Variations on emulsion-peeling have been around at least thirty-five years (at least that's when I first started experimenting with Polaroids).

Oops! Did I just reveal my age?!?

This is so much up my alley . .I love all this bashing about with images. Anybody remember the title sequence to "SE7EN"?

Bob has always teetered on the edge of this analogue/real world FX-ing. Nice! - Thanks for the links, ozzie-boy!

Grazie

The reason I was so interested in the article about True Blood in the Dec 08 issue of the ASC mag was an interesting convergence of several things over the last few weeks.

1) I have a client who wants titles with a certain 'distressed' look to the text. Some of them he wants them to look like they are "stamped" over the other titles e.g. with a rubber stamp.
2) I finally cracked open the DVD that comes with the DV Rebels Guide and loaded the gunfight project into AE. It's a great example of how having the tools is one thing. Knowing how to use them is another. The amount of time involved though even then can be HUGE. I'd hazard a guess Stu spent a week adding those muzzle flashes, heat distortions, flying shell casing etc to those few seconds of vision from looking at that project.
3) Following on from 1) I tracked down a tutorial on using displacement maps in PS. Towards the end the author gets into the Glass filter in PS. He admits he'd received more emails about this than anything and one common request was to see it in higher resolution. He did it and it took him a week to get it looking good enough for him to be happy with it.

On a similar note:
Quite some time ago I had an intersting conversation with a rather scruffy looking gent who'd wandered into our office with a group of helpers. He wanted help with a small steadycam rig. No problem there but he wanted the camera operator to 'see' in the viewfinder what was realtime CGI and what he saw would like exactly like he'd see as he moved the camera through a group of CGI dancers.
Yikes I thought. The sheer computational power required would be mind numbing and tracking the data from the camera sensors and the linkages would be quite a task and what the heck it's not like CGI packages can't do camera moves anyway.
As I got told in no uncertain terms of course they'd tried that but they couldn't get the CGI camera moves as 'organic' as a real cameraman would as he'd move through real dancers. What I didn't know at the time was that scruffy gent was George Miller and the 'dancers' were penguins and he did have plenty of CPUs at hand to pull it all off. Talk about a bad case of foot in mouth on my part :)

So tomorrow I have to get back to the simple task of displacement mapping text. I've tried it in PS, AE and Vegas. The results are pretty much the same, no surprises there. Finding the right dmap is the challenge. Mapping it onto a texture and getting it to look organic isn't easy. Given that it also needs to be stamped onto the other text and grahics I'm fast thinking about finding a piece of lino and a small knife and stamp pad.
This isn't an original idea, the True Blood title fonts were created by cutting out cardboard with an Exacto knife. Inspiration was taken from roadside hand painted signs.

Bob.

I always like using organic items for effects. I have used sweet n' low for snow or ocean waves. Sugar for starfields. And actually cut traveling mattes out of paper by tracing the shape on the monitor.

Not everything needs to be CGI.

Dave T2