Who's your monkey?

I finally feel a great deal better about not getting to know After Effects as planned, because it seems like motion graphics is quickly becoming a dinosaur career.

Why would I speak such evil? Well, because I attended the new Final Cut Studio seminar yesterday and could not believe how easy they've made everything now. Motion is amazing... beautiful, easy, understandable, and so much swooshy, glowy shit that had to be built from scratch in After Effects is now all in the form of templates and pre-made expression buttons. And everything is already in vector! Whee! I watched as the tech showing it did things that should have taken hours or days even, and literally just him a couple clicks of a mouse. Beautiful.
And the Final Cut Pro demo was breathtaking... as were Soundtrack and Color. All are easily inter-workable within Final Cut. They've shaved weeks of work off of everyone's time with this stuff. And that was just the basics they showed. I don't think that my mouth ever closed the whole 3 hours. Apple really knows how to rivet a crowd... and how to cater to their customers.

We also got to see a Peter Jackson short that was supposed to be only a camera test, but turned out to be a fully loaded World War I short film, with machine guns, explosions, tanks, biplanes, and a quite a sizable cast. Pretty sweet, I tell ya!

The bad news is that I discovered that I'm a hopeless geek... as you can see by the above excited ramblings, which likely make no sense to anyone else reading this. I also learned that I get quite turned on by technology. Seriously. If I'd had someone to come home to, he would have been in for the ride of his life.

Sadly, that energy went unutilized.

On another note, I was able to see "Eagle vs Shark" at a free screening afterwards, and I recommend it to everyone who likes truly quirky films... like a smarter "Napoleon Dynamite" meets "Little Miss Sunshine" perhaps, but with great accents.

So yesterday was all in all a truly great day... a lunch date with some truly pleasant company and a nice walk downtown afterwards, an exciting tech seminar, and a fun free movie with more pleasant company (can't forget a mention of my movie buddy!).

Now if only I could find a job where I could get to play with all those great toys on a daily basis!!! And if it were downtown, I could have more lunches like the one yesterday (ah, if only I were still a GSU student). The tech seminars are appreciated more when they're sporadic, yet I can't wait for another.

Okay, I'm done writing about stuff that makes no sense to anyone else but me.

For now.