Cut & Paste SF

Saturday, April 14th, 2012 | Blog, Downloads

I competed in the San Francisco Cut & Paste event, and this was my entry. The theme was “my family”. I won the event, and competed in the finals in NYC.

We were given 8 hours to produce a 15 second animation, were allowed four assets, and then given the theme 5 days ahead of the competition. In addition: all music had to be rights approved, we were not allowed any plugins besides trapcode suite in After Effects, & no scripts or rigs of any kind except to speed render times.

When approaching the creative brief, my approach was simply to tell a story or convey an idea in 15 seconds. When researching the winners from years past, it seems as though using humor was successful, and a solid “beginning, middle, and end” seemed to always trump style in this competition.

I’m not the funniest director, so I figured I should quote someone who was funny. I tried out a few different quotes.

When I decided on the George Burns quote, I decided to design a 1 ‑2 punch for the setup and the punchline. My four assets were three pictures I took around San Francisco, and a type design I laid out in Illustrator.

I painted my photos in Photoshop, used sweeps and projection mapping in c4d, rendered in passes, and comped in AE.

Here’s a screen capture of the whole competition:

If you would like to poke around the source files, I’ve reduced them to small bandwidth versions here.

Edison and Moldover for the music, Cutandpaste, and Metros for the use of his 7D, and of course the other talented designers. Ashley’s piece I thought was particularly nice.