Breakbot - By Your Side Part 2 (Music Video)

I always think back on this particular music video when I try to think about my favorite music videos. There is something that I really like about plain white and black backgrounds and the crisp, simple lines that make up the animation. I always appreciate a nice short & sweet video and this animated music video is the perfect length.

Title Sequence: My haves and have nots

As everyone currently taking this class (Motion Graphics and Animation) already knows, we are all currently working on our very own title sequences. Some of you are "done", some of you are "almost done," and some of you are beginning to panic that there's no way your project will be handed in on time. The reason for having 'done' in quotes is due to the fact that no project is ever actually finished. More can always be done.

For my project, I decided to make an opening title sequence for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The film doesn't actually have its own opening sequence, so accidentally copying the original hasn't been an issue at all. The image above is actually a screen shot taken from the end of my sequence. I don't mean to toot my own horn or anything, but it looks pretty good if I do say so myself. Just like a movie trailer, though, I really only like to highlight the best aspects of my work. What I really want to do is put out my successes and failures with this particular project in writing. Why? I have absolutely no idea.

Let's start from the beginning. Now, I'm writing this post on Monday, but the project is due on Wednesday. Some faults I write about may be fixed by the time I submit the title sequence (probably not). As I was saying, the first noticeable issue with my sequence spans over the first 30 seconds--yes, it's a pretty big problem. The problem is that there's simply too much empty space. As the production companies' names are displayed, there's probably about five seconds of black between each of them. It's a bit boring and needs to have something there to kill the time. The idea of somehow incorporating the bat theme into this section of the sequence was given to me, but I'm not quite sure how I'd do that. Maybe just some audio? I don't know. The good part about the opening is that it's clean and simple. It looks good and it gets the job done.

The second part of the title sequence is a bunch of Sure Target. Again, it's really simple. I find that totally OK for this section, though. Each name that appears is matched to the music. They come and go on beats and no name sits there for longer than two or three seconds. The pace is certainly much faster than the opening. I was also able to work with a light that really added to the feel of the sequence. I parented the light to the Sure Target camera, which gave more of a focus to the field of view, and added a blue tint to it to match the color scheme of the film. I also messed around with the depth of field to give a greater sense of focus for viewers. This part of the sequence is definitely simple, but it has a bit more artistic value to it than the opening of the sequence.

As the sequence comes close to the end, I needed to find a good transition to move from the name credits to the movie title and bat symbol. Since, after all, the guy's name is Batman and the character's disposition largely stems from his phobia of bats, I figured there must be a way to incorporate the creatures into the sequence. What I ended up doing was using the bats as a sort of wipe transition. I keyed out the background of the video I found on YouTube and colored the layer so the bats were a dark gray instead of black (don't want them disappearing into the background, now do we?!). I have yet to add any bat sound effects--which will definitely add to quality of sequence--but I'll get to it eventually.

The closing of the title sequence is certainly my favorite part of the entire project. As you can see from looking at the first image in this post, it's clean and just looks really damn good. The bat cleanly drops from off screen and the actual title fades up on a beat (which is pretty awesome). The best part about the closing take place in the last couple seconds. What I basically did was made the title and bat become engulfed in black. It's pretty awesome if I do say so myself. To really make it look like it was disappearing into the blackness, I added a quick blur with a couple keyframes to the title and then dropped the opacity once the bat was completely covered so the text would completely disappear. It's a simple concept, I know, but that didn't make it any easier for me to figure out, so I'm quite proud of it.

Overall, I'd like to say I'm proud of this final project. It's not perfect, by any means, and it needs a lot of work. I'm happy with what I hope the final product will be, though, because it really showcases what I've learned this semester (which is a whole lot more than I knew four months ago).

Old Spice | Questions

A series of commercials that I feel is very underrated in the sense of animation, are the old spice commercials.  Throughout the entire series of these commercials, there is a man who is constantly changing the scene which he is in and what he is doing.  When you think about it, these commercials and the animation that must go into them are quite impressive.  When analyzing it closer I can only imagine that there must be a lot of chroma keying on either green screens or blue screens.  The most intriguing aspect for me though is the water.  At times it is very hard to distinguish between animated water and real water (if they are even using either of the two).  The reason tat I find this soo amazing is because of my experiences with animated water before, most of which you can tell is fake.  Over all, these commercials really are fantastic and deserve recognition for what they are doing here.  

puppets in after effects

so i really like hishe they use after effect and photo shop to create basically puppets that the move around with anchor

here we see the hishe guy painting one of his puppets in photoshop, he uses layers to paint and the head, hair on head arms and legs are all different layers so that he can move them freely. i think it would be fun to play around with puppets like this in after effects so im practicing my drawing so one day i can live my dream of messing around for no reason with a puppet in stead of studying

Dragon Baby

The thing that impressed me the most about this piece is the fact that even though the viewer knows it is fake, it is nearly impossible to catch any flaws in the animation.  This looks soo real and and so well done that its production personal must have an extremely experienced background.  It is one thing to fight on the green screen and then make it look like they are in a miniature environment.  But the fact that they were able to put the child’s head on the actor with such an apparently flawless execution is absolutely stunning.  They were even able to achieve all the head movements and various expressions necessary from the baby with the correct orientation of his head.  The editing that must have gone into this must be remarkable.  I realize that this level of animation mostly likely won’t be able to be achieved from just this class alone, but it would be very interesting to know how they did this.  I am in awe.