TED's Ads Worth Spreading

TED, have I told you lately how much I admire you? Probably not. I am often amazed when I talk about TED videos to people and they have no idea what I'm talking about. It's almost inconceivable to me that there are people who don't know about TED. But that's not really what I intended to talk about today. I was merely going to praise the great people behind TED for starting a new thing called "Ads Worth Spreading" (it's a play on the tagline for TED, "ideas worth spreading"). Their first ten winners of this competition are posted here, but I thought I'd share my favorite with you. It's all graphics and music, which I love. All the pieces work together: the story, stylization, music, and execution bring about this really fabulous piece of work. Though I can't figure out how to embed the video, I encourage you to watch it:

TED | Ads Worth Spreading | Girl Effect: The Clock is Ticking

Mizzou Little Planets

After trying out the little planet technique, I decided to try the whole process and take some full panoramas to create a couple of Mizzou planets! The first one amazingly worked and was so fun, I had to go back and get panoramas without people running through them.

And on a snowy day...

To see more of my little planets, visit my behance "marbles" project, or checkout my other little planet posts.

UPDATE 2013: I have re-done the first Mizzou Little Planet and made it available for purchase at photosbykatrina.

All images copyright Katrina Kouba Boles

Panoramas and Little Planets

My struggles with the opening overview for this current video I'm working on has led me to some interesting places of late. (See previous posts about progressive animations in December and in January.) After an in-progress critique, we realized that this whole intro was going to take up 20% of the time allotted for the whole video. That's way too long! So, it's back to the drawing boards. A whole new idea was brought up, but I wasn't ready yet to give up altogether. So, I went out to search for some ideas on how to make it better, and hopefully shorter. In my search, I was looking at panorama photographs and had some "little planets" made from panoramas come up in my search. I'm not sure what peaked my interest, but I was hooked.

Rather than show you some of my favorites, I thought I'd try this technique myself and post some of my own little planets (none of them started out as full panoramas, but all from a series of stitched-together images). I hope you enjoy them! I know I am!

The first one is from our trip to Hawaii. It was a series of pictures taken near the top of the Lanai'i volcano, looking out over the former pineapple fields. I didn't like how it looked as a little planet so I reversed it before polarizing and now I think it has potential:

The second one is a series of images taken of San Francisco from Alcatraz (matching the mountains to buildings was a pain...I don't think I'd try that again):

This third one is also from Hawaii, with Molokai in the distance. We were standing on the shore at Lopa:

Prince Edward Island is where I took this fourth one:

For this project, however, I will be using an illustration created specifically for the project. Here's my "mock up":

All images copyright Katrina Boles

To see more on this illustration project, view my June 16 post.
To see more little planets, visit my behance portfolio.