Welcome to movecraft, my little slice of motion graphics heaven on the internet.
Youtube Advertise Goes live
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
Website Relaunch
New Stuff
Now that I’m staff at CobraCreative. Wait- let me just post the notice.
Notice this announcement is a bit dated already... In the style of the old site. Ah well. Where was I?
Now that I’m staff at Cobra, I realized my site didn’t exactly have to be a professional advertisement for me anymore. This is kind of nice. I can Blog, post personal links if I feel it, and generally relax with movecraft.com. I also have switched over entirely to Rapidweaver for my development. This means, I will never have to hand code anymore. All my knowledge was painfully outdated anyway, and this way I hopefully will be encouraged to frequently update with such an easy to use platform. Anyone can build a website with this here new-fangled software.
Other new stuff... You’ll notice I am still building the Boards section out slowly. I haven’t decided if it should just be motion boards or other graphic design. Also, dang, I don’t have much of either. I have been focusing for so long on learning C4D and AE that I kept getting paid to be a technical guy instead of an artist. This is rough because I don’t know if I will ever compete with the truly technical guys. I think that personally, I would love to focus once again on what brought me here in the first place – you know. Art. Pretty pictures. Maybe the Boards section will have photography too. Maybe I just renamed that section right here in this blog post.
I also have a Source Files section. I keep posting files to message boards and the like. It occurred to me that they might be useful actually posted somewhere. I also have been instructing at the Academy of Art University, and this semester have been putting together a Special Topics: Motion Graphics class for compositors. I keep referencing files, and, bandwidth permitting, could post some source file from that course. It’s turning into a monster- I have some dedicated and awesome students. I might require all of us to use Vimeo. I have set up a profile there. Working at an interactive firm is already making me realize how behind the curve I am in general web knowledge.
Finally, I am riding in AIDS Life Cycle this year. I have set up a page for everyone to donate, buy beer, and check out the cause.
Colin
Little Red Robot Corporate Work for Google
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A Mumbaikar Minute
After meeting Tomas at the airport, my american producer, we jumped in the car to go to the bollywood studio to meet his indian studio exec. Again; the new pasted on the old, affluent mixing with the crushingly disenfranchised, and population density that made me feel that I was traveling in a human ant colony.
Loopy with jet lag, brain addled with the 3 text books I had read and annotated on during the 24 hours of travel, we arrived and promptly Tomas bought me new shoes. ("Umm... dude. You look like a homeless guy") He says this to me in a city of homeless, more homeless and poor than I thought could exist in any one place. It then occurred to me that I am not here to travel, not here to sight-see, and not here to observe for my blog, but to work. And part of working is impressing those here with the money and my personal presentation. In San Francisco I am used to resting on my personal appearance with many of my clients. Many of them enjoy the bike riding, pants rolled up, tight ironic hipster t-shirt chic. Here of course, money walks and talks and appearance is crucial.
Waiting to go into a production meeting that never came, instead I sat and observed dailies from a current production. Through a run down office (chipping paint, faded posters on the wall) with a 50 year old brass sign that says "Mixing" we walk through a door and into a state of the art, air conditioned, 5.1 dolby sound mixing studio as large and current as anything I saw at Skywalker.
Sitting on the couch and being brought strong coffee, I watched them review the sound of the latest marginally taboo sex farce/music video/ beautiful people/escapist fantasy/Bollywood Epic.
Back to the hotel. sleep.
New-ness, funky, fresh, clean
Two updates from two of my good friends and fellow art collective/ compadres/ artists extrodinairez: Carl Nolting (aka AM Overtone) and Justin Metros. Carl has a distinct and soulful style that mixes well with his music background, and Justin is just a plain crazy smart and talented guy (custom video application coding and compiling using jitter at 3am after drinking a bottle of whiskey kinda smart). The three of us have been loosely performing as veejays around the Bay Area, with diverse shows, locals, and associated fame of the djs. Justin and I played a killer show with The Orb a few months ago and it was very cool to make some art with such a legend! As a result of all this activity, Justin is building us out a space on the web for us to share all of the video goodness. So, the insta-action video collective is still in its infancy, but check out insta-action.com soon.
AM Overtone Update
Justin Metros Update
Movecraft finished work on a PSA spot for William Philbin Productions
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)