We’ve yet to write a truly negative review, but I’ll have to break that positive streak on this one folks. The White Oak Syrah is tough, and no amount of “letting it breath” makes it any better. It’s fruity and thin, and doesn’t keep well. After my initial disapproving tasting, I gave it some time and took another whack at it a day or two later. No amount of time will help this wine. I can’t imagine a food combo that would compliment this wine, besides maybe Pop Rocks and sawdust.

The wine itself has a strange spice to it. Not to be confused with a spicy finish, this wine is spice from the get-go. It’s not a particularly flattering flavor either, it starts spicy and ends bitter.  This might be a good wine to make sangria with, assuming you add enough fruit.

When to drink this wine: When the liquor store literally has NO SELECTION. This might actually be the first bottle of wine I may not finish.

Boo.

Let’s get down to it! A little sweet, but extremely drinkable. Reminds me of wine we drank a lot in college. Feel like it would be good with spicy food. My meatball sandwich proved insufficiently spicy for adequate testing. Tofu salad didn’t meat the spicy quota either. A bit acidic (in a good way). No stand-out fruit bouquets though. Mostly just smells of grapes. Tastes like…wine.

I really want to learn about wine through this process, but so far these are not stunning examples of viticulture. Hats off to the guys who actually review this stuff. Kind of like grading the silica content in a bucket of dirt. You could analyze the dirt and spend a whole bunch of time actually finding the stats. Or you could just guess and come up with some great descriptive sentences describing the complexity of the dirt. Sure does fit in with the rest of our home decor. Reasonably prices but not classless. It’s not like we’re drinking out of jugs, barefoot.

Anyway, the cat sniffed my glass then licked his nose, then backed away. Cat approval = 3.5 (for reference the cat approval scales starts at minty toothpaste at 0, then maxes out at 10 with cat nip). Not really marketed towards cats. Or ground-based stags either. The stag on the label (Jess calls it “kitchy and cute”), does appear to be taking a hesitant step towards the afterlife. Or perhaps there is a meadow just out of the picture and I’m thinking about this way too much.

Why does it always take me 1/2 a bottle to come to a decision on a wine? The professionals can do it in one sip. Amazing.

When to drink: The second date. Drinkable enough to inspire conversation, and with sufficient alcohol content to help forget said conversation. Probably won’t stain a blouse too bad if you really hit it off and get frisky on the table.

-Grant and Jessica

Before we get to that, lets briefly hit on the industry of choice for the Jacuzzi family. Their tag line is “Generations Dedicated to the Art of Discovery”, which hints at a father/son team “discovering” the joys of home brewing. Alas! Look at that bottle! When you think Jacuzzi, what do you automatically think of? Thats right. Airplanes.

The Jacuzzi family, according to the notes on the back of the bottle, invented the toothpick propeller *(the WHAT?!) and the first cabin monoplane (a mix between remote outdoor living, a communicable kissing disease, and aeronautics). That’s right, the generations of discovery is in reference to a completely different industry! Well, this ought to taste wonderful!

Thank god that the toothpick propeller never took off (pun intended), and the Jacuzzi has plenty of time to work on their wine. The stuff actually isn’t bad at all, and I would go as far as to say it is quite drinkable. The flavor isn’t thick or heavy, yet the acidity and fruit ratio is just right. It smells like brandy, and has a faint oak-aged taste. It has that tingle on your palette that you get after sipping a stronger spirit, but not overwhelming.

Overall quite delicious actually. And the cork has a propeller on it. Best time to drink this bottle: in a hot tub at the ski-in-ski-out condo that your neighbor leant you for the weekend surrounded by beautiful women (or men) feeling the burn in your legs from a long day of skiing. OR, right before a bath in your undersized coffin of a bathtub before falling asleep with your glasses still on reading The Economist in bed.

Next up: a review of my latest batch of homemade Pinot Giorgio called Red Face White.

-Grant

Their tag line is “Eternal suffering has never tasted so good”. Lie. I expected something darker, spicier, and richer from a company down under. Now, I’m no wine connoisseur, I’d say this wine is anything but full-bodied. It’s bright and leaves the taste of cherries in your mouth.

Like cherries you picked that weren’t ripe and really want to eat again. Best time to drink this bottle: When it’s the only bottle in the house. Would we drink it again? Yeah, I guess so. But I wouldn’t pay for it. Bring on bottle #3!

-Jess

"Eternal suffering has never tasted so good."

So we wanted to start a wine jounrnal. We did get the cheaper wine – and our wine knowledge may be limited – but I’m excited to get started and pour myself a glass. We’re signed up to get three bottles a month and for our first month we recieved a white a two reds. The white, a reisling, we drank before we had the forethought to do this. So we’re starting at #2 and #3.

Check it out at westernproscapes.com.

No sooner am i done with college than–WHAM–i’m working. Engineering at FSN Rocky Mountain.

One of the coolest parts of this project was getting to work with some of the 3D elements I included. The CU logo was the obvious choice, and I (convieniently) had a copy of it in a vector format. The process for this is (relatively) simple.

-Modify your vector image in Adobe Illustrator, making sure all the different parts of the image that you want to be editable are located on separate layers. Also, it is best if you move all the same colors to the same layer, as this will make it easier later in the process. Use the “pathfinder” utility in Illustrator to combine as much of the logo as you can into one continuous vector shape.

-Save this file as an Illustrator 8 file (this took me FOREVER to figure out), not as a new snazzy CS3 file. This is simply a compatibility problem inherent in the After Effects plug-in we will be using in the next step.

-Open After Effects and create a new Solid. Go to the effects menu and select Zaxworks 3D Invigorator. There are lots of plug-ins that can create 3D images in After Effects, I just happened to have the Zaxworks product. The Invigorator dialogue box should pop up and walk you through the rest, allowing you to import that newly created Illustrator 8 file into the system.

-Inside the plug-in you can fiddle with every thing to make the 3D object look and feel the way you want it. Here is a little screen shot of the CU logo, being worked on in a chunky low-res way to streamline my work flow.

As you can see, the colors I separated into layers before are now separately editable objects that I can change depth, color, and texture for. This allows the black portions to pop out of the gold portions, and allows me to add a beveled edge to the gold portion only.  Here is a screen shot of the materials selection menu, it allows you to select the material your object is made from. I chose a high-gloss color scheme, although you could choose any color and any level of gloss. 3D invigorator also supports transparent or semi-transparent objects.

For my spinning logo, I merely put the object on a timeline and added a rotation of 359 degrees. In order to make the spinning look seamless, you have to get rid of that 360th degree or else the logo appears to stall or stutter. Since 0 degrees is equal to 360 degrees, it makes sence to eliminate the 360th degree when you want a logo to spin cleanly from 359 degrees back to 0. I know it is knit picky, but it really makes a difference in the final product.

Once I rendered out one full rotation of the logo, I was ready to place it in the other compositions. I wanted this spinning logo to essentially take the place of a transition, flying in from in front of the ‘camera’ and exiting right back to where it came from. This allowed me to change compositions cleanly and link them together with a unique and eye catching graphic. In a football game senerio, this would also be important as a transition from an instant replay or other graphic.

After a final render, I accumulated all the clips into a central file and added a sound track. In this case it was “Velvet Snow” by the Kings of Leon. I picked that song simply because it was the lightest and happiest song that I had on my computer that fit the two minute composition length. Works great and sets the mood.

I hope this overview has helped you understand the process I went though. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them in the comment section directly below each post or email me at grant.mcgilvray@colorado.edu

The process for creating the starting line up starts in the same way the head shots do. I took the same light streak images into Photoshop and created a framing template that would include four individual “team members”. My mock-up just contains myself.

Once I had that look created to my satisfaction, I again moved it into After Effects. This is where the process starts to differ. Working with four different pieces of footage creates some complications, and it took me a while to wrap my head around this added step. Before I added in the four different people, I completed a rough-draft with repetitions of my footage. That rough-draft can be seen here.

As you can see, I utilized a freeze-frame type look to freeze the players not being introduced. When the player gets introduced, that player jumps to the front. This means I had to duplicate the footage multiple times and stop and start footage as it was used. One of the trickiest parts of this process was using the “time remapping” capability of After Effects. This tool allows you to place key frames throughout the duration of the clip, and then move those keyframes closer together or farther apart to change the relative speed that the clip plays. This was an essential part of this project, as this process allows you to freeze a frame of video and then start the clip again before once more freezing it.

I treated the innitial “frozen” frames with a de-saturation filter to make them gray scale, which further separated the player being introduced from the people in the background.