Big Mike Design: The Blog

So remember when I did a bunch of belly-aching about how all the car commercials I make all the time are so dumb, boring, ineffective?

I recently had some down time at work and got to knock out a project I devised and has been on the back burner for awhile. If I had my way, I would spend most of my work week doing one nice, creative, and clever spot like this instead of a dozen crappy ones:

The Exciting Adventures of Savingsman from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

 
I don’t really think it’s very hard to come up with something different and creative to sell cars. This is merely a spec spot, so it’s unfortunately never been on television. I really hope it does, but at the rate were going, it might never make it on. It was an even better idea when I thought of it this summer when gas was like $13 a gallon.

Technique-wise, I did the whole thing in After Effects with some initial help from Photoshop. One thing I didn’t do is draw the characters, they were purchased on cartoonsolutions.com. I recommend their products because they are relatively cheap and they give you a bunch of pieces to assemble various poses for your character.

I did however create the Guzzler. I took the image of a standard SUV, a chevy Tahoe I believe, and manipulated the front grill and headlights to look more like a character. I added a wiggle expression to make him shake while idling and a smoke emitter using Particular to make him an evil earth enemy. The rest of the spot comes together using some over-animation principles and lots of bright, flashy color combinations that I’m normally not allowed to use. It was a lot of fun to design and edit. It took about 3-4 days to do, but it could go faster now that I have the technique down.

Overall the concept has been well-received, but unfortunately I can already hear whispers of changing this, tweaking that, swapping out those, and all of a sudden it will end up being a complete downgrade from what I came up with. Oh well, I guess that’s what you get when you willingly allow car salesman make your creative decisions. 
 

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I forgot to post the file that goes with the paper rip tutorial. It is now available here.

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Here’s 2 good new links for you:

cgtextures is the best texture site I know of.

stockfootageforfree offers what it says, stock footage for free.

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So I finally posted a new tutorial. This one shows you how to make a crumpling paper animation in Cinema 4D, like this:

Paper Crumple Tutorial Intro from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

 I discovered the basis for this tutorial while doing a lot of experimenting with the Cloth Tag in Cinema 4D. It definitely saves a ton of time rather than the alternative of keyframing the entire animation. I would recommend playing around with the settings rather than just using what I gave you; you can get different results for you animation and experiment a little bit.

I’m going to make an effort to post tutorials more frequently. If you become a registered user I will send out a notice when a new tutorial is posted, or you can subscribe to my feed.

 Feel free to email me any questions you may have about this tutorial.

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