First Impressions

Wanna know something funny? The first day I walked into class, I had no idea what After Effects even was. I'm so clueless sometimes it's a bit ridiculous. In any event, now that I know what it is, I'm extremely excited to be part of the class and learn the program. After playing around with it for just the first few days I've been trying to think about the possibilities of the program and what it could mean for my future in game design. I've worked a little with Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm taking a class this semester that works with Flash. By the end of my time here at IC I would love to be proficient in each program to be able to adapt my drawings and sketches into polished concept art and animations.

The short time I've spent with After Effects has opened my mind up to even more than that. I'm still not decided on exactly what I want to do... I seem to have run the gambit of game design and don't know exactly where my niche is. Art, writing, and production seem to be where I find myself always returning to. But talking about all these intros to movies has made me think critically about them, and the possibility of doing something with movies or television is always in the back of my mind. One of my favorite movies of all time is 300, so when we talked about it and I began to realize that we were working with the very same program that made the special effects possible, I got very excited. I'm a pretty good artist and I really want to use my drawing skills with the After Effects program to create some cool animations like the ones in the credit scene, and I've told some friends that maybe someday I'll be able to create some cool intros for their film projects.

One of the coolest things I've seen done with the After Effects program is people on YouTube making live action, or real-life videos of games, or spoofs on them. Specifically for the game, Skyrim. This is one such video that if I could, I would love to make:

By the end of this class, I hope to have my own Skyrim Badass video on youtube. Cody, I know you're out there, lets do it.

Zach Snyder

Zach Snyder is definitely one of my all time favorite directors. My love affair with his work all started with his box office hit "300" which still to this day is one of my favorite movies (and no its not because of the half naked men in loin cloths, contrary to popular belief).Everything he does is beautiful and complex. If you are familiar with Snyder's work you know exactly why he is absolutely relevant to the topic of motion graphics and animation. I definitely think that his team is one of the best in the industry right now. Every single one of his movies, (300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch) have some of the cleanest and most outrageous effects out there. To say that I understand the complexity of all these heavily animated scenes would be a lie but I hope this class helps me at least somewhat disect and understand some of the scenes of some of these marvelous movies directed by one of my idols.

Enjoy a small clip from 300...

Adding yourself to famous scenes

As I was reading the blog this morning I was very interested in everyone’s posts about green/blue screens, and their use in famous scenes from movies. At first the movie “300” jumped into my head as the movie which used green screens the most. So I started looking for behind the scenes footage of what the set actually looked like before the green screen work was done. While looking for all of this I stumbled upon a really interesting video that reminded me of the work we were doing in class. The video is a student that used a blue screen to add himself into one of the famous scenes of 300. The video shows step by step using aftereffects and Photoshop just how the student added himself. It was similar to our class exercise with the red bull can but on steroids.

Bluescreen Assignment from Marius Denisse on Vimeo.

FX Studios

So I found this list of the 34 top FX studios. If you click on there names it will bring you to their websites where you can watch demo reels. In most of the reals they will show you before and after images and the stuff they do is absolutely amazing. These are the studios that did movies like Avatar, 2012, 300, and a bunch of other graphic heavy films.