“Twenty three” was the grad project for one of the VFS writing students. The writing student’s scripts were produced by the VFS film department and we were given the task of developing title sequences for one. Myself and Asuka picked “twenty three” out of the bunch and developed concepts for it.

(I apologize about the choppiness of the video. I’m not sure why it is so choppy and am looking into how to clean it up some)

The film itself is about a boyfriend / girlfriend that are about to meet the lady’s parents and talking about some of their fears in meeting them. All in all, it is a rather funny little film with a bit of an indie feel to it. To adequately capture the feeling of the film, we struggled greatly with concepts. Eventually we settled on the idea of a roadtrip as one of the lines from the film indicates that the couple just drove half-way across the country. From there, the idea of using a map was pretty straightforward. The execution, however, took a lot more effort. Building the entire setup in Cinema 4d. The pen and camera moves took a while to work out properly (and as I remember, I lost the file partway through and had to redo them). However, the real kicker was in the rendering.

In order to achieve the motion on the pen ink as well as the other additional elements (the drawn-on heart, coffee stain, crumbs and sun), I needed to access them directly in After Effects. Since the methodology of export from Cinema 4D is flattened image sequences, I needed to attach an object buffer onto each element I wanted to animate and render it in particular. That rendering generally took around 3 – 6 hours per object. I also had to repeat the rendering of a number of objects repeatedly due to problems or mistakes. All in all, I believe this project had somewhere near 3 to 4 days worth of rendering put into it (that’s hour-wise). I wasted a lot of time and learned a lot about the best way to work in Cinema 4D, so that was really good, but it was awfully frustrating. Extremely frustrating. However, finally, finally, all the rendering was done and then I had to face the spectre of rotoscoping all of these individual layers in After Effects. That itself took a significant amount of time, but I’m rather happy with how it came out finally. At last, I exported out of After Effects with a few additional effects added to heighten the quality of the work.

Finally came the audio. As a student of VFS, we have access to an online database of music from a company called 5 Alarm Music. I generally like to produce my own music for these sorts of projects, but for this one, I didn’t have much time available to me and I was looking for a very particular sound to the music. Searching around, I found the one you hear in the background; a nice piece of “traveling” music. At last, I added in some sound effects to reflect the car and traveling nature of the title sequence and produced the final piece seen above!

In terms of things I feel could be improved, I was never particularly happy with the shadows of the crumbs as they fell. At first, the shadows are all squares, which didn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t have much time to fix it and I had already gotten the timing right. Also, I had a lot of trouble with rotoscoping the pen ink to the pen itself; an issue that thinking ahead would have solved somewhat. The main stroke of the pen especially was difficult to match up and I eventually just re-rendered a part because I didn’t want to do rotoscoping for it (and it would have looked bad anyways). Also, I feel that the coffee stain could have been better, but I wasn’t sure what to do and ran out of time. Finally, I wish I could have added more texture to the map itself. I feel like it is a bit clean for the piece and the film itself, so a little more texture and “dirt” would give a better feel.

I think my proudest moment on the project was figuring out how to do the pen stroke. Originally I had a lot of trouble conceiving how it would be best to make that stroke and be able to animate it at the same time. Then, I was hit by a stroke of genius! Taking a screen shot of a top-down view out of cinema 4d, I made the stroke in Illustrator, exported it into Cinema 4D and applied a extrube NURB to it so that it would be a solid. From there, I attached the object buffer to it (to create an alpha channel) and rendered it out to bring into after effects. In after effects, I applied the alpha channel to the clean render to be left with just the stroke! Then I can apply a mask or whatever to the footage and all the camera angles will be kept perfect. I liked the technique so much I applied it to three other objects in the piece. That one solution made my day on this project. It was wonderful.

However, all in all, I’m rather pleased with how the project turned out. It was great and I had a lot of fun figuring out how to work between three different programs to bring the whole concept together. I hope you liked it too!

Yesterday was the first ever project slam at VFS. Arriving at 8:30 am, we had no idea what was going to happen except that we would need to produce a commercial and we would need to do it fast.

First off, we were given our assignment; to develop a 30-second commercial for a company called “Body Reach.” The problem Body Reach had was that due to a production glitch, one of their vitamin supplements had no vitamin C included. While not instrinsically harmful, the flitch caught the eye of the media and was turned into a more major issue, threatening the company’s brand. As a result, the company needed to run an “mea culpa” campaign to apologize for the mistake, try to re-establish trust in their brand and win back customers.

Then, we were broken into our teams of four or five consisting of students from dd07, dd08 and dd09. I happened to be in one of the few groups that had 5; three dd09 students, myself and one dd07. It was all rather exciting and good to get going on.

In our first meeting, we worked to get the commercial idea planned out and then sketched. As it turned out, I ended up concocting the solution that the team really liked. We would play off of the idea of not being able to get the vitamin C into the pills with shots of a guy trying to get a large orange into a pill bottle. Wrapping around it would be the company president explaining about how it seemed strange that vitamin C didn’t get into the product and upon investigating, finding employees trying to shove the big oranges in. The kicker at the end would be the president saying, “we figured out how to solve the problem; smaller oranges!” at which point he holds up a tiny orange.

The concept and such we felt was rather good. Unfortunately our production had a lot of issues. To start with, for some reason the camera didn’t record audio while we were shooting. This could have been somewhat disasterous, but we were extremely lucky to have been recording with a small, portable voice recorder that was on set primarily as a prop. As it were, the syncing of audio to video consumed a bit of time and ultimately wasn’t perfect anyways; much to our frustration. Secondly, since mandarin oranges are out of season, the orange we wanted to use for comparison didn’t really seem small enough. It was suggested that we try using kumquats since they look like oranges and are tiny, but none of the three stores we went to had any. All in all, that was rather frustrating. Finally, we only had access to the audio room from 12-1 and 4-5, which wasn’t nearly enough time for us to really get the audio cleaned up well; especially with the problem due to the camera. Watch it below:

In the end, the project went decently well. Sadly, it isn’t perfect and the audio issue still bugs me, but we made it in 8 hours so tis something to be proud of. Ultimately, our commercial didn’t win either of the two prizes, but it was still a fun activity to be a part of. That and a rather tiring one!

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I ended up wasting a whole bunch of render time, but learning a good lesson about moving the camera in C4D. Exciting…

The first is a soccer field that is being designed for a motion graphics infographic piece for this term. My partner and I are going to explain the lovely game of soccer (that’s football to you non Americans) and give the viewer a basic introduction to the sport. So, this field is going to be the primary container for the piece, moving about and exploring. Should be fun.

The hardest part I found was in creating the net. The goal itself was pretty simple and just a matter of creating the cylinders and then bending them as needed. The net though, was a bit of work because I wanted to put the

slight gravity drop into it. Ultimately, I created a plane and attached cloth nurbs, then bent it the same as the tubing. Finally, after setting fixed points to all the edges, I applied “relax” and watched gravity do its job^^ Quite thrilling when it all worked out. The ball was the result of a tutorial I followed. I had painted it beforehand but discovered that shrinking the size of the ball messes up the special texture, so I need to repaint it. *sigh* As for the field, the floor and texture are native to Cinema 4D while the lines were originally created in Illustrator, then imported into the area. All in all, it was a fun project! Now I just need to apply the camera movements and we’ll be in business.

The other item for you today is a pill I kinda threw together for a DVD menu. The ultimate look will feature text on the pill indicating “Play,” “Scene Selection” and so forth. I thought it would be cool to have the pill rotate when the user clicks the “left” or “right” button on their remove and shift to a new button. Here is the front where the main menu will be.

and here is the back where the special features or scene selection will be. We haven’t quite worked that out yet!

I’m rather proud of this idea and I like how it is shaping up. I’ll be sure to post more about it in the future!

I really liked the concept for this piece. It started off at around 8 pages of storyboarding, then got bumped up to 10 after talking with Cory. Sadly, I wasn’t able to execute precisely along the lines of the storyboard as I had hoped due to limitations on money and time, but all in all I’m rather pleased with how it turned out. The graphical style of the backgrounds is one that I have been toying with this term greatly in numerous other projects (many of which I have posted here).

To create the piece, I first sketched out my ideas via storyboard, then on the computer with my tablet. Then after finalizing my bluescreen videos with the alpha channel attached, I did a final environmental design and coloration of the world using illustrator. Ultimately my bluescreen footage was pretty good, though not perfect as I had a number of places where rotoscoping was required (and not enjoyed, I can assure you). I shot all the outside footage myself, even the skateboard shots. For those I ended up just leaning down on the board and holding the camera steady to take the shots. It wasn’t easy and I kept seeing visions of something going wrong and breaking the $1800 or so camera, but it was ok! I feel a little bad about the audio design as it was the last part of the project that I did. As a result, it was rushed and not mastered properly. However, I do think that it came together fairly well and that the simplicity of the solo guitar for the alternate world is really nice. I wanted to have only the music in that section, but it became clear that sound effects would be needed as well, so I kept them limited and light. The skateboard audio is some that I recorded myself using a handheld recording device. I made use of the slight hill in front of my apartment to record the audio on, but it took me 3 runs down (and then back up!) the hill to figure out how to actually record. That aside, I captured some good sound.

I think it was a successful project despite needing to cut out shots, rushing at the end and all the other foul things that happened. I hope you enjoyed it!

This is a character animation piece I finished today for my motion design class. I first conceived of the concept for the piece and recorded the audio (yes, that’s me… with a little tweeking of course!). Then I went about designing the characters. The basic mouse template was sketched out and then fully digitalized / colored in illustrator. I also made the background in illustrator (Look! I can make a vanishing point!). From there it was just a matter of creating the animation in after effects. Finally, I popped in some music and sound effects to round out the piece. Overall it was a really fun little assignment to do, even though I thought it was due yesterday and was really stressing out about it (given everything else I had to do). Thus, I was quite glad to discover that it was actually due today.

The motion and flash pieces are still coming along. I’ll upload a little sample of where my flash project is going over the weekend sometime to show a little of what I’m trying to do with it. Overall though, it looks good!