Above is my first iPhone/iTouch wallpaper, which was created from my animated music video ‘Dead All Along.’ I’ve added a wallpaper section to my website so that I can add more free wallpapers for download.

The following is an easy tutorial on how to render out stills from your After Effects film and create great looking wallpapers for an iPhone or iTouch, by taking advantage of the iPhone and iTouch native resolution.

Technical Info

An iPhone and iTouch both have display sizes of 320×480px, at 2:3 aspect ratio and a resolution of 163ppi. After Effects renders out stills at 72ppi. So to ensure that the film frames look as good as possible on the small iPhone and iTouch screens we simply have to render out a larger still image from After effects at a 2:3 aspect ratio and then resize in Photoshop. The larger After Effect image needs to be 2.26388889 times (163 divided by 72) larger than the iPhone/iTouch display and use a composition size of 724 x 1086.

Steps

1. With your scene selected in After Effects, change the Composition Settings (composition–>settings) so that the width and height are 724 by 1086 (see screenshot below)

2. Move the camera, and possibly props/characters to ensure the composition is still good
3. Render out the single frame as a PNG sequence
4. Open the png render in Photoshop and resize the image’s Resolution setting (Image–>Image Size) to 163 making sure to deselect the ‘Resample Image:’ check box (see screen shot below)

5. Save the image
6. Lastly, two optional steps you can perform to increase the quality of your image are to increase the Saturation (Image–>Adjustments–>Hue/Saturation) and apply an Unsharp Mask (Filter–>Sharpen–>Unsharp Mask). The amount is dependent upon the image so you will probably have to fiddle and test the results.

The above is a still from one of the animated sequences I illustrated and animated for Jeffrey Blitz’s new documentary, Lucky. Lucky premiered at Sundance 2010. I was fortunate to work again as an animator and illustrator with Bill Barminski from Walter Robot on this production and it was also great working with Jeffrey Blitz. I found Jeffrey to be a very intelligent and challenging director. The sequences were animated in After Effects, with the illustrations drawn and colored/textured in photoshop.

The reviews of Lucky have been positive and it seems people also liked the animated sequences, as this review from Scott Weinberg testifies “with nifty animated interstitials full of interesting jackpot stats.” You can read Scott’s full review here:

http://www.cinematical.com/2010/01/27/sundance-review-lucky/

I’m excited to see the full film. Please leave a comment if you’ve seen the film and let me know what you thought, thanks.

I’ve been busy with freelance commercial work and have neglected my blog. Plus I had to upgrade WordPress and migrate to a new host, which I just completed this week. With the migration and upgrade complete I’ll be back to posting regularly. Anyway, above is a color comp, cut-out design and character design I put together for a treatment I submitted last year for a Neil Diamond music video through RW Media. I didn’t get the gig :(

Thanks to Peter Halim for my interview on ‘Something We Like.’ You can check out the interview here:

http://www.somethingwelike.com/inspirational/creating-worlds-images-stories

Manifestations is screening at the Anchorage International Film Festival.

Thanks ever so much to Teresa Scott :)

Faerie and baby color comp illustration for a freelance animation project. Hand drawn on paper and colored in Photoshop.

Big thanks to Jessica Kantor :)

Many, many thanks to Mary Watkins at UCLA :)

Manifestations is screening agian this coming weekend at the 18th Annual St. Louis International Film Festival. Here are the details for the second screening.

Where: Tivoli Theatre, Animated Shorts Program 1
When: Sunday, Nov. 22, 9:30 p.m.
Link: http://www.cinemastlouis.org/2009/short_programs.html#sp10

Manifestations was created within the UCLA Animation Workshop at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

Music by Ceri Frost