When I started blogging again this year; I made a firm resolution to blog consistently, listing sites to give insight into digital work.  Unfortunately, I fell off the blogging wagon – hard.  Shavaun and I have re-tooled our main site Rigler Digital to promote our hosting and domain registration services.  As artists we continue to design websites, and do animation for the web but our main focus will lie in hosting and domains.

Tips for registering your domain keep it short.  Instead of registering mymegahugebusinesscompany.com try baboo.com or something short.  It can be nonsensical.  For artists, use your name in the domain.  Think of it as a way of branding yourself and artwork.  Don’t be shy.  Of course then promotion begins on all of the sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube.

Okay the bad. . . It’s the battery – jeesh, it just uses up it’s power so quickly.  You need to charge it at least twice a day, no seriously.

The Beautiful:

Apple's iPhone

Please visit me on twitter and let me know your thoughts: http://twitter.com/RiglerDigital

Chris Georgenes Site Mudbubble.com

I haven’t blogged that much about Flash, but now I am working on a new Corn Star and knee deep in Flash.  Chris Georgenes started working with Flash in 1999 and now is an expert in the field.  He is a consultant to Adobe on the program and has a great tutorial there for character designing.  What I like about Chris’ background: he has a fine arts degree, he turned to Flash as a last resort to help bring a project in on a deadline, he’s now an authority in the field.  His approach in the above tutorial helped me to take Brad Goodchild’s design of Corn Star into a Flash reality.  Enjoy the site and his portfolio page.

For great tutorials and advice about Photoshop checkout: PhotoshopRoadmap.com .  The owner of this site is very passionate about Photoshop.  He has over 9 years- yes that’s 9 years of experience, collecting tips and tutorials to help the novice user.   He’s compiled a list of 64 essential guides and tips, to help you master Photoshop.

I know I’ve blogged about sites for inspiration, but there are others that motivate me as an artist as well.  One site is Passion for Life.  This blog was created by Stephen Silver.  Stephen is a top character designer in animation.  Some of his credits include designs for Kim Possible, Danny Phantom, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks.  Stephen shares his passion for the arts and gives advice and motivation to other artists.  I look forward to his weekly posts of motivation.   Personally I feel his down to earth style helps others realize they can achieve their dreams even if that dream is skydiving.  Take some time to investigate his site and it’s well worth subscribing to.
     The Cinema 4D site for this week is Cactus Dan’s website.  Cactus Dan is synonymous with Cinema 4D plug-ins.  He can take your MOCCA rigging to a whole new level.  I first learned of Cactus Dan from a tutorial on a snow covered mountain on Creative Cow.   The tutorial’s great and it led me to Cactus Dan’s site.  His site contains tutorials, plugins, and links to many sites about Cinema 4D.  Some of his plugins include:

CD Character Bundle Pro 1.5
CD IK Tools/CD Morph Bundle 1.5
CD IK Tools/CD Joints & Skin Bundle

and many more. . .

1. If you can put aside an hour a day to participate on all of your sites.  
2. comment on others work, good and bad.
3. set up a gravatar account so your image/brand will appear in comments.
4. when you fall off, pick yourself up and start participating again.

Myself I’ve let LinkedIn go yet participate fairly regularly on facebook and twitter.  
The positive side of all this:  You actually get a chance for a large number of people to see your work.  Good luck.

It’s been awhile since we posted a movie trailer. My sister visited recently and got me to watch Twilight.  Check out their trailer for New Moon. Stay tuned next week for more interesting websites. Hulu is one of my favorite for movies and tv on the web.

Apple's Final Cut Pro

2-pop is more of a landing page for Creative Planet to promote their other companies. Yes there are articles and yes there is a forum, but the latest entry I saw was for February. Not an active forum in my book. To focus on the positive; I suggest Ken Stone’s website. He has a large number of tutorials. It is a very zenlike site laid out very clean. Each tutorial is the way I like it so a complete novice can understand step by step. Another resource is the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User’s Group – ok lafcpug.org also done with care and tutorials by experts in the field giving step by step instructions.
However, where is my favorite place to get help with Final Cut well that’s easy: Creativecow.net. I like CreativeCow because their tutorials are video based with the program open and running. This helps by which you can start and stop the tutorial – view it as many times as you like. Richard Harrington is their expert and he does a great job.