This animation I made aired throughout the holiday season on Univision. My producers wanted it to be similar to the animation I did for their summer campaign.

The actual logo animation is a very simple spin inside Cinema 4D, it’s not going to rock anyone’s socks off. I created a very reflective red material for the logo because I wanted to try and make it look like it was a Christmas ornament.

The part I ended up liking the best were the gold ribbons, which were a technique I developed after to avoid dealing with the frustrations of working with Cloth in Cinema 4D. I hate using Cloth in Cinema 4D, I will avoid it at all costs. The ribbons are a Plane object modified with a Spline Wrap deformer to get their overall shape and control their path on a Helix spline. But if you stop there you have just a flat and dull looking line circling the screen. The key to making them float and fly in an organic manner was to apply a Displacer deformer to them as well. If you bump up the Height of the Displacement and the Global Scale of the Noise pattern you pick in your Shading options, you can get a wide level of displacement that makes the ribbon look more natural as it flows through the scene. Then you can just change the Seed value on the Noise shader and you’ll get different looking patterns for the ribbons, and you can find one that you like the best. Much easier than using cloth for ribbons.

Here’s the end results of the lessons in chapter 10 of my book on Dynamics in Cinema 4D. I cover most of the dynamic features of the program like the Dynamics Body tag, springs, connectors, Soft Body dynamics, how to make MoGraph cloners dynamic, dynamic cloth, dynamic splines, and hair.

The key advantage of using dynamics is you can create realistic looking reactions and collisions without using keyframes. You set up a world and how your objects interact, and let Cinema 4D handle the rest. In my opinion it’s one of the the more fun areas to explore in the program, you can do some very creative and interesting stuff (like making cereal for example!) with dynamics.

You can find my book avilable for purchase here.

This animation is the result from the final lesson in my book. The last chapter deals with configuring dynamics in Cinema 4D, which is the process of making objects interact with each other with collisions, as well as forces, gravity, and more.

From the moment I started using dynamics in Cinema 4D I always thought of making a Rube Goldberg Machine, an elaborate contraption that yields a very simple result through chain reactions of many objects. It’s basically like creating a big game of Mouse Trap, except you have to make the whole thing yourself and kids will get really bored watching you tweak settings like Rotational Mass, Collision Noise, Linear Damping, and Angular Velocity Threshold.

I designed as many pieces as I could and tried dozens of combinations to get a complete sequence that results in the big finale. The lesson in the book takes you through the process of taking a bunch of static 3D objects and making them behave as this complex machine. The entire process requires no keyframes at all, which is all thanks to the power of dynamics.

Me and a couple other animators were given less than a week to prepare an entire graphics package for this new show called “Protagonistas.” The producers left the graphics on the backburner in the hands of some animators that weren’t cutting it for about 3 months. I would have loved to collect checks and produce subpar graphics for 3 months, but instead I was asked to make something nice in about 5 days.

Protagonistas follows the cookie cutter reality show format of: Auditioning contestants in front of 3 judges -> move selected contestants into house -> sit back and watch them fight/argue/have sex/argue about sex fights -> vote contests off until a star is born.

This show searches for the next big telenovela star. I was denied an opportunity to be on the show to which I am still outraged. Just because I’m white and don’t speak Spanish shouldn’t preclude me from becoming a telenovela star. I could totally be on Que Hora Es? and they know this. I will have to catch my big break at another time.

I highlighted the main part pf the show’s opening that I did in this clip, they added some sound effects and music for the broadcast addition. I had to make a tunnel full of screens showcasing clips of the contestants on the show. They wanted all this to feel like we are going into the camera lens, which is the main element of the show’s logo. The tunnel is a heavy render in Cinema 4D with the help of MoGraph. I modeled one flat screen TV and placed it in a radial cloner, then made a linear cloner of each radial cloner. The camera is set to have a very wide lens to make the tunnel appear a lot deeper than it actual is. I had to apply different clips to each TV so there was some variety among the monitors, so there were a lot of materials. I didn’t have Cinema 4D 13 at my disposal so I couldn’t use the new multishader setting where you can add entire folders to just one material.

The shutter is a transition I made with another radial cloner to the contestants on the show. They wanted a sort of “beam me up Scotty” effect to introduce the characters. Each contestant enters through a combination of effects like linear wipe, turbulent displace, and emitting some particles using Trapcode Particular. I used a lot of tech overlays from the Motion Designer’s Toolkit because having pre-rendered footage like that is the only way I could pull that off in a few days.

This intro marks the first time in Univison history that the female contestants are wearing more clothes than the males. Despite concerns from me and multiple other people with common sense that framing the male characters waist up without a shirt will make people think they are naked, this is exactly what the shows producers wanted to infer. There was plenty of room for me to include the tops of their pants, but I was told to scale them up so that viewers will obviously be so captivated by a bunch of naked hombres on the screen. This will clearly lead to incredible ratings, increased advertising revenue, and ensure that the visionaries that insist on shooting guys waist up without shirt get promoted.

I did a some content for the show Premio Lo Nuestro this year. This is the second awards show I’ve done content for, also for the 2010 Latin Grammys. I designed the video content that goes on the screens behind the artists when they preform. It’s not just a giant TV behind them, but it’s little accent monitors and displays around the entire stage and venue. It’s definitely a different medium to showcase your work and requires different techniques than traditional motion design for television. In this case, the art is not the focus of the viewer, it’s supplemental to the live performance by the artist. It took me awhile to not think in terms of designing a music video, but something larger that lends itself to the style and artist of the the performance. And once I actually see the content on broadcast TV, it becomes apparent from various camera angles and perspectives that you rarely see your entire design, unless it’s a very wide camera shot. Therefore things can’t appear too big on the screen, and you also can’t focus too much on minute details because they become lost in a performance with singers, dancers, flashing lights, panning cameras, stage effects, etc.

I’m not sure how long these videos will last before the Univison lawyers go off on them, but I’ll try and keep them up as long as I can.

The first one I did was for Ricky Martin. It was not my favorite piece by far. I was given very little time to produce this because of various hold ups with his management. I spent only a couple days designing and executing a iece that was over 3 minutes long, while my other loops were tested and fleshed out over the course of a several weeks. It was too generic for my taste, basing it on a Trapcode Form style animation was not my idea or personal cup of tea.

The next artist I did content for was Tony Dize. The performance was supposed to have a Japanese theme in terms of art direction, so I styled my loops accordingly. I didn’t feel like the set and stage props really tied it together, and I felt like my loops were a little out of place. The opening was a Japanese style room with sliding paper doors revealing a peace bridge scene outside. I also made a koi pond with rippling water and some koi fish I was pretty proud of. I took a still photo and manipulated it to move using some bend effects in After Effects, so it appeared to swim as a real fish. I also made some falling cherry blossom petals and falling red maple leaves for separate scenes. I originally had them paint on over the duration of the loop, but the creatives above me didn’t feel like the effect translated well to the big screens, so I left it on the paper canvas and added the final paint texture to the entire duration of the loop.

I’d like to thank Nick Campbell, the Greyscale Gorilla for publishing a tutorial awhile back based on an effect he saw using reflective glass. It was pretty much exactly what my creative director described that he wanted here for Prince Royce, and I had previously viewed the tutorial so I knew what to do. I added a twist to part of it by launching the reflective glass pieces into the air and having them fall back down with gravity out of the bottom of the frame.

The last artist I did was for Fuego, and it was the act thgat closed the show so that was kind of cool. Obviously being named Fuego, we tied in a fire theme. I presonally love working with fire footage, and I used this 3K FIre Footage from Rampant Media Design Tools for some of my content. I made some nightclub lasers, a full concert stage, dancing girls among fire, as well as various generic fire loops to tie in to his 2 song medley.

All in all it’s a cool gig to design for, it definitely breaks up the monotony that can come from designing the same things for TV all the time.

I had to update my banner to reflect my actual, accurate weight. When I updated the site over the summer and added the tagline with my height and weight to the banner I listed myself at 160 pounds, which was generous, I was a bit less than that. Yeah, I lied to you. But all of last year I focused myself in the gym for the first time in my life while eating a lot of helpful food to get stronger.

I gained 30-35 pounds in less than a year. Good pounds too, they came with equipped with muscles and everything. So I changed my banner to reflect my new weight, I wish there was a PHP plugin to sync up with my body and do it automatically, but that would be hard to program.

I’m not sure at what weight it stops being ironic that my nickname is “BIG MIKE” but people were calling me that when I was 4 foot nothing so it will stick no matter what happens.

Besides eating and lifting heavy things, I also designed a new file for purchase on videohive.

It’s an Xpresso powered slideshow created in Cinema 4D and After Effects. It allows you to display photos, videos, 3D objects, etc. in actual 3D space within Cinema 4D. I coded the controls to be powered via Xpresso and a User Data control panel. There is minimal keyframing needed to create a great looking 3D presentation slideshow that will blow the pants off anything that can be exported from Microsoft Powerpoint.

I made a video that shows a little how it works in case people want to see behind the scenes before they buy it. I also provided an instruction guide and encourage any emails from users if they get stuck.

I have a bunch of different file ideas I want to execute, I just need more time in the day to be able to work on them.

I designed this as a segment open for the news show Aqui y Ahora in the same respect as my Fuego Cruzado animation. This segment shows situations where people have no idea who is their neighbor, and the person may have something unique about them.

I came up with the concept to literally translate “La Puerta de al Lado” into an animation. In English it means “The door next door” so that is essentially what I based my scene around. There were some previous designs and examples other people did that the producers thought were not alluding to content in this segment enough, they were too abstract. So I tried a rather simple concept based on just a literal translation of the title and they gave me the green light to go through with it.

I created everything you see in the scene in Cinema 4D, the house, the door, the welcome mat, the door knocker, etc. I only used one stock photo to generate the reflections and use it as a background for the neighborhood in the scene. I put the house number as 1985 because that’s the year I was born in, I like to add a personal touch to my animations whenever I can. I spent a lot of time on the details, like adding dirt to the siding and windows, in order to make the house look more convincing. Nobody’s house is perfectly clean on the exterior so you have to make the model have some blemishes so it can be more believable. One area I barely spent any time on was the grass and the bushes in between the two houses. The camera whips by so fast there was no sense in creating highly detailed bushes and plants because you have no time to absorb anything other than there is a little bit of landscaping going on there. I just used an old grass set up I had done with the Hair module from awhile back.

I added a camera move and made it wobble and bounce very slightly, to look like it was on a steadycam, so that the movement wasn’t a strict point A to point B linear move. The title is revealed as stitched into a doormat, which I also created using the Hair module in Cinema 4D. The Hair module can be used for tons of other things besides just hair. Once in After Effects, All I did was some basic color corrections and added a motion blur to match it up with the camera move in Cinema 4D. The start and the end are designed to be alpha transparent so you can place video underneath it, or in this case use it as a transition from one source to another on a TV broadcast.

I enjoyed working on this piece because I got to play a variety of different roles. Instead if just animating, I was a set designer as well. I was in charge of adding different styles and decor to the front of my houses. I was trying different paint combinations for the colors of the doors and siding, I felt like I should get some swatches from Home Depot to help. I had to set up the camera moves and lighting to reveal the limited parts of the set I designed and to make sure they had a believable looking light source illuminating the exterior. I would guess it took a good week to get everything just right and I like how it turned out. I added the music and sound effects on here, I’m not sure what the broadcast version sounds like.

This is a short title sequence for a segemnt on the show Aqui y Ahora called “Fuego Cruzado” which means “Crossfire.” Crossfire was a sweet game I had when I was a kid. I thought about this game nonstop while I worked on this animation.

Damn those effects are sick, that song rocks, I wish I still had this game…

I had to come up with a design that incorporated the idea of a segment with a lot of fast segments, so I started by designing a stopwatch in Cinema 4D. I made the watch tick using XPresso, and I made it tick a lot faster than it would in real time to make it feel more accelerated. It’s a pretty basic animation, the hero stopwatch is used as a transition to start and end the animation. I liked how the stopwatch came out with the lighting and reflections, and it took awhile to get the Xpresso right using some forgotten radians to degrees math principles that I temporarily learned in Pre-Calculus in high school. I don’t know what the music is on animation during the actual show, I can’t track down the final. I hope it is similar to the song in the commercial for nostalgia’s sake.

Here is a Univision Promo I did featuring the lovely Greydis Gil. I want to apologize first for the music. It was not up to me to use a track that was written by Mario and Luigi in the Mushroom Kingdom.

This one took a long time to create. I started by making a butterfly in Cinema 4D that was comprised of the pieces of the Univsion logo. I imported the logo as splines and textured each piece to match the corresponding colors. Then I animated the movement of the wings by linking them together with xpresso and driving them with some user data I keyframed. I flirted with the idea of making a sine wave control the movement of the wings, but it looked better to add a little more randomness to the speed and movement of the wings flapping, so I took the manual animation route. I can tell you are on the edge of your seat.

When out of nowhere I defined the path that the butterfly was to fly and attached the butterfly’s position by aligning it to the spline and animating the start and end position. I added a vibrate tag to offset the position and rotation of the spline slightly in order to give the butterfly a little more realistic flight path; it moves more sporadic this way like a real butterfly would. Once I did this for one butterfly, I duplicated many instances of it and tweaked all the animated parameters to make each butterfly different than the next in terms of the way it looks and moves. I refrained from naming them all.

I positioned each butterfly carefully in the scene to get the right distribution through the duration of the animation, making sure of things like they wouldn’t overlapping each other. I tried to make it look as random and natural as possible by neurotically adjusting and constantly tweaking my creatures for hours to have them fit perfectly in my world. I bet that is what God feels like on a day to day basis.

I divided the butterflies into drones and heroes. The drones are the butterflies that fly aimlessly through the scene and carry on their way. They are n00bs. The heroes are the ones that interact with the talent and need to be in a specific spot at a specific time during the animation to make it appear as if they are being swiped at by the net. I ramped up some of their movements as the net is going by in order to make it seem like they are trying to escape urgently.

For the final logo, I had to come up with something that went with the way the scene is shot. She looks up as if something is coming from high up so you have to do something along those lines to make it convincing. They originally suggest I make the butterfly turn into the logo, but that is pretty predictable since it already is the logo. I decided to make the logo big and in 3D and have butterflies nesting on it and flying towards it. Besides looking like a “U” and a butterfly, the logo also looks like a flower, which is naturally what a butterfly would be attracted to. Much like I am attracted to Greydis Gil.

Greidys is the lovely lady in this promo, and I have not seen her at work since I’ve been here at Univision. I really, really wish I would have. If I saw her in the hallway I would approach her and tell her that I am the clever and rather striking young man that was fully capable of surrounding her in imaginary butterflies, so I could obviously make her wildest dreams come true. Then she would say something to me in Spanish and I would have no idea what it meant. Google translate wouldn’t help because I would have trouble spelling and remember what she said. It was probably something quite romantic and how she longs for an hombre like me. But alas I will never know for sure…

What.

Here is a new Univision Promo I did with Cinema 4D and After Effects. They needed it done fast earlier this month because they wanted to air this network promo right after the coverage of the World Cup ended, and they were hoping Spain would win and they could air this promo that has an obvious Spanish theme to it. I got it done with a quick turnaround thanks to MoGraph as always. I made the Univision logo the object cloner, then I offset the smaller particle clones along a spline using a spline effector. I added some chaos to the particles with a random effector and animated the parameters so they moved and rotated along a spline path to make it appear they were coming from the woman’s fan and merging into the network logo. I did the post effects in After Effects, it needed some rotoscoping mostly, along with a few other tricks to make it look polished.

I’m going to start doing a breakdown of my projects when I can. It may help people understand what it is exactly that I do, besides pushing buttons on a computer to make pretty pictures appear on da tee vee.

Oh yea and there’s a BMD new logo in there…change is coming…