the tale end of 2007:

1. My 2007 Year in Pictures at the Lawrence Journal-World
2. Graph Paper Press
3. A few photos from my friend’s wedding

Here’s to a less manic 2008!

But, I had to ask myself, do my site visitors really care about all this WordPress jibberish? Likely not. So, I decided to curl up this weekend and make Graph Paper Press, a focused repository of WordPress themes created by me for you. The site accomplishes a few things, but most importantly, it makes it much easier to locate, preview, and download my theme designs.

So far, I’ve sold themes to people on every continent, except Africa. So get with it Zimbabweans! In all seriousness, the popularity of these themes has come as quite a pleasant surprise.

In the mean time, take a peek at Graph Paper Press.

• All original PSD files, making all graphics easily customizable
• All theme files, including the Blueprint CSS framework
• Author archives template page for multi-author websites
• Two page templates for narrow and wide column pages.
• Web Standards Compliant
• Backwards compatibility with, hiccup, Internet Explorer

You can download them all from GraphPaperPress.com.

Update

Visualization is one of the original “magazine-style” themes created for WordPress. It was released as a free theme, then it became a paid theme available through Graph Paper Press. Today, it’s a free theme again and can be downloaded by signing up for a free account at Graph Paper Press.

If you visit my site regularly or irregularly, you have undoubtedly noticed constant design changes, tweeks and dramatic overhauls. Chalk this one up to my obsessive compulsive nature and insatiable taste for modern, clean, minimalist aesthetics. So, after more than two years of fidgeting with dozens and dozens of WordPress themes I have decided to release my own theme for others to enjoy.

Visualization is a grid-based, magazine-style WordPress theme that is easy to customize and make your own. The CSS borrows heavily from Blueprint, a CSS framework that streamlines development by utilizing an easy-to-use grid and sensible typography. Visualization can transform your blog into a full-blown magazine or news Web site.

Visualization includes

• Widgetized sidebar and bottombar
• Optional custom header images
• Dynamic (AJAX) sidebar to maximize homepage real estate
• Nine spots on the homepage to pack with content
• Valid XHTML and CSS