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Subway Train Animation/Composite

Here’s a Cinema 4D train moving through a subway station.

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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Magnetic Animation

I just started messing around with the idea and came up with this. In Cinema 4D of course.

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I am mentioned honorably

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:

WOOOOOOOOOO! I’m awesome!

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5 Second Project – Old Video Games Graveyard

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.

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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New Welcome Video – Sifting through my file

I was long overdue for a new video that play on my homepage. I haven’t played Guitar Hero in ages, so I definitely need something else. But it’s hard to come up with a self-promotional video with no guidelines. So this one I made in After Effects. I just came up with the idea long ago to animated a file folder opening and moving on its own. It’s all Photoshop and After Effects.

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New After Effects Tutorial: 3D Stroke Glow Animation

So my latest tutorial creates a design that is a bit hard to describe. It’s a sort of a 3D stroke-light streak-burst-glow-particle-explosion-reveal-animation. That name just rolls off the tongue. This video is a practical example I made with the technique.
If I remember correctly I got inspiration from a Ford Flex commercial like this one at some point last year (It’s towards the end):
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My Entry for the “See What’s Possible” Contest by Adobe

It took me awhile to come up with exactly what I wanted to do for this contest. The theme was Compose an engaging animation or motion graphic video incorporating the Photoshop brand logo that illustrates the theme of “See What’s Possible.”  I ended up taking the design of my web site and animating it, hence the similar look of the random elements coming out of the computer.

The bulk of the work was done in After Effects, with some Photoshop, and I even managed to use a little Cinema 4D in there, I couldn’t resist. The color spectrum look comes from the “Color” blending mode (shocker). The steps are shown after the jump. Continue Reading