Red Giant Universe

From the Red Giant blog:

Red Giant Universe is a community that gives members access to fast and powerful free tools for editing, filmmaking, visual effects and motion design.

Every tool in the Universe library of effects and transitions is GPU-accelerated, both Mac and Windows compatible, and works across multiple host applications including: After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X and Motion. The Universe library of tools is continuously growing—new effects and transitions are added regularly, and existing tools are updated often, based on user feedback.

A free subscription gets you access to tons of effects. A paid subscription ($10 per month, or $99 per year) gets you more. Don’t like subscriptions? Buy a perpetual license for $399.

How can Red Giant promise to keep Universe growing so quickly? Because they built Supernova, an internal development tool that’s like a 3D printer for plug-ins:

If you want to be a part of this today, you can sign up for the public beta.

Inverse-disclaimer: Universe doesn’t fall within my Creative Director duties at Red Giant. I don’t have anything to do with it (yet). I’m just a huge fan. And speaking of being a huge fan, the directing/producing team of Seth Worley and Aharon Rabinowitz did such a rockin’ job on both this video and the teaser.

“Pixar’s 22 Rules of Story,” Analyzed

Back in 2011, a Emma Coats tweeted a series of “story basics” she absorbed and distilled during her tenure as a story artist at Pixar. These tweets were aggregated by many bloggers, who tended to refer to them as “pixar story rules,” even though they were never represented by Coats as “rules,” or “Pixar’s.”

I found Emma’s tweets insightful and useful (especially when rendered in Lego). As with any pithy, tweet-sized aphorisms, they were more interesting for the thoughts they spurred in the reader than as hard and fast “rules” on their own (as Emma was always quick to point out herself). To me, what was most valuable about these observations was what happened inside my head when I read them.

Another Pixar employee, Stephan Bugaj (a good friend who consulted on the design of Slugline), would seem to agree, as he blogged his analyses of each of the rules-that-aren’t-rules. He recently completed the series of 22 posts, and has compiled them all into a PDF e-book, which you can download free from his site.

Pixar’s cultural commitment to storytelling is something special, and any window into it is gold. But in the same way that Emma’s tweets were her own, Stephan’s analysis is all him—and it’s definitely worth a read.

Thanksgiving Sale at the Prolost Store

I love Thanksgiving, because a) food, and b) my family is the good kind of crazy.

So take advantage of my good spirits and save 30% on everything at the Prolost Store! Even the free stuff.

• That means Prolost Boardo, the badest-ass way of making an animated storyboard, is only $17.50 instead of the usual $24.99.
• The Prolost Lightroom Presets are only $14.00 instead of $19.99.
• And Prolost Burns, which makes easy work of the famous Ken Burns effect, is a ludicrous $2.80, instead of the egregious regular price of $3.99.
• The DV Rebel Tools and Prolost Stereo Levels—hold on, lemme, check. Yep, still free.

Just use the coupon code CANBERRY when you check out. The sale lasts through Monday, because it makes me laugh when people say “cyber.”

Happy Holidays!

Run Like Hell

Run Like Hell is a hilarious feature screenplay inspired by the cult classic video game. Producer Adrian Askarieh and I want to get this movie made, so we teamed up with Red Giant Films to create this short teaser. Watch for the link to the behind-the-scened video at the end.

Update on Wednesday, October 30, 2013 at 1:25PM by Stu

You can now download the screenplay for the teaser over at the Slugline blog.