Photoshop Phun

This semester I am teaching seven classes and it has been keeping me awfully busy. I work from home a few days of the week but instead of giving myself more free time I find myself recording demonstration videos for my online students that it turns out have been a pretty big help for my on campus students as well. It seems the ability to pause and rewind and follow along at their own pace is easier than trying to keep all 19 people on the same page and still get through everything I need to get across to them. So my youtube channel has become a little more central to my career. I have been trying to crank out at least one video per week. I give my in class lectures on Thursdays and Fridays and then take that experience home to make my demonstration video for the students to relive the class at their own pace. It's a lot of work but whenever one of my students tells me how much they appreciate having the videos it makes it worthwhile.

I also adopted a new hobby recently. I purchased a DJI Phantom and I have become obsessed with aerial photography. I have spent so much time researching how to build camera gimbals and balance rotors and motors that I could probably build a helicopter in my sleep. The way I rationalize the new hobby is that I will put my visual FX skills to use compositing aliens and such things into the footage so as to build up more demo reel material. I've certainly spent some time learning to color grade my footage nicely mostly using the Magic Bullet plugins for Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere. I keep telling myself that at some point I am going to teach myself Nuke but I never seem to find time.
First thing on my list to composite into my aerial footage is a post-apocalyptic scene from Robotech. I have to finish modeling, texturing and rigging my battle-pod and a veritech to litter the battlefield with so I will have to scrounge up time between teaching classes and flying quadcopters.