Mid-way through our rainy Friday, the office was brightened up by some fresh faces.

Students from Westwood College’s Visual Communications and Animation programs paid Mightybytes a social call today. We showed off our demo reel and discussed everything from social media marketing for filmmakers to brewing beer and worm composting. The semi-informal session spawned dozens of questions fielded by Joy, Tim, Steve, Bryan and Stephanie and hopefully helped the crew of nearly a dozen students make some smart choices about career paths. Continue on to check out the photo slideshow.

Our final take (for now) on best design and coding practices for better email campaigns.

Part Four in a Series of Four

Wrapping up our four-part blog series, ‘Tips from the Experts at Emma’, we offer seven tips to improve the design and code of your email campaigns. Yes, our friends at Emma and other email service providers offer template stationery in an always-evolving variety of pre-built styles, but if you really want to drive success, custom design and coding is the way to go. Here are some ideas on how to build a better custom campaign.

We often times find ourselves at a loss for what to do when working with a program we know inside and out and love deeply, but have to blend it with another program that’s as confusing to us as the opposite sex. It’s at times like these, however, that working with people who specialize in various programs makes life (or at least the work part of life) so much easier. Such was the case when Travis, audio and video guru, and Joy, Illustrator-loving pixel princess, put their minds together to figure out a simple animation task. This series of posts is for all of you frustrated Flash-lovers who would like a bit of advice about transitioning from Illustrator to Flash.

An animated exhibit for the Shedd Aquarium offers some unique production challenges.

We recently created a twelve-minute animated 3D penguin habitat scene for the John G. Shedd Aquarium as part of the Oceanarium Reimagined, a significant overhaul to that portion of the museum. At twenty-five feet wide by fifteen feet tall and spanning across three HD projectors, the animation provided many opportunities for us to roll our sleeves up and put on our technical problem solving caps, not the least of which was the fact that it needed to nestle snugly into the organic crevices of a man-made rock formation.

Limited 3D functions were introduced in several CS3 applications but Adobe really upped the ante with CS4.

Animators can now import 3D models into Photoshop, paint textures directly onto them and export PSD files with 3D objects intact for animating in After Effects. The resulting layers in After Effects retain all properties from the Photoshop document except for lighting, which of course can be re-created in After Effects. It’s a bit of a drawback, yes, but hopefully one that animators will be able to overlook in favor of having these new creative options at their fingertips.