 I'm trying to think bigger with different programs, different dimensions. In college, a professor talked about how illustration is the reflection of society and it helps people process things, so that legitimized it for me. I'm like, this is important. I can do this. One of the things I do is make gifts, which are little moving images for the web. I think people really respond to gifts in a way that they don't to still images because there's this infinite perpetual motion to them. Rebecca has a real sense of how to capture a quiet moment, so it still has that tension and excitement. So the part that animates in this is the leg moving. I think that gifts are perceived as a low art form and Rebecca was one of the early artists who were pushing the form to a higher level. Today we're going to be using a new computer with Optane Memory and we're going to be showing how that works with some of my more complicated files. I tend to make all of my gifts by hand entirely in Photoshop. I like to work pixel by pixel to make everything very deliberate. Each of these is the same layer, but very slight movement. The advantage of doing things the way that I like to work is that I have this hyper control over every detail of the piece. But every time you reload that huge file, that's more time where you're just kind of sitting there waiting for it to load. I feel proud of the aftershocks because it's definitely the most complicated, illustrated gift that I've ever done. I commissioned Rebecca to create the animation for the aftershocks, which was about this earthquake in Italy. He said, I want to see the interior of a house with those trimmers of an earthquake right before everything starts going crazy and breaking. I said, sure, I can do that. And I really did not know how I was going to do that. What draws them in is it kind of fascinates and terrifies at the same time, something that a photograph couldn't do, an infographic couldn't do, but her animation could. It's really a masterpiece. The more times you watch it, the more you really realize how intricate it is. There were so many layers and so many moving parts that my computer just couldn't handle the file. It would freeze or it would just lag to a point where I couldn't actually do anything. I had to break certain parts into their own files. I needed to be smoother, so I added more frames and more wiggle. I'd like to be able to open that file a little faster and actually see the animation as it's supposed to play in Photoshop. What I like about Optane Memory is that it's so fast to boot up and put me right back where I was when I left it. That was pretty fast compared to my old computer. The vase itself is just like a little outline. And there's like a little highlight that goes back and forth. It looks like water was spinning around. One of my favorite details is like there's a mid-ground room with a lamp hanging in it. It looks like it's swinging back and forth towards you and away from you, but it's a bunch of different layers moving pixel by pixel and me turning layers on and off. Then I just have to render it up. That was quite fast. I've worked with a hundred illustrators in my career and Rebecca is really one of the top people I would go to for an assignment. I would be excited to see what Rebecca could do with a really powerful computer. I'm feeling way more inspired than I've been in years. I feel really excited about new technology that's helping me tackle bigger and more ambitious projects. And as I learn new techniques and new programs, I keep coming up with crazier and crazier ideas.