Back to School

I have been enjoying this semester greatly. I have just finished doing the titles for Spring Show for the Academy of Art University. Many of my students have produced professional quality work, and I am awed by the time all of them put in.

I have switched departments - from New Media to VFX/Animation, and I have to say it has been a good transition, the two departments function as compare and contrast exercises in what's going on in computer graphics - style versus technical skill. New Media is all about style, multi-discipline, and perception, but I usually struggled through instructing even basic concepts in After Effects. VFX students are gearheads and like to read computer manuals for fun, do fluid simulations in their spare time, etc- however, typography and the world of design isn't much on their radars. So it's been a challenge, an interesting and exciting one, and my students put up with me using them as guinea pigs for Curricullum changes/evil experiments/ untold amounts of homework.

I will post links to a few of the students who have produced some really exceptional work- The highlight of the class had to be the final projects of two groups who had some connections to some martial artists who they filmed with a Red One (!) in the green screen studio here in the Academy. I remember filming my final project in studio for my Senior Project- to be the instructor on hand during this shoot made me excited for my students, and made me feel young and old at the same time. (Student work c/o Artur, Roger, Yasemin, Carlos, Christian, and Louis. You know who you are.)

Other Stuff

I also have been cranking away on projects at Cobra. Two new projects since YouTube- one for Suzuki (a basic dealer type spot) and one for a prominent tech brand that is re-branding and re-positioning itself to be competitive in this desert fiscal landscape of 2009. Also a few secret projects of self promotional value, and some co-lab work for Mekanism here in SF.

Final project- Getting VeloBrew launched, sold, and drank by the masses. This homebrew was sold as a fundraiser for my Aids Life Cycle ride which is happening in... oh... 2 weeks! Months of training and focusing is coming up to the ride here. I have done a lot of prepping, had an art auction with all of my friends (which... of course, I did not document with this amazing medium known as photography) and produced these nice homemade booklets and posters. I am proud of how this project turned out - the first time in a while I have been maybe 50% satisfied with something, rather then focusing on the flaws of the piece or comparing it to what else is out there. The blessing and the curse of seeing amazing work all day, every day, is that it can paralyze you into not doing anything. Well, to hell with that. I am getting as much done as I can in 2009 with the finite amount of energy and life available to me.

Coming up

More work at Cobra, including selling our broadcast motion graphics harder, a project with Alexander Tarrant for a short web film festival thingy, and trying to start composing nicer pics with my DSLR. I also have been learning some serious c4d this year, with a lot of Mograph module, Expresso, and Thinking Particles finally making sense to me, although the world of creating nice models with clean geometry, real character rigging with IK, and bodypaint is still out of my grasp a bit. I still don't understand every switch and dial in the program, but have started to become comfortable answering questions on forums and analyzing the work I see. Justin and I have been doing visuals as an excuse to learn the technicalities of the various modules, including a bang up show for Flying Lotus.

Finally

I developed a bunch of Holga shots from last year, and mixed in with the rolls was one roll from winter of 2005, in Colorado. A lot of light had leaked in and exposed the roll, resulting in haunting, washed out, wintery surreal images, with a young dude staring back at me through the print. I can see why some folks go Holga and never look back- the shock of not having unlimited control which in turn creates happy accidents is something I have lost in going so digital. My next project might just be a group of songs played on prepared piano with typewritten pages.

John Cage - o - vison.

The work I did for Youtube through Cobra Creative has gone live... This is a promotional campaign showcasing YouTube’s dominance of the eyeballs of the peoples of the internets and how it can be utilized for ad campaigns. I worked on most all of the c4d on these projects- The design was all done at Cobra and motion designer Jake Hawley also worked on 3d + composite.

I’m particularly happy with the way the “Media Ball” section came out on the Audience targeting section - basically a bunch of clones being pushed around by effectors in Cinema. I feel as though the communication is particularly visual and clear here; the customer can physically see how their concept or campaign gets filtered and specified in a pretty visual way. I think a lot of internet concepts are hard to distill to some sort of visual, we usually end up designing a globe for “international and global”, usually with lines crisscrossing the face to show “IT”, and a giant “icon cloud” to show a breadth of skill, products, and services or divisions. Are there better ways to visualize these common themes?

www.cobracreative.com
www.youtube.com/advertise

Tags: Professional, After Effects, Cinema 4D

Tags: Professional, Cinema 4D, After Effects

So here it is, the Art project of the Summer for the event of the Fall (Imagine that in my move trailer voice). Shaun Roberts of Triplewide, who produced the most excellent documentary, The RunUp for Upperplayground got contacted by those fine peeps & by Aesop Rock to produce an all original, all new visual set to accompany his new album as he takes it out on tour.

Shaun lept on his producing duties with gusto and hired four Motion Graphics badasses/designers/animators/friends (/models). Working with Aesop + his MC in crime, Rob Sonic, on super tight deadlines and budgets, we all divied up the work and came out on the other side with nearly 85 minutes of original content that synced with the Fall tour.

Basic pre-production was simple. Aes and Rob would upload the instrumentals of their tracks to our secure server, and then post the lyrics, a brief description of the track and the kind of imagery they saw in their heads. From then on we had carte blanche to go nuts, drawing on whatever tools we could imagine so long as we could fill the content time. While the project was a huge collaboration between Alexander Tarrant, Buddy Giguerre, Shaun Roberts, and Justin Metros, we all chose certain tracks to direct. I directed "Citronella" (with tons of collab with Justin Metros), "Coffee", a medeley of older tracks ("Fast cars/Nickel/Famous"), and I co-directed "Catacomb Kids" with Alexander. Excerpts for all of the tracks are up on tourvisuals.com, and the main area of movecraft.com, along with a demo reel of the whole project.

Citronella was my biggest undertaking. The concept revolving around this track was a future dystopia with rich 1984/brave new world/ blade runner type imagery. Aes' lyrics were crazy evocative and set up a twitchy, paranoid future ("Nothing says charm/like taking the clone farm 'tards/to the arms bizarre") and the chorus ("When the radio stars/climbed up out of the floors/to murder the medium/that shot 'em 30 years before/ they said "Kill your television"). I researched old vaccum tube tvs and used them as references for modelling in c4d. These became the "Propaganda tubes" Then I modeled a simple draconian skyscraper for the "ministry of information", and used the citygen plugin to fill in the surrounding cityscape. From there, I fired up the dynamics module in c4d and threw the tvs over the building, bumping and colliding on the way down. I parented the camera to the falling tvs and set my render settings to 90 fps. Next, I set up some simple explosions, breaking apart the geometry with mograph module and the good old simple explode. I set up some multipass renders seperating the city models from the tubes with object buffers. I rendered the tubes with Ambient Occlusion but made sure to get my sample settings real low and crappy so that I would get all the flickering and noise that you usually try and avoid using AO, because I wanted the look to be dirty and artifact-y.

While all this was going on, Justin Metros was sourcing all kinds of crazy footage from the Prelinger Archives, a free public domain collection of media on the web. Justin is a MAX/MSP guru and he built out some custom patches to create a custom time remapper/noise effect dubbed "The ScrubFucker". After Scrub-fucking all his footage, he sent it to me, and I set to compositing the footage on my tubes in After Effects using c4d's external compositing tags for 3d tracking (I also stole graymachine's backface culling script, which was wicked usefull)

Then I composited the whole thing in After Effects with tons of noise overlays, solids on various blending modes, tons of time remapping using trapcode's soundkeys, and liberal abuse of the 3D glasses effect.

The coolest thing is that all this stuff got burned to DVD's as instrumentals,DJ Big Wiz, Aes's super tech and super tallented DJ, would scratch and beat juggle live, with the live visuals going nuts back behind him on screen. Very rad.

Catacomb Kids was basically all After Effects madness. This track is about bombs being planted in the lockers when Aes was in school, and general messing around in high school. Alex and I built out a bunch of lockers in AE, and then went through and keyframed the camera to the beat. (I was on his couch, drinking beer, screaming, "and then the camera will move like THIS!!!", and bopping my hand to the beat. Glad he trusted me to make something cool based on that stellar pitch

Alex made some cool simulations of explosions in particular and overlaying practical footage from stock (lots of explosions in this project). And then we extended the whole thing out with cinematic pans of fronts of high schools, school clocks animating in After Effects, and other various school violence imagery. I think the final result is powerful, cathartic, and not a bad party anthem/ background to boot.

Coffee was a slower, less, intense track. Shaun, Alex, and I were staying up near Tahoe. "Coffee" is all about getting out of the city, hole-ing up away from civilization. Shaun is an awesome photographer/Filmographer and he went out at dawn to take some rad nature footage with the GL1 and still photos. We also took a bunch of photos of the textures of that cabin we stayed in and I went and filmed some of the creek behind the place. I wanted the whole thing to have a psychedelic, kalidescopic feel and CC Kalieda served my purposes well. I was especially blown away by the new Motion Blur in CS3, as it actually interpeted the translation moves in-plugin of Kalieda and calculated the motion blur correctly, something I hadn't seen before unless this was built in the plugin like particular's Motion Blur (anyone know?). I also built a nice long hallway with the cabin textures and cut out old windows from old cabin stock, and composited our imagery in the frames. Then I took some Jeremy Fish artwork (a frequent colaborator of Aes, he was nice enough to send us source files of his artwork and animated them, and threw 'em in z space on a blending mode. I mapped the z movement of the camera to the beat using time(); and had it randomly wiggle(); to the hihat using good ole soundkeys. I color corrected all the nature footage and had it cut back and forth between symmetrical hallway and mirrored nature footage.

Overall it was totally awesome experience. Especially cool was going to the Fillmore with all my friends and seeing Aesop perform with our visuals 30 feet tall. "Props" go out to Ordinary Kids for producing the title track "None Shall Pass" as a music video and that traveled the tour as the visuals for that track. Also, Jeremy Fish had a timelapse video of him painting out a custom mural, that we weren't involved with that. Lisa Klipsic manages Aesop and helped the whole thing transpire. DJ BigWiz's lady friend has been posting youtube video of all of the performances, check them out going crazy in NYC! Thanks to all involved.

Aesop's Fall tour is ongoing, check out dates at his website.
Rob's new album just dropped. Buddy did most of Rob's tracks.
Justin's site (justinmetros.com)
Alex's site (tarrant.tv)
Shaun's site (Triplewide)

Tags: After Effects, Cinema 4D, General Nerdery

So, The work I did with GB on Grouper.com which is now known as Crackle has gone live. Strangely enough, Buddy and I also worked on a pitch for the Crackle identity intro animation as a separate job, which I might post here if I can show it to y'alls...Some cool styleframes for the brand. We had a wicked cool Katamari Damci type concept but no one went for it. Guess everyone has done Katamari. Sony owns Crackle and their deali-o is to provide inroads to all of Sony's traditional media empire for web based peoples/ film students/ etc. Will this branding and positioning differentiate this video sharing site from the other one billion video sharing sites out there right now? I have absolutely no idea. Maybe they should have called it Crckl, cause all web 2.0 sites come from the future, where they have no vowels.

Tags: Design, After Effects

So we just finished some graphic/post production spot for this PSA. I worked with Buddy Giguerre (Maya Generalist), Bill Philbin (director), and Zachary Greenbaum (producer), to help bring this story to life. One nice thing about creating video game type graphics is that you can have your render times relatively low with no anti-aliasing or GI and such and stock models from turbosquid are actually preferrable!

I like doing this kind of effects work. It's a lot less about graphics and more about the puzzle of achieving believable composites. It's wierd though. I feel like the whole motion graphics industry is moving towards the effects pipeline model with specialists doing individual jobs. I mean, Psyop is basically a VFX house. The problem with the FX model though for us lowly mographers or freelancers is that it's freaking expensive, so your clients have to be paying big bucks!

Check out the final project on William's Page (top video)

Tags: Professional, After Effects