This is a quick experiment I made in AfterEffects after watching a documentary about Islamic tapestries. Warning: LSD veterans from the sixties may experience flashbacks.

While the great brains of physics will argue that a starfield seen from the perspective a superluminal traveller will not smear into little spectral streaks, the effects is ubiquitous enough in contemporary science-fiction and fantasy works that it has become a kind of visual staple. So, science be damned -- the following tutorial illustrates a simple way to quickly apply the rainbow-streak effect to your moving starfields...

Pseudo-hologrammetry is a fancy name for a very simple effect, in which a two-dimensional image is given a hologram-like appearance. It is a quick, pain-free way to add some life to flat artwork. I came up with this recipe when charged with the task of creating a full minute of interesting video using only twelve still images with just one day of production time available.

Strictly speaking, this recipe does not reproduce the look of a classic flat hologram with its distinctive chromatic scintillation as much as give the impression of flat artwork forcibly "dimensionalised" and projected through some yet to be invented technology, like a very simplified version of the effect seen in the movie Minority Report (2002) in which we see flat video footage interpolated into semi-dimensionality and projected into 3D space by an array of tiny light-guns.

The geeks at ILM spent a lot of money and sweat figuring out how to achieve that cool effect. In contrast, the trick described below is cheap and simple. Ready? Let's go...

The varied and sundry digital revolutions of the last thirty years have empowered many regular people to create the kinds of media that had heretofore been the exclusive domain of trained professionals with expensive proprietary hardware and specialised knowledge.

In part this has resulted in a profound empowerment of creative users to express themselves in powerful new ways; largely, however, it resulted in the wide exposure of a whole lot of really, really bad visual design by amateur clods.

Whether you are an enthusiastic user of these new technologies who would like to improve your skills through a better understanding of the formalised elements and principles of design your fly-by-night "digital design school" located above a convenience store may have failed to teach you, or if you are just a regular person who would like to sneer and poke fun at the ocean of bad design that surrounds us in a more intelligent and informed manner, this is the article for you ...