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 320x480px, 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.

Big thanks to Jessica Kantor :)

‘Dead All Along’ is featured as the ‘Film of the Day’ on the Portable Film Festival front page and blog.

Portable Film Festival: www.portablefilmfestival.com
Portable Film Festival Blog: Dead All Along – Film of the Day

Big thanks to Al Cossar and the rest of the crew at www.portablefilmfestival.com :)

Manifestations, my animated short film, is an official selection of the Rockport Film Festival. The RFF looks like an awesome fest – would love to visit Texas for this one (have never been to Texas). Below is the screening information.

When: Sat, Nov 7th at 7:30pm
Where: Main Street Arts, 902 E Main, Rockport, Texas 78382
Film Link: Manifestations, Rockport Film Festival, 2009

Big thanks to John Aasp and the rest of the Rockport Film Festival crew :)

Manifestations was made at the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television

My latest project, an animated music video, ‘Dead All Along’ is also featured as a Motionographer.com Quickie:
http://motionographer.com/2009/09/28/dead-all-along-a-gorey-esque-short-film-by-giles-timms/

Motionographer.com features motion graphic, film and animation work from studios, freelancers and students.

Big thank you to Motionographer.com!

Image stills from my new music video, Dead All Along, performed by Ceri Frost.

Enchanted by a fairy, a child called Yorick briefly journeys in the fairy kingdom, but when Yorick returns to his world he discovers that everything has changed. The art direction for the film is inspired by the work of Edward Gorey and so the worlds and characters are hand-drawn in pen and ink.

Produced at UCLA’s Department of Theater, Film and Television, Animation Workshop. To be released this fall, 2009 :)

You can view the Portable Film Festival Audience Award Winners here: http://blog.portablefilmfestival.com/blog/post/portable-film-festival-2009-the-winners-are/

Thanks to everyone who voted and helped Ceri and I win. Also, a big thankyou to the Portable Film Festival crew, especially Al Cossar, for a brilliant festival!

Manifestations is performed by Ceri Frost

You can vote for Manifestations here: http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/category/vote/.

Many thanks to Colleen McHugh and Reel 13!

Manifestations was featured on Channel Frederator along with an interview. You can find the feature here: http://www.channelfrederator.com/frederator/episode/CFR_20090630.

The interview can be found here: http://www.channelfrederator.com/post/13200/gee-whiz-it-s-giles-timms.

Many thanks to Bailee DesRocher and Channel Frederator!