Happy Birthday Dad!

This is a shout out to my Dad, (AKA "Grandpa" around here.) "Happy Birthday! I love you!"  



The kid in the movie is supposed to be patterned after my oldest.  Can you tell?

Puppet Tool

 

This was my first time trying the "puppet tool" on After Effects! I created the cartoon guy in Illustrator and animated him in After effects. It's kind of hokey because I didn't spend a lot of extra time creating the guy and making him look great because I just wanted to try it out. (There is no sound, just so you don't think anything's wrong with your volume).

The puppet tool is pretty neat because you can take anything you create in Illustrator and place joints on it in After Effects where you would have them in a "puppet" so to speak and then move them around from frame to frame to make them animate.

I hope to get more practice in and get better at it.  For now, here's this little dude.

Video Mom

I'm taking a class once a week about Adobe After Effects.  I have been using it  somewhat in my video work, but I knew there was so much more that could be possible.  I have only had a few classes, but so far I have learned quite a bit. 

I didn't know that so much could be done with it in connection to Adobe Illustrator.  You can use After Effects to animate a lot of the stuff that you make in Illustrator.  As one of my projects I was working on animating a logo, so I have been practicing a lot with Illustrator.

I have been debating changing my blog name for a while and I figured this was a good enough time.  I actually have a confession.  The eggplant in the picture was from our garden this past summer.  For some reason or other we never even picked it.  It just sat out there and rotted.  So I guess you could say I am not very good at saving eggplants.

I am just trying out this banner for now.  It is subject to change in the near future as is the rest of my blog.   I'll try and keep you posted on any projects I come up with as I take this class.  I've already made a moving logo out of the same pictures I used in my banner, but as a tag for movies I make, which I use the name "Video by Karen".  I don't want to post it quite yet, because I think I'm going to adjust it some more first.

Hair Cuts

Everybody needed hair cuts desperately! Well, actually I kind of liked my littlest one's long, but oh well. Anyhow we trucked on down to the hair school and this is how it turned out!

Our before shots.

Just woke up.... mixed with hat hair.

He was actually perfect through the whole hair-cut.  It took a while so he did get a little antsy at the end, but he really was a trooper.

The hair-cut actually looked normal. It did dry kind of funny and this picture really accentuates that fact.  I just posted this pic because I think it's funny.

He was not happy about this.  However, after watching his brother (and a little bribery) he reluctantly sat on the chair.

The hair dresser promised not to use the buzzers. (He hates buzzers.)

By the end he decided it wasn't too bad.

Teton Flood Museum

The Teton Flood Museum is located in the basement of the Rexburg Tabernacle.  We went there for family night.  It is also a museum for history of the area in general.  There is a children's museum inside, but they were between displays so we will have to go back. 

Games and Puzzles from D.I.

 Here is our shocking revellation: We don't have a T.V! So we have to find other things to do.  I actually like this better, I feel like we really spend better time together as a family.  We never really watched much T.V. before and I guess we could still watch a movie on this computer, but most of the time my husband is using it at school or for homework anyway. The kids have gotten used to it pretty quick and don't even ask to watch anything.

One Friday we all went to Desseret Industries (I pretty much always shop at D.I.) -Please excuse my inner Napoleon. Anyway we all picked out a few puzzles and games and spent practically nothing, but had quite a bit of fun from them. The kids and I have been doing these puzzles over and over and it's fun to learn the new games.

Teddy Ruxpin!

The puzzle selection wasn't super, but of all the puzzles we bought none were missing any pieces!

The Idaho game was pretty fun, except for that I kept getting all these insanely hard questions about Idaho's history and then my husband would wind up with these ones like "what crop is Idaho famous for?"  Seriously that was one of his questions!  It's okay though because I still won.  Anyway we also picked up this one that is kind of like scrabble mixed with crossword puzzles called Ipswitch and we really like that one!

Idaho

Here are a few pictures of us on our way to Idaho and right after arrival.  Time has actually been going quite fast and our we have kept ourselves VERY busy.  I am going to add a few  more posts with pictures of some of our adventures so far!

Entertaining himself on the long car ride.

A happy traveler!

Enjoying some bagels at the school while we get everything squared away for classes.