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I recently did some freelancing in NYC and I worked on some ads for a few Broadway plays. These are technically unfinished I guess, since they weren’t finalized by the clients before I left, but they got to the point where I wanted to include them on my site.
First is La Cage with Kelsey Grammer. The key for this came out really good, I just wish the subjects were chicks instead of dudes.
La Cage from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I also did some rough work on an idea promoting a play with Denzel Washington, it’s called Fences:
Fences – Example from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I’m not sure if I’ll put either of these on my reel, since I don;t know if they are approved and finalized. So I’ll just leave them in Vimeo/Blog purgatory for now.
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I just posted my newest tutorial, where I demonstrate how to create a set of curtains that spread apart to reveal footage. It’s like a theater stage or a movie theater style set of curtains that parts in the middle, and you can place your footage behind it and have it be revealed. I’m thinking of a new welcome video for my site based on this, but I’m not sure yet. So check it out on the tutorials page.
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Last month I made a subway train scene using Cinema 4D and after Effects, and the folks over at Envato liked the idea so I got to produce and distribute a tutorial for them showing how to do it. So I didn’t upload this to Vimeo or embed it on my site since it is on CGTuts+, that’s the rules. So follow the link and check it out.
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Here’s a Cinema 4D train moving through a subway station:
Cinema 4D/After Effects Subway Train from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
The subway platform comes from istockphoto. I modeled the train in Cinema 4D and brought it into After Effects to fit it into the scene. By moving the train so quickly with a heavy motion blur, you can get a way with a relatively basic model of a subway car with not a whole lot of detail. I added some HDRI lighting to simulate the fluorescent lights above and color corrected the train to make it blend in with the color and feel of the environment.
I mean, the clip isn’t anything earth-shattering; you could easily just get a clip of an actual subway train passing by. But sometimes the best part about being a designer is making something out of nothing. A still photo becomes alive with hopes of convincing the audience that there is no animation at all and it goes unnoticed.
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I don’t watch TV like normal people. Every time I see something on TV, I start breaking things down in terms of how they are produced in post-production. I think about the effects and techniques involve and wonder how I would go about creating something similar.
There’s like 10,000 Police/Crime/Detective dramas shows that have come and gone that I never watched much. I think the major networks have this idea that the good guys need to catch the bad guys in a half an hour or else people won’t watch and they can’t sell any ads. I urge you to forget these broadcast network crime shows and go get your hands on The Wire. Trust me. There are two types of people in this world, people who think The Wire is the best show in TV history, and people who have never seen The Wire. You will regret wasting your time watching people take their sunglasses on and off instead of watching The Wire. It has no discernible line between good guys and bad guys, the stories have a series of causes and effects that span several seasons beautifully, intertwining conflicts get resolved and lead to new ones, and it’s HBO so it doesn’t have to hold back like regular TV.
Oh yea, motion graphics. I made this intro in CInema 4D and After Effects for a shitty crime show that will surely get cancelled:
Crime Show Style Promo from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
The opening scenes are all Cinema 4D with an assist from Photoshop. The fingerprint transitions into After Effects. I got the background image from here and I purchased the main character from iStockphoto. I realized after I bought it that he was wearing a tuxedo, whoops. I was fixated on his sunglasses and totally ignored the tux. Nothing Photoshop can’t fix. Main character wearing sunglasses at night? Perfect. The caution tape and titles were Cinema 4D, positioned and animated to fit in the scene. The siren colors are a simple After Effects expression. I think it’s a good composition considering I have no actual video elements in a 15 second clip. All from stills and scratch.
It needed a voice over track, but if you’ve listened to my tutorials you know my voice is so terrible for this. I had a some great corny lines like “If you aren’t watching the best show on TV… GET A CLUE.” Forensics humor. Nice. Anybody with a good network promo voice who wants to record some cheesy copy I have in my head, I welcome it.
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I just posted a new tutorial for After Effects. I show you how to create an animated spider web that catches some text flying into it. It starts by showing you how to create the web in Illustrator and then how to make it elastic and bouncy in After Effects. Enjoy and hit me up with any questions you may have.
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Something I worked on in After Effects that really doesn’t try to mimic any style or theme you’ve seen before, nope not at all.
Marvelous Spider Text, Man from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I submitted this to get picked up as a tutorial that I would get paid for, and it probably won’t in the end. So if not then I will record the tutorial for this technique and post it here.
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So AETUTS+ announced their winner for the logo reveal contest I entered. Mine was ok, the winner’s was way better, quite slick. I got listed under honorable mention, I think that’s like one step better than getting one of these:
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WOOOOOOOOOO! I’m awesome!
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After Effects is king of 2D animation and compositing. It’s been around since the early to mid 1990s when I was working on coloring books instead of color corrections. I first used it probably around version 5.5 and I barely new what I was doing. But as my knowledge of general computer and video principles increased, I became quite adept at it. I’m probably in the top million After Effects users on the planet, elite company.
But then there’s Motion, Apple’s relatively new, competing program. Motion 3 came out a couple years ago and added some advanced features that closed the gap some. I used Motion everyday at my last job, so I got to learn it rather thoroughly and decided to write a little compare and contrast based on my experience. Here we go:
After Effects has Motion beat when it comes to:
If you get stuck on a project using After Effects, you can find some sort of tutorial, message board post, or plugin that will help you get the job done. Motion just can’t compete with the knowledge and help that’s out there with just a Google search. This is a HUGE deal because if you’re like me, sometimes you wonder “Hey, how did they do that?” and you look it up and then you’ve got another page in your playbook.
It’s a little better than it used to be, but Motion cannot touch After Effects in terms of the extra power you can add to your application by adding plugins from 3rd party developers. Sometimes it’s claimed that you can just add the same After Effects plugin to your Motion directory and it will work within Motion. My answer is no. Expect bugs and unreliability.
Motion has After Effects beat when it comes to:
Motion does a good job of being stable when rendering out your composition. After Effects has always been pickier when it’s time to make your final file. I can’t tell you how many times After Effects has crapped out during a render because of insufficient RAM or a codec issue or because it’s low tide right now. When I render in After Effects, I simply walk away and don’t dare touch my computer until it’s finished. Motion is much smoother and stable during a render. It crashes a 100 times less than After Effects and you can actual check your email, load a web page, etc. while your rendering without your computer hating you forever. And the speeds are similar, obviously it depends on the composition, but I’ve never found one to be much faster or slower overall on the same system.
This is the part where Motion laughs in After Effects face. RAM previews sometimes don’t require any rendering in Motion, you can literally hit the space bar and watch your work play, even if it has filters and effect on it. The audio plays uninterrupted right along with it as well. A lot of times in After Effects I just render out a whole movie instead of a RAM preview because of impatience or stability issues. Motion practically plays in real time, and it can store more frames in a RAM preview even if you actually have to render one.
Moving Between the Two Programs
I am fully capable of switching between the programs and not messing up what I’m doing because I think I’m in the other program. I know you’re impressed. The one thing I have seen people struggle with is difference in the key-framing controls. In After Effects, once you toggle on key frames for a certain a parameter, the instant you change a value on any frame that isn’t already a key frame, and new key frame is created. It doesn’t work like that in Motion. In motion you have to set the key frame first, and then change the value. It drives After Effects disciples crazy. It’s just a different way of doing things, it makes sense either method. In general, people struggle with the different keyboard shortcuts and contextual menus, but obviously those are going to vary between programs and you just have to suck it up and remember them.
Overall
I would recommend Motion to anyone who needs to get a project done fast. If more support, power, and sophistication, go with After Effects. They both get the job done, but Motion will never be able to overthrow the firmly entrenched After Effects.
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So this is my entry for this week’s 5 Second Project theme “Old Video Games.” I started modeling an old NES Cartridge in Cinema 4D but couldn’t figure out what exactly to do with it. I figured the theme would provoke everyone else to try and emulate old, crappy video game graphics so I wanted to do something else to differentiate myself a bit. I thought about all the old terrible games I used to play (technically I still have them) and how lame they seem nowadays, or how they were poorly designed and thus nearly impossible to actually beat, or the myth that blowing on the contact part of the cartridge would actually make the game work. Since you can play all these old games online with various emulators, the cartridges seem dead and worthless, and visually sort of resemble a tombstone.
Old Video Game Graveyard – 5 Second Project from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I had a few other game name ideas, but I threw out the scratch paper I jotted them down on. Using your own NES game experiences, feel free to come up with one and post it in the comments.
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