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.

Most Used Motion Graphics Techniques

This week while browsing reddit, I found a blog post that summarized the top 25 techniques that motion graphics artists use to make simple videos look better. Some of these techniques I had practiced in the past, while some of these were completely new to me. It’s a good checklist to go through if you’re looking for ways to make a plain video look better, and I will definitely check this list before finalizing videos in the future. The link can be found here, and it’s a url that I have bookmarked for future use. /r/aftereffects has provided me with lots of valuable posts, and I plan on using these posts in the future as a valuable source of learning. 

MoGraph for Bernie Inspired MoGraph for Me

This week, I was browsing reddit when I came across an interesting post. It came from one of my newest subscriptions on reddit - r/AfterEffects. The post, titled “MoGraph video I made for Bernie”, gave me an interesting idea as to how I could apply some of my new skills. The video takes the normally visually unappealing topic of voting statistics and used motion graphics to bring some life to the numbers. I thought this was an excellent way of keeping an audience interested and involved with a topic that might have otherwise been bland or boring. Inspired by this post, I have decided to work on a video for The Ithacan that follows the same style - using nothing but motion graphics and voiceover. One thing I am somewhat nervous about is the amount of time this may take. We usually try to get videos posted at the same time as their accompanying article. This would give me 5 days to get all the facts I need, make the entire video, get it criticized and fixed up, then finalized and posted. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to make the tight deadline, but it is something that I’m definitely interested in trying and I’m up for the challenge.

/r/Animation

Reddit has long been "the front page of the Internet." Since it because popular, Reddit has become one of the go-to sources for news, soon-to-be viral videos, memes, etc... Basically, they know what's going on before the rest of the world figures it out.

While I've never been a huge "Redditor" myself, I did recently stumble upon /r/animation. After spending only a few minutes scrolling through the endless links, I quickly figured out what a great resource it is. It has a lot of the new animation/3D graphics news, animation shorts, tutorials, and more. The community is also very welcoming and good about asking any questions you might have.

If you regularly check Reddit, I recommend you follow the r/animation subreddit, and if you don't, I still recommend you at least take a peak!

Quick & Simple Flash Tutorials

We have been focusing on working with AE mostly in class but I've been playing around with some of the other programs such as Flash.  I came across this series of demo videos on Reddit that were clean, simple, and informative. 

Check 'em out here if you're interested...