I saw a random article on Huffington Post about my absolute favorite artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat last week, and I just could not, in my right mind, not share this with you all.  Do you know who Jean-Michel Basquiat is?  He was callled a “graffiti artist” for a long time, but call him what you want – his work is moving and awesome to me.  Unfortunately he had this intimate relationship with heroin, and lost his life to the beast at 27 – but his work lives on.

I always wonder what the world would be like if people like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and other artists dead before their times were up were still here to change the world of art and music.  From the HuffPost article:

Basquiat jumped into Manhattan’s fertile downtown art & club scene in the late 1970s, at first surviving by selling his images on postcards and T-shirts. Meanwhile he conjured a droll and recognizable street identity, SAMO, that raised the dialogue of street artists from I Was Here to the kind of ongoing piss-on-authority satire that made Banksy and his ilk possible. Meeting Warhol was almost unavoidable in that hothouse moment, and their friendship grew into collaboration (one more appreciated in retrospect than at the time). The meteoric fame and the inevitable drugs finally made Basquiat a poster child for the toll of premature success, but Davis’ film covers every aspect of his life and work along the way: music, black identity, class-shifting, love life, club culture, his child-like nature, his premonitions of death. It is a loving tribute to a raucous time and an indelible talent.

You have to take a few minutes to watch this video – Tamra Davis apparently had some Jean-Michel Basquiat footage in a drawer somewhere and drug it out – and it’s pretty excellent:

Tamra Davis talks about THE RADIANT CHILD from Michael Kurcfeld on Vimeo.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Not Quite Light, But I Still Love Jean-Michel Basquiat

• Olafur Eliasson Request That You Take Your Time

I saw a random article on Huffington Post about my absolute favorite artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat last week, and I just could not, in my right mind, not share this with you all.  Do you know who Jean-Michel Basquiat is?  He was callled a “graffiti artist” for a long time, but call him what you want – his work is moving and awesome to me.  Unfortunately he had this intimate relationship with heroin, and lost his life to the beast at 27 – but his work lives on.

I always wonder what the world would be like if people like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and other artists dead before their times were up were still here to change the world of art and music.  From the HuffPost article:

Basquiat jumped into Manhattan’s fertile downtown art & club scene in the late 1970s, at first surviving by selling his images on postcards and T-shirts. Meanwhile he conjured a droll and recognizable street identity, SAMO, that raised the dialogue of street artists from I Was Here to the kind of ongoing piss-on-authority satire that made Banksy and his ilk possible. Meeting Warhol was almost unavoidable in that hothouse moment, and their friendship grew into collaboration (one more appreciated in retrospect than at the time). The meteoric fame and the inevitable drugs finally made Basquiat a poster child for the toll of premature success, but Davis’ film covers every aspect of his life and work along the way: music, black identity, class-shifting, love life, club culture, his child-like nature, his premonitions of death. It is a loving tribute to a raucous time and an indelible talent.

You have to take a few minutes to watch this video – Tamra Davis apparently had some Jean-Michel Basquiat footage in a drawer somewhere and drug it out – and it’s pretty excellent:

Tamra Davis talks about THE RADIANT CHILD from Michael Kurcfeld on Vimeo.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Not Quite Light, But I Still Love Jean-Michel Basquiat

• Olafur Eliasson Request That You Take Your Time

It’s three parts, and it’s quite amazing.  I’ve linked the three videos here, but you HAVE to check out the video posting page here.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

JimOnLight.com digs your artist brain, Jeff.  Great work.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Jefferson Waful of Umphrey’s McGee Directs “The Tabernacle”

• JimOnLight.com Hangs with Jefferson Waful of Umphrey’s McGee at House of Blues in Dallas
• Progress: Jeff Waful and Umphrey’s McGee on the Mantis Tour
• Umphrey’s McGee at House of Blues Dallas – Crappy Cell Phone Pic Tease

It’s three parts, and it’s quite amazing.  I’ve linked the three videos here, but you HAVE to check out the video posting page here.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

JimOnLight.com digs your artist brain, Jeff.  Great work.

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

Jefferson Waful of Umphrey’s McGee Directs “The Tabernacle”

• JimOnLight.com Hangs with Jefferson Waful of Umphrey’s McGee at House of Blues in Dallas
• Progress: Jeff Waful and Umphrey’s McGee on the Mantis Tour
• Umphrey’s McGee at House of Blues Dallas – Crappy Cell Phone Pic Tease

Yes, residential load centers.

Um – uh – yeah.

Cool video, check it:

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Residential Load Centers (or Electrical Panels for the, uh, Normal Person)

• How It’s Made – Electrical Wire!
• How It’s Made – High Voltage Fuses!
• How Incandescent A-Lamps are Made

Yes, residential load centers.

Um – uh – yeah.

Cool video, check it:

by Jim On Light | Licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License

How It’s Made – Residential Load Centers (or Electrical Panels for the, uh, Normal Person)

• How It’s Made – Electrical Wire!
• How It’s Made – High Voltage Fuses!
• How Incandescent A-Lamps are Made

Create a new composition

The first thing we are going to do is create a composition; this is the canvas you will create your animation on. To manually create a composition, you need to do the following.

Choose New Composition.

New composition window.

This will open the composition dialog box. The options on the basic tab will allow you to set up the preset,
width, height, aspect ratio, frames per second, start code and duration for your animated sequence.

With the dialog box open apply the following settings:

Preset: PAL D1 / DV

Width and height: 720 X 576

Aspect Ratio: D1/ DV PAL 1.09

Resolution: Full

Start Timecode: 0.00.00.00

Duration: 0.00.030.00

Depending on your output, you may want to set up the first 4 settings at other standard settings, for example for Northern American broadcast media or for the Web.

So now our sequence will run for 30 seconds.

Changing background color of the composition.

To change the background color you need to do the following:

Choose Background color.

This will open the color picker dialog box.

The color picker dialog box.

Click OK to choose a color for your background. With your cursor move around within the color space to pick a color, when you have chosen your color click ok to accept this.

Creating text for the animation.

Using the text tool type out a word on the stage.

Choose the font and size using the character palette.

The character palette.

Creating the path for the animation

With the text layer selected, select the pen tool draw a path for the text to follow.

Make sure that
Rotobezier check box in the tool palette, is selected, this allows you to draw a smooth path.

Twirl down the text option to reveal the path options.

Select Mask 1 for the path, this is the path you have just created. Now the text is automatically
linked to that path.

Animating text the path

With the play back at the start of the time line, create a keyframe for the first margin property.

For this property set the stopwatch and drag the word to the beginning of the path by dragging the slider value for the first margin property.

Drag the play back head further down the timeline set a keyframe for the last margin property, drag the slider value for the for the first margin property so that the so the text moves to the end
of the path.

Move the play back head to the start of the animation and scrub through the timeline. You should now
see your animated text animating along a path.

I’ve added some extra graphics and text in addition to the animated text.

Hope you have found this tutorial useful.

• Adobe’s Help Page
• Create Whispy Spirit-like Text
• Create A Growing Text Animation – Quick Tip