A Cool Tutorial and A Cool Website

I might be catching you off guard with this one, but - I found something cool on reddit! This week it was a tutorial I found on /r/VFX on how to create the HUD (heads-up display) from Iron man, aka the cool hologram stuff you see when Tony Stark puts his helmet on. While the tutorial was pretty fast moving and involved a lot of things I had never seen before, I liked the light humor throughout it and it kept me engaged. Engaged enough to make it to the 5:45 mark that is, when the maker of the tutorial shows off his website. I went over to productioncrate.com to check it out and I found some pretty cool stuff there. They have lots of cool video FX and royalty free audio you can download, as well as some tutorials (although I haven’t yet looked at any of the tutorials besides this one). To download things you need to make an account, but a free account can still give you access to download some pretty cool stuff. I’ll definitely come back soon to check out exactly what I can get with a free account and see whether a pro account is worth it. Because in the grand scheme of things, $40 per year for a full-access account can save me a lot of time and help make some things a lot cooler.

Professional Uses of After Effects

A lot of production companies and video game development companies design their own in-house software to accommodate their needs, such as Pixar. However, even these studios use publicly accessible software such as After Effects to do things we assume were made on far fancier software.

Here is a video from Adobe's site detailing the use of After Effects as a major editing tool for the movies Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Its cool to see how within reach the professional level methods and motion graphics are, for those of us advancing our varying levels of motion graphics abilities. (Adobe has some other great videos relating to After Effects and their other products that are worth looking through.)

The Avengers

So the Avengers comes out in a week and I for one am very excited.

In case you haven't seen it here is the trailer.  Lots of explosions, lots of superheroes, what could be better?!  I'm sure the effects are going to be insane.  I personally love Tony Stark's computer interface at his house and in the iron man suit.  I thought those 3-d graphics were awesome in the Iron Man movies and I hope they are prevalent again.  Basically I'm just really excited for this.