Always Working

I’ve taken a growing interest lately in “behind the scenes” videos for large budget productions. One animated video that I recently saw was a short promo for McDonalds called Always Working. It was a one minute piece made with 3D printed figures and a background full of miniature plastic trees and hills. The reddit user who posted it also included a “making of” video that I found to be very interesting. It shows all aspects of the production process, including some of the character modeling in Maya and compositing in After Effects. The reddit user was an animator on the project and also held a mini AMA (Ask Me Anything) session in the comments of the post. I think that videos like this one give an interesting glimpse of what it may be like to work as a professional animator.

Awesome Matte Painting

I had heard about Matte Painting before, but never really took time to see how it really worked before watching this video. This is an awesome breakdown of an artist's process of creating one of his fictitious worlds, and the amount of work he seems to have put into it is quite amazing. I thought it would be a good idea to post this here because it was put together using - amongst a few others softwares - Photoshop, After Effects, and Maya, and it shows a bit of what those tools can do.

Here's the video:
Breakdown | - HORIZON - from Mickaël Forrett (MEO) on Vimeo.

Cigarette people

Well after not missing a post all year I guess it's fitting I forgot the last one haha.  So I'll just leave you with this sweet music video.

http://youtu.be/voBNpdXkLnU

It's from The Prodigy.  I think the concept for the video is really cool.  The characters are people made from cigarette boxes.  I had assumed the video had to be made using stop motion because the textures looked too real but after finding this "making of"video I found that they actually did live action work with puppetry and green screen.

They also used animation along with the live action.  It still amazes me to see the level of planning and sophistication in order to make one 3 and a half minute video.  Really cool stuff.

Compositing at its best.

I wanted to share this video I found a little over a year ago on Vimeo. It is created entirely in digital compositing software and is absolutely incredible. This is the kind of stuff I want to be able to make in the future. Make sure you watch the whole thing, and then watch the "making of" below. It shows all of the steps taken when compositing and whatnot. It really exposes to you what little video they actually shot to create this: just a few shots of people in front of a green screen, so well integrated into the film that you can't even tell what exactly was done to create this masterpiece. I'd love to be able to get such incredible results out of green screen footage, and I feel I can be capable of many of the skills required to produce something this incredible if I keep at it.



The real magic of this video is above, where they go into more detail and show you all the layering and just how much work was done to achieve each shot. I have a long way to go with learning this stuff, but this is my motivation.