Thursday, March 13, 2014

Keep food from drying out by reheating with a wet paper towel.

Not being responsible for feeding other people is awesome because I can make dinner at the beginning of the week and then it lasts me for that whole entire week. 45 minutes spent cooking on Monday means for the rest of the week I can eat my dinner after I microwave it for just two minutes!

This week, I made some delicious BBQ biscuits. They're so good (biscuit+beef+secret sauce+cheese), but after they are refrigerated for a day the biscuit part loses all moisture.


These BBQ biscuits used to be one of about four things that I ever cooked, but I have since broadened my horizons and started cooking all the things on my Pinterest recipes board. Since I used to make them all the time, it turned into a pretty huge problem that I was frequently eating super dry biscuits for days in a row. It was also pretty gross and sad, because these biscuits are normally so good. I put my thinking cap on and came up with a solution!


Just soak a paper towel in water, cover the food and voilĂ ! It comes out of the microwave like it's fresh out of the oven.


Friday, March 7, 2014

Streamers can be made in After Effects.

It's a big year for the University of Missouri! It's MU's 175th birthday and it's the Trulaske College of Business's 100th birthday! Since I work at the Business School, I got to make a fun birthday themed animation.

Step one for any good birthday themed anything is streamers. 3D-looking spirals are actually much harder to make in After Effects than you might think. Lucky for me my boss sent me a link to this tutorial about how to begin, starting with a single skinny line.


I animated this one line, added a cylinder effect for the spiral, and duplicated it to create several different spirals. The only problem is the effect I used doesn't create more than one twist, which can make for some pretty lame streamers.


Those doesn't look like a super exciting centennial AT ALL. So, I duplicated all of them and shifted the time over to make the duplicates into an extension.


Much curlier, longer and overall more fun-and-exciting-birthday-party-looking! Next step was the confetti. That was the easy part, as the confetti is just a rather simple particle effect. I had to adjust all the settings about a million times to get the amount and speed of my confetti just right, but I did it!


The final step was to add a grand entrance for the main happy birthday message! Here's the final product: