BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Bennett Waisbren – ChatGPT 4 video generation
1. Rankin/Bass – That nostalgic stop-motion look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Cozy and janky.
2. Don Bluth – Lavish hand-drawn fantasy. Lush lighting, expressive eyes, dramatic weight.
3. Fleischer Studios – 1930s rubber-hose style, like Betty Boop and Popeye. Surreal, bouncy, jazz-age energy.
4. Pixar – Clean, subtle facial animation, warm lighting, and impeccable shot composition.
5. Toei Animation (Classic Era) – Foundation of mainstream anime. Big eyes, clean lines, iconic nostalgia.
6. Cow and Chicken / Cartoon Network Gross-Out – Elastic, grotesque, hyper-exaggerated. Ugly-cute characters, zoom-ins on feet and meat, lowbrow chaos.
7. Max Fleischer’s Superman – Retro-futurist noir from the ’40s, bold shadows and heroic lighting.
8. Sylvain Chomet – French surrealist like The Triplets of Belleville. Slender, elongated, moody weirdness. -
GIMP 3.0 review – 20 years on from 2.0, has GIMP kept up with the times?
https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html
Highlights
- Need to tweak a filter you applied hours ago? New in GIMP 3.0 is non-destructive editing for most commonly-used filters. See the changes in real time with on-canvas preview.
- Exchange files with more applications, including BC7 DDS files as well as better PSD export and many new formats.
- Don’t know how big to make your drawing? Simply set your paint tool to expand layers automatically as needed.
- Making pro-quality text got easier, too. Style your text, apply outlines, shadows, bevels, and more, and you can still edit your text, change font and size, and even tweak the style settings.
- Organizing your layers has become much easier with the ability to select multiple items at once, move them or transform them all together!
- Color Management was again improved, as our long-term project to make GIMP an advanced image editor for all usages.
- Updated graphical toolkit (GTK3) for modern desktop usage.
- New Wilber logo!
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Reve Image 1.0 Halfmoon – A new model trained from the ground up to excel at prompt adherence, aesthetics, and typography
A little-known AI image generator called Reve Image 1.0 is trying to make a name in the text-to-image space, potentially outperforming established tools like Midjourney, Flux, and Ideogram. Users receive 100 free credits to test the service after signing up, with additional credits available at $5 for 500 generations—pretty cheap when compared to options like MidJourney or Ideogram, which start at $8 per month and can reach $120 per month, depending on the usage. It also offers 20 free generations per day.
FEATURED POSTS
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Guide to Prompt Engineering
The 10 most powerful techniques:
1. Communicate the Why
2. Explain the context (strategy, data)
3. Clearly state your objectives
4. Specify the key results (desired outcomes)
5. Provide an example or template
6. Define roles and use the thinking hats
7. Set constraints and limitations
8. Provide step-by-step instructions (CoT)
9. Ask to reverse-engineer the result to get a prompt
10. Use markdown or XML to clearly separate sections (e.g., examples)
Top 10 high-ROI use cases for PMs:
1. Get new product ideas
2. Identify hidden assumptions
3. Plan the right experiments
4. Summarize a customer interview
5. Summarize a meeting
6. Social listening (sentiment analysis)
7. Write user stories
8. Generate SQL queries for data analysis
9. Get help with PRD and other templates
10. Analyze your competitors
Quick prompting scheme:
1- pass an image to JoyCaption
https://www.pixelsham.com/2024/12/23/joy-caption-alpha-two-free-automatic-caption-of-images/
2- tune the caption with ChatGPT as suggested by Pixaroma:
Craft detailed prompts for Al (image/video) generation, avoiding quotation marks. When I provide a description or image, translate it into a prompt that captures a cinematic, movie-like quality, focusing on elements like scene, style, mood, lighting, and specific visual details. Ensure that the prompt evokes a rich, immersive atmosphere, emphasizing textures, depth, and realism. Always incorporate (static/slow) camera or cinematic movement to enhance the feeling of fluidity and visual storytelling. Keep the wording precise yet descriptive, directly usable, and designed to achieve a high-quality, film-inspired result.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139mxi3/chatgpt_created_this_guide_to_prompt_engineering/
1. Use the 80/20 principle to learn faster
Prompt: “I want to learn about [insert topic]. Identify and share the most important 20% of learnings from this topic that will help me understand 80% of it.”
2. Learn and develop any new skill
Prompt: “I want to learn/get better at [insert desired skill]. I am a complete beginner. Create a 30-day learning plan that will help a beginner like me learn and improve this skill.”
3. Summarize long documents and articles
Prompt: “Summarize the text below and give me a list of bullet points with key insights and the most important facts.” [Insert text]
4. Train ChatGPT to generate prompts for you
Prompt: “You are an AI designed to help [insert profession]. Generate a list of the 10 best prompts for yourself. The prompts should be about [insert topic].”
5. Master any new skill
Prompt: “I have 3 free days a week and 2 months. Design a crash study plan to master [insert desired skill].”
6. Simplify complex information
Prompt: “Break down [insert topic] into smaller, easier-to-understand parts. Use analogies and real-life examples to simplify the concept and make it more relatable.”
More suggestions under the post…
(more…)
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Methods for creating motion blur in Stop motion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_motion
Petroleum jelly
This crude but reasonably effective technique involves smearing petroleum jelly (“Vaseline”) on a plate of glass in front of the camera lens, also known as vaselensing, then cleaning and reapplying it after each shot — a time-consuming process, but one which creates a blur around the model. This technique was used for the endoskeleton in The Terminator. This process was also employed by Jim Danforth to blur the pterodactyl’s wings in Hammer Films’ When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and by Randal William Cook on the terror dogs sequence in Ghostbusters.[citation needed]Bumping the puppet
Gently bumping or flicking the puppet before taking the frame will produce a slight blur; however, care must be taken when doing this that the puppet does not move too much or that one does not bump or move props or set pieces.Moving the table
Moving the table on which the model is standing while the film is being exposed creates a slight, realistic blur. This technique was developed by Ladislas Starevich: when the characters ran, he moved the set in the opposite direction. This is seen in The Little Parade when the ballerina is chased by the devil. Starevich also used this technique on his films The Eyes of the Dragon, The Magical Clock and The Mascot. Aardman Animations used this for the train chase in The Wrong Trousers and again during the lorry chase in A Close Shave. In both cases the cameras were moved physically during a 1-2 second exposure. The technique was revived for the full-length Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.Go motion
The most sophisticated technique was originally developed for the film The Empire Strikes Back and used for some shots of the tauntauns and was later used on films like Dragonslayer and is quite different from traditional stop motion. The model is essentially a rod puppet. The rods are attached to motors which are linked to a computer that can record the movements as the model is traditionally animated. When enough movements have been made, the model is reset to its original position, the camera rolls and the model is moved across the table. Because the model is moving during shots, motion blur is created.A variation of go motion was used in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial to partially animate the children on their bicycles.
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Cinematographers Blueprint 300dpi poster
The 300dpi digital poster is now available to all PixelSham.com subscribers.
If you have already subscribed and wish a copy, please send me a note through the contact page.