Found this amazingly creative video on Vimeo called "Wurst." It's a clever title because it's a german film and wurst serves two meanings.
It actually took me a while to realize this video was stop motion, and the cinematography was so animated, I figured it had to be green screened. It's quite a cool story as well.
The website has a "how it was made" page which is such a cool behind the scenes aspect.
I thought this video was fascinating because it was all shot with the new iphone 6 Plus. Of course the guy used different video filters and applications, but that fact that we have phone cameras that can produce such amazing quality is so so cool.
I don't think it will be long before we start to see actual films being made with camera phones and other recording devices. When I was younger I had a really bad, old video camera that I barely knew how to use, and now I think the landscape has changed drastically to the point where kids can start using mobile devices and ipads to create videos.
I wish I had the knowledge and accessibility to things like this when I was a kid because it could've greatly propelled my creativity. I think the slo-mo and time lapse features are so cool on the new phones, and with each new generation the features are just going to get cooler.
Here's the whole video: https://vimeo.com/80218060
Saw this video on Vimeo as the short of the week. I thought the cinematography in this film was especially clean, and worked well with the simplicity of the message.
The other thing I noticed was how simplistic the setting really was. Things in the background were half drawn and not fully created. This could be considered lazy, but I think it works so well with the simplistic message and creates this dystopian society where our eyes aren't drawn to useless object. I felt it was very successfully animated and told a story very successfully. It also felt very much like a Tim Burton film because of the coloring and figure drawing.
I noticed on the Maya help page that they had a picture of the winning animated short film of the 2014 Academy Awards known as Mr.Hublot.
I did a little research and found out that the film was made on maya. This didn't come as a suprise to me as the film is visually stunning for animation. The lighting especially is fantastic. This was a grew example of exactly what can be created with Maya under the correct creative mindset.
Came across this video on Vimeo. I thought it was such a cool and unique way to do a short informational documentary, and keep in fresh and interesting. I loved the idea of animating animals over actual footage of their inhabitants. It also seems like a good way to shoot something like this on a low budget, since you don't have to try and hunt down this animal and wait for good action shots.
At the beginning, many of the animals didn't have shadows, which made them seem like they're on a different plane than the background, and the walking was a little robotic at times, but overall I felt this was done very well. The owl especially.
What's interesting to me is the amount of planning and visualizing shooting this real footage must have taken. To imagine exactly where the owl would be had to have been a tough situation, and to make sure you got all of the shots to animate over definitely took some time and precision. Kudos to whoever script supervised this...
This is a mainly animated video, that varies in format. This video does an amazing job transitioning between different worlds of animation. This video uses lighting, black and white, 3D, shadows, and even green screen.
It's very impressive how they manage to keep these 2 characters consistent throughout such different settings with really just 2 eyes and a mouth to define them. The 3D is especially exceptional and high end as their couch form is very stunning.
I do think this video is a good example of some really cool things you can do even outside of the 3D world in After Effects.
One of the shows that has won a bunch of recent Emmys for Visual Effects is of course Game Of Thrones. With such a vast, virtual, and magical world it's very important to have believable graphics.
Most of the structures in the show are computer generated, even though they shoot in exotic locations like New Zealand. The video below is a highlight real of some before & after effects consistently found in the show.
One of the things that amazed me was their ability to duplicate extras in the show. Many times they took a small platoon of soldiers and turned them into an army of thousands. It is so amazing how they can do this and create such a realistic army. I also loved the use of green screen curtains to eliminate certain pieces of unwanted terrain that were in the way of the shot. I had never thought about using green screen to get rid of things before.
Rodeo, the company in charge of the visual effects does a fantastic job of creating fantastical and amazing skylines, with crazy mountains, lights, and castles. It truly is a visually stunning show.
One of the most popular movies that came out last year was "The Lego Movie." This movie gained a lot of attention because of its insane cast consisting of Will Ferrell, Allison Brie, Morgan Freeman, and many more.
What makes this movie so interesting is the fact that the entire world shot in this movie is made from LEGO's. Most of the film is done in fluent stop motion as the main characters are portrayed as plastic.
One of the coolest things in this film in my opinion was the ending credit sequence, which tracked through many different tiny scenes consisting of LEGO's. While there isn't much motion graphics in here other than possibly the camera tracking and maybe some moving LEGO pieces, I felt this stop motion was so incredibly well done, and that the use of programs like After Effects for the mouth movements really made this film possible.
