mack's final

hey everyone i here is my final video check it out

DRAW MY LIFE - Zach King

I really enjoyed this video.  I have seen many other videos from this user, but I though this one was cool for a few reasons.  To start, he talks about his life an how he got into making all of his videos and his inspiration.  The other part that makes this really cool, is the animation that he does.  The theme is that of a pop-up book with all the animations drawn.  He brings this into a whole other realm by having them interact in 3D space.  When you look closely, you can see points that he made on both the horizontal and vertical planes for tracking purposes.  On the horizontal paper, there are “x”s and on the chairs, there are pieces of blue tape.  I assume these are tracking points because they are out of place and I have seen him use this type of method before.  Over all, the video is quite inspirational and well done.  I would also like to thank you Arturo for a great semester.  I learned a Lot in this class, so thank you!

Game Grumps

First of all, let me explain about Game Grumps. Game Grumps is a channel on YouTube with two well-known internet celebrities, Egoraptor and JonTron. These two play video games and talk about random stuff that happens during their day. Egoraptor and JonTron are fans of many video games and decided to play them together to their combined fanbase.
These two play without a camera to show their faces, so all their fans hears them playing, but not see what they're doing. That is where this video comes in. This video is one of many that drew or animated spoofs of the Game Grumps, using various voice clips from their videos. This one is one of my favorites, since it's a dramatic movie trailer spoof, while in reality, they're just playing video games.

TItle Sequence: Catch Me If You Can

A few weeks ago, I watched the Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can.  I really enjoyed the film, but the thing that grabbed me right at the start was the title sequence.  It is a very minimalistic animation that draws the viewer in and tells a story of its own.  Just through silhouettes, it is able to capture the essence of the characters and tell their story.  Even more impressive is the fact that the characters were not animated digitally.  Rather, the creators made stamps of the characters and animated with those.  There's  a lot more detail on the process and other aspects of creating the titles in an interview on the Art of the Title page.  Unfortunately I can't get the video to embed, but it is also available on the same page.

My last blog post

I decided to end my blog posts with 5 things a Motion Graphics Designer should never do. The first thing on this list includes to never use anything from Video Copilot, as I guess the industry hates this guy. Poor Andrew and his silly jokes. There goes a majority of the classes demo reels, sorry guys.
Here's the link to the website with the guy keeping it real. Sorry for ruining everyone's hopes and dreams of copying Andrew and his tutorials.

More Set Design!

During this year's Ultra Music Festival, attendees were treated to much more than a full schedule of DJs. They also had outstanding visual aesthetics to complement the music, synchronized to every beat. The amazing results you see in this video are the successful result of collaborations between SJ Lighting (stage/laser lighting design) and Dierson Design (programming). Lightwave International, the production company responsible for piecing it all together, is a professional production company that specializes in concert design (lighting, lasers, LED visuals) and special effects for movies and corporate/touring/civic events. Some of their other credits include Coachella 2013, Pretty Lights, Jay-Z, and The Killers. Customized water screens, fog screens and CO2 shows are some of the unique special effects they also use to create an amazing and captivating show. Here is their Reel:

How far we've come

So I saw this commercial the other day and it made me think how far we've come this semester in Motion Graphics. Before this semester I wouldn't have had the slightest idea about the ins and outs of producing a commercial with graphics like this, but now I can saw with confidence that with time and effort I can probably do everything in this advert. Other than maybe the squirrels talking and the witches at the end, everything in this ad can be recreated in AE. There is definitely a lot of particle use and they for sure used green screens and keying. I think it's pretty sweet how I can see ads on TV now and say I can do that.

Bjork Music Video

One of the first posts I did was about a video called Solipsist by Andrew Huang. Well here's another great video by him but this time it's a music video for the very talented singer Bjork. A lot of Andrew's work from Solipsist is similar in this video. This video also incorporates animation of sand, moving creatures and vibrant colors. The animation is mind-blowing and very unique. This video was nominated for the Webby Awards, and it's pretty obvious why. Andrew makes these creatures come alive with it's juxtaposition of faces and these odd contraptions. Awesome video just check it out I don't really do it justice.

Real Time 3D

This weekend my roomate showed me this skate movie which somehow created the illusion of 3D space when skateboarding. What looks like a simple shot is quickly transformed when the camera freezes the subject then quickly pans around you you can see an alternative angle. I searched the web for a behind the scenes video of how they achieved the effect but all and all its pretty cool. My hypothesis is a series of cameras evenly spaced shot instantaneously similar to the first motion pictures. 

Cool Effects

So at the beginning of the semester we did a little audio visualizer animation that was based on the levels of the bass and treble.  Here is an example of an audio visualizer that is much more complicated than that:




Thats pretty cool.  But this is way cooler.



This is a tutorial that shows how to have a frozen in time effect.  This effect can have varying levels of difficulty.  You need to make a way to have a camera do identical motions.  This can be very difficult but there are many ways to do it.  The tutorial has a specific device that does this.  Next you take multiple shots with the camera going in the same motion with just the actors in different places.  Then you simply mask over the shots to combine them in After Effects.  If you don't need to add any 3D elements that are not in the original shots then you are done.  If you do then you need to go into 3D programs and add them.  I get lost at that point but from this tutorial I could make a cool freeze frame that would look pretty cool.

Animation Sound Design

Here's a neat little video about the process of sound designing for animated films.  In this case, the video gives us a behind the scenes look at one of the most popular and well-known animated films from the past few years: WALL-E

Neon Light Text Tutorial

For my final project I am creating a title sequence for the new show Bates Motel, which premiered a few weeks ago on A&E. The show itself doesn't actually have a title sequence, but everyone knows that the best part of a sketchy motel stereotype is the flashing neon sign out front, so I really wanted to include that in my sequence.

As it stands right now, all the text in my project is a flashy neon sign font that I built in After Effects. When I was in the early stages of figuring out how I wanted to arrange my text, I found this tutorial on neon signs and thought it was pretty helpful. Check it out if its something that interests you.

Freezing Time

I like this video not only because of the effects, but also because it talks about more than just that.  It talks about so really cool systems that can be used to control the camera.  With these systems shots can be perfectly duplicated and thus allows an editor countless more options with video effects and essentially giving him a free reign.  The coolest part of the video tough is at the end.  What they do is basically freeze time and move the camera around in it.  From what I have been through in animation from this class, I can really appreciate the amount of time, money and effort that must have gone into making this scene.  I currently don’t know how they did it, but trying to figure it out is half the fun! 

Pixar Uses Maya To Model EVERYTHING

This is one of the cooler videos I've seen about Pixar, and it gets down to the gritty details about how they model their characters in Maya and how they animate them. The big discussion here is the way they can subdivide their shapes into smooth shapes and forms without slowing down the computer at all. All the computing for the real time rendering is calculated on the GPU instead of the CPU so the process is much faster. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in 3D Modeling!

Spy vs. Guy

Red Giant is a plugin and software company that creates software for filmmakers and visual effects artists (Among other things, they are the company behind Trapcode Particular and the Trapcode Suite). For the past few years, they have been creating short films to demonstrate their products.  This is their most recent, demonstrating among other things, their new product Bulletproof.  The short is very well done, funny, and displays some very good visual effects.  Even better, they have included a behind the scenes showing how they achieved their results, as well as the programs they used.


I really enjoyed the short, and it was a great bonus to see behind the scenes as well.

Despicable Me 2

So one movie that I am excited to come out is Despicable Me 2.  The 1st one was hilarious and I cannot wait to see what happens in the third one.  I found a couple of trailers and the movie looks to be just as funny as the first.






From these trailers the movie shows great promise and I can't wait to see it.

History of Motion Graphics

I found a website with some pretty interesting stuff on Motion Graphics and what it is. It has a lot of cool videos from older movies and TV shows (including Adam West). This guy also gets into how he made a demo reel in order to find a job. So I guess Arturo was right for once (just kidding, don't fail me Arturo) that a good demo reel really does get you places. Check it out.

Epic

The creator's of Ice Age and Rio are coming out with a new 3D animated film called Epic. The stars who are voices the characters include Aziz Ansari, Christoph Waltz, and Beyonce. Yep I said it, Beyonce. Beyonce voices Queen Tara, who is trying to protect the forest against evil creatures. The film is based the children's book the Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs.  The rest of the cast is pretty impressive and it hopefully will be as good as it looks! For some reason I haven't heard much about it but if it's as good as Ice Age was then I bet it will be great.

The Little Panda Fighter

This fascinating video right here is one part of a movie called, The Little Panda Fighter. If you watch even a few seconds of it, you will notice some similarities to the movie, Kung-Fu Panda. This movie was produced by Video Brinquedo, or Toyland Video in Brazil. There are other movies they produced such as, The Little Cars (rip-off of Cars), Ratatoing (rip-off of Ratatouille), What's Up?: Balloon to the Rescue (rip-off of Up), and much more. These movies are horrible CGI rip-offs of most high-quality movies. If you watch closely, even the lip-syncing is off. You can check this out, or not. I could not stand watching this for more than a few minutes.

E*Trade Baby

This past weekend I was in NYC interviewing for a couple animation/motion graphics internships for the upcoming summer. I interviewed at Click 3X (http://www.click3x.com/), this really cool entertainment company who do the graphics for the Superbowl, the Geico pig commercials and the E*Trade Baby. I got a tour of their studio and office which was really awesome. They have this massive Flame compositing suite with these mega computers for fast rendering.

I really love the E*Trade commercials. I learned they were made by filming babies on green screens and filming older children who read the script. The lips of the older children were composited onto the babies which was then supplemented by the voice actors audio track. A pretty crazy process that produced an almost seamless result.

Game of Thrones - Visual Effects from Season 1

Don't know how many of you watch Game of Thrones but I came across this pretty cool short video that shows scenes from the show before & after the use of VFX.  You can see them using green screen on a number of occasions.   Also, I found a pretty interesting Cracked.com article.  These days, its relatively safe to assume that many outrageous stunts or effects shown in movies are accomplished with computer graphics.  However, the article lists several films that have "amazing special effects" you would think are CGI.

7 Amazing Movie Special Effects You Won't Believe Aren't CGI