Flaming Hot Rod Text for Rez Rides

Ever since my fascination with Star Trek as a wee lad, I've wanted to be on TV. I was just discussing this with my lifelong friend turned Hollywood director, Michael Greenspan. When we were in elementary school, we did a lot of role-playing together and we're convinced it set things in motion for him to end up in film school and me doing my shtick in video production and editing.

While I knew my path would never lead me to appear physically on TV as an actor, I had the pleasure of witnessing a logo I designed appear as part of the title sequence for the second season of Rez Rides, a Quebec production that airs weekly on the APTN network. It was quite a thrill!

For the second season, the original logo (also designed at Red Dream Studios) was revamped to give it a classic hot rod treatment -- flaming tracer stipes painted over a hard, red glossy body. In fact, two versions of the logo were created -- the first was a pitted, mottled and rusted steel gray version, complete with spot welds, which after a digital painting, sanding, and buffing, transitions into the final version of the logo, the premise being, "bring your rusted crappy car into Mad Mohawk's autobody shop and walk away with a killer set of wheels." The transition effects were created by our partner, Rev13 Films.

The first pass of the logo showing Rez Rides in a "before" condition.

Creating the logo was actually straightforward. The basis of the logo is the word "Rez Rides" written in the font "NiseHotRod" upon which various textures of flame decals were applied and masked around the letters. The flames themselves are also font-based, letting us easily scale up our design to conform to an HD resolution, the format in which the show is produced. The rest of the look is achieved simply by using Photoshop's own built-in style effects, although to get the proper highlighting and texturing, mutiple copies of the logo layers were assembled and composited using different transfer modes to get the final result.

The second pass of the logo showing Rez Rides in an "after" condition.

Gee, you really CAN find anything on the Internet

It takes a lot to impress me, but a few days ago, I was throughly impressed -- enough to take time to blog about it.

Red Dream Studios recently secured a video production project with SoftImage. We're very proud of this, as it places them as being one of the largest and most prestigious clients we've ever served. Our mandate is to produce an interactive training DVD based on video material that was previously captured -- a whole 45 hours worth!

Since the project is not going to end up on television, or being played on set-top players, we chose to author the navigtional interface in Adobe Flash. All video was converted into FLV files that were loaded by clicking on various menu options or chapter points.

So what had impressed me?

I was looking for a quick way to convert time into seconds. Specifically, the time had to be formatted as an expression of 00:00:00 (hours, minutes, seconds -- the time indicated to me on the original video clip timeline), and when input, I needed to have the result in seconds. This would allow me to seek to a specific point in the FLV file that would represent a chapter point. The seek function in Flash requires seconds as its parameter.

So for example, 0:03:08:39 would equal 11319 seconds.

I couldn't figure out immediately how to do this, and various searches for "time calculator", "time conversion", "minute to second conversion", left me with the wrong results. In the end, I searched for something explicit like, "format 00:00:00 in seconds", and I came across a post on a developper site for Microsoft Excel. And believe it or not, Excel has some great functions that allow me to do exactly what I was looking for.

Thus the power in the internet. You really can find the answers to imponderables. Now, if it could only tell me the meaning of life...

PS: The formula in Excel is: =RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(":",A1))*24*60*60. Put your time, expressed as 0:00:00:00 in cell A1, and there you go.