Former Google intern Kevin Lustgarten produces some delightful sleights of hand. Enjoy!

I will not be trying to replicate his Jedi push-up technique anytime soon!

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A post shared by Kevin Lustgarten (@kevinlustgarten) on Nov 8, 2018 at 7:02am PST

I somehow overlooked last month’s announcement of a public beta program for Adobe DVA apps:

Today a small group of users will become the first Adobe Creative Cloud members to find Beta versions of the Adobe video and audio apps available in the Creative Cloud Desktop app. This marks the start of a public Beta program which will roll out incrementally over the coming months, until it is available to all Creative Cloud members.

Now O.G.’s David Simons & Jason Levine have given a live overview and Q&A covering the project:

Not to be confused with cloud-hosted Team Projects, this new feature is geared towards editors working together on premises:

Productions connects Premiere Pro project files, making them into components of the larger workflow.

Media referencing across projects means you can reuse assets within your Production without creating duplicate files. Using shared local storage, multiple editors can work on different projects in the same production. Project Locking ensures that no one overwrites your work.

You control your content: Productions use shared local storage and can be used without an internet connection.

A few weeks back I noted that the Dear Adobe site had generated lots of discussion within the company.  Now the After Effects team has worked with the site creators to address the top 25 comments posted there.  If you’re interested in AE, you might find the list a worthwhile read.

• Roi Sabarov’s Typeflow animation is poetry in motion.  ("That is awesome.  That goes on the blog."  –Margot, Licensed Nackwife.)
• Fatal Farm makes some super, ah, unique remixes of 80’s TV themes.  Knight Rider is brilliant, though be warned that you won’t be getting the song out of your head. The rest are of mixed taste, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.
• Mato Atom’s "Champions" probably won’t change any hearts and minds about Bush, Blair, & Co., but it’s impeccably executed. [Via Sebastian Meyer]
• I like the lo-fi stylings of these animated videos for Welsh band Los Campesinos!, created by Simon Ampel & Chris Seimasko.
• The Whitest Boy Alive is all about optical illusions. [Via]

By the way, if you’re going to be in NYC in a couple of weeks & are interested in After Effects, you might want to check out the next AENY meeting.  Jim Geduldick writes to say that the June 26th meeting will feature some cool speakers:

• Visual Designer Marc Coleran, whose work has been seen in films like  The Bourne Ultimatum, Domino, Alien vs. Predator, The Bourne Identity, Blade II, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The World Is Not Enough – just to name a few.
• Visual effects artist John Montgomery, co-founder of the online visual effects news site fxguide, as well as the training site fxphd. His Clients and Credits include Super Bowl commercials for McDonald’s, Disney as well as work for Budweiser, Miller, Hallmark, Sears, Moen, Gatorade, Morgan Stanley, and the ESPN and CBS television networks.

Check out the AENY site for more details.

Last Thursday Adobe held a day-long event at which the execs briefed members of the financial community.  A couple of us spear carriers (Steve Heintz, Karl Soule, and I) were recruited to help show off some new technology that’s baking "in the labs" (i.e. none of this stuff is promised for a future version, your mileage my vary, void where prohibited, professional driver on a closed course, etc.).

Check out the Connect webcast to see the goods in action.  (Scrub ahead to 18 minutes or so–about one third of the way through–to catch the demos.)  I show off some new performance tuning in Photoshop by playing with a 650 megapixel image on a Mac Pro.  It’s too bad that the low frame rate of recording hides the fluidity of panning, zooming, and rotating via OpenGL hardware acceleration.  I also demonstrate automated merging of images to extend depth of field, as well as a 360-degree panorama mapped onto an interactive 3D sphere on which I can paint directly.  (Painting directly onto 3D models–mmm, yes.)  Steve demos Adobe’s new "Thermo" RIA design tool while Karl shows off inverse kinematics in Flash and more.

You can check out the rest of the executive presentations & their slides here.

Congratulations to TJ Sochor of 3 Wagons Deep on winning the grand prize in Adobe’s "See What’s Possible" motion graphics contest:

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TJ writes,

The entire animation was done completely with Photoshop and After Effects (with a touch of Illustrator for logo preparation). No 3rd party plug-ins, programs, animation, videos were used; just the tools that ship standard with Adobe software. All photos are original – taken with my Nikon D80 (organized in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom). The music is also original. No 3rd party stuff, well, except for my cheap Yamaha guitar.

Finalists

• See What’s Possible — Hello Lava link
• Thinking Magical — Animatório/Vinicius Costa
• The Amazing Factory — Wondermint
• Happy Place — Network Osaka

Participation

• More than 348 Submissions from over 31 countries with over 1/3 in the last day before the deadline
• More than half the submissions came from outside the U.S.
• More than 5,800 registered users who contributed submissions, comments, and votes
• More than 120,000 unique visitors from over 156 countries around the world

Then, of course, there were a few that remind you that "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro"

• Hip hop ‘shop: Crime Scene by d.inc design ("All the other programs, irrelevant!"–or as ODB might say, "You know my name, now gimme my money")
• As with the boat in "Apocalypse Now," Never Leave the Letterbox
• Spazzing like the people in "Jacob’s Ladder," it’s One Man Show (known colloquially as "meth guy")
• PS goes The Way Of The Stick: Designer Ninjas
• And finally, Mr. Hankey would be so proud: Turning Crap to Gold

Thanks to everyone for the great entries! If you see any that strike you as particularly cool, funny, bizarre, etc., please pass ’em along via the comments.

Decks & Bombs & Rock n’ Roll: Peep the amazing intro to Lakai’s Fully Flared skateboarding video.  (Okay, no rock here, but the grandiose score & slow motion really do it for me.)  I’d love to see a higher-res version of this clip, but for that apparently you need to buy the DVD. [Via]

In other animation/motion graphics news:

• Yannick Puig’s I Lived On the Moon is just unreasonably great-looking, loaded with memorable character designs in a melancholy palette.  His site contains a good deal of behind-the-scenes info on how he created storyboards, then used Photoshop, After Effects, and 3ds Max to realize the vision. [Via]  A few of the visuals recall Jamie Caliri’s similarly wonderful Dragon ad for United.
• On the other end of the tech spectrum is Fantoche, a rather nightmarish stop-motion sequence crawling across a bathroom wall.  [Via Frederick Johnson]  I can’t find much in the way of credits, but I imagine it’s connected to the animation festival of the same name.
• Hamburg-based Sehsucht has created a hypnotic & painterly animation for the 20 Jahre Auto Trophy. [Via]
• Toolfarm features an interview with Jim Geduldick of Wonder Pets, discussing his work on that AE-powered show.