Newsletter #3
I'm trying my hand at making my own GIFs for demonstration purposes this week. I'm hoping my good looks will bring in more subscribers, but in all likelihood the opposite of everything I just said will happen.
What's trending?
I have a feeling the flame outline lenses are going to be taking over for a while on Snapchat. The one linked here showed up on Trending for me today, but I saw a couple other ones earlier this week too. I doubt the flame outlines will become as ubiquitous as grain, alt (sharpening?), or kira kira, but if you want some extra views it wouldn't hurt to make some flame outlines lenses while they're hot (pun 100% intended). Just don't ask me how to make them because I don't know. There is a pretty similar effect (with a free version for any cheapskates) you can create in Instagram already, so if you can't hop on the Snapchat hype train maybe the trend will spillover to Instagram? Or maybe someone much smarter than me can reverse engineer how the IG version works and recreate it on Snapchat.
Join the copycat wars
I finished my tutorial on making a cloning lens! The video version clocks in at just under 40 minutes so it is a doozy of a tutorial. But there is a lot of good stuff in there and I walk you through some troubleshooting. Let me know if you make something cool with it.
Coming soon to theaters
If you've spent more than 2 seconds on Snapchat Spotlight, you've seen videos featuring the Screen Scanner Pro lens. But its solo reign is coming to an end. I'm missing out on the big Spotlight bucks because apparently I'm not good at making videos, so instead I sold my soul and am making the small bucks on Patreon. One of my patrons requested a tutorial for this sort of effect, and luckily I figured out how it's done just the other week. I don't want to be in the business of leaking everyone's secrets, but it is a really handy technique to know and can be used for more than just the screen scanning/time warp effect. I'm not going to exactly recreate the lens, but I will teach you everything you need to know about how it works.
Super cool Snapchat lens
"God Rays x Color" is a super cool lens I came across recently. The rainbow rays look really nice over a grayscale background. There's a nice tutorial by Julien if you want to make your own light rays.
Super cool Instagram filter
Point Cloud is a super cool Instagram filter that I came across this week. It uses the pixel values to create a "depth map" and then displaces the point cloud based on that map. Go check it out.
