So a few months ago, my sister Leena made a custom version of the widely used song meme "We Are Number One" and asked that I do the visuals based on some premade animations.  It was only half a year later that I remembered to do a blog post on it!  Without further ado, here's my contribution to BIONICLE fandom:     Most of the work here was simply video editing in Premiere, but there were a few points where I ended up adding original elements and visual effects--for instance, I made Ekimu's saxophone in Adobe Illustrator while paying attention to the surrounding art style.     The main changes I made were actually all based around masking and animating those masked elements in After Effects, using the same technique I used for the hand in my "Fire Hand" short.  I used a bit of motion tracking for some of the masks, but a lot of the motion was manual (e.g. masking Leena's signature yellow Miru Nuva over Sportacus' ...

So, as many in the tech world know, Apple recently switched to a new photo format for their iDevices with iOS 11 forward.  While the new format is vastly superior to JPG, it was all but entirely incompatible with Windows programs. However, thanks to a college class in JavaScript, I managed to download and jury-rig the official HEIF format website into a file reader!  It seems Chrome/Edge are incompatible as of this writing, so thus far only Firefox seems to work.  Here's a link to the program: https://mega.nz/#!9xwWgCSA !6G3mvAjN_zB7iYzhVEkuGsulNjPFCsoZubSfpUTHQw4   This is far from a perfect viewer, so I plan to keep working on and rewriting the program as necessary (#1 on the agenda would be compatibility with more browsers).  In the meantime, though, have fun with the program!   UPDATE 1/3/2018: I've run a direct copy of the website on other browsers, and apparently Chrome (and presumably the other browsers) somehow can't load the special images b...