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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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I just posted my newest tutorial on the tutorials page. It shows you how to make a beach ball model in Cinema 4D. It’s a pretty easy model to make, but I show you an easy way to texture it to get it to look like a 100% too- legit-to-quit beach ball. Yeah. Check it out.
Also, I will probably reorganize the tutorial page soon, it’s getting pretty crowded over there.
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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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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. Here’s 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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99% of the work I create nowadays is car commercials. Compared to anything and everything else you see on TV, they set the quality bar pretty low. You know exactly what I mean.
I’ve done hundreds of them. My work tends to look better than those extreme examples, but nonetheless, most car commercials are doomed before I even get to edit one thing. I can only imagine that most people who see car commercials on TV either:
a. Tune it out completely, rendering the advertising message useless.
b. Change the channel.
c. Groan/roll eyes/ sigh/other symptom of aggravation.
d. Some combination of a, b, and c.
They are what they are: cheap and quick. I sometimes make 3 commercials in one day from start to finish. The deadlines are tough sometimes, as I work furiously to try and crank something out that is so subpar. Occasionally my attempts to add a bit of style to the car spot are vanquished. Plenty of times I’ve been told to change a commercial I worked on to severely downgrade its overall quality simply because the owner of John Smith Cars wants it that way. Nevermind that I am the artist, I just have to give the client what he wants.
BUT! Occasionally I get to do something creative, something that can showcase more of my skills. This is part of a commercial I made that is a bit nicer than any of the harsh reality I spewed proceeding this clip.
Intentionally Annoying Car Commercial from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I actually had a lot of fun making that acid-trip-intense-fake-commercial. It’s mostly a combination of various After Effects expressions to make the objects wiggle, vibrate, and dance in the most obnoxious ways possible. It was a challenge to make a mockery of some of the annoying attention grabbing gimmicks I sometimes am asked to pull.
Here’s my take on car commercials:
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So here is a clip form a commercial I did that had to do with UCF Athletics. Instead of just using regular-old text, I constantly try to think of different methods to present title work. In this sports themed commercial I added the title work onto a material in Cinema 4D and created a waving pennant using the cloth tag.
I would recommend using the cloth tag to create any sort of waving flag like this rather than the wind deformer. The Cloth tag is very easy to set up and with some trial and error you can create a much more natural looking movement than with the simple wind deformer. Don’t forget to make it a child of a hyperNURBS object to make it even smoother.
There are several tutorials on this subject already out there, including this one.
I’d really like to get more in depth with the cloth tag to better understand how the settings can alter the movement and reaction of your object. I haven;t been able to find an in depth review of what certain things like flexion, global intersection analysis, global drag, etc. actually “do” when changed. If anyone has a breakdown of this to link to or would perhaps put it in writing please let me know.
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I felt my home page was in need of a bit of a makeover, so I created a new welcome video. I consulted my Xbox for inspiration and decided to create a Guitar Hero style video for my site. After doing tons of interactive research while observing the details and nuances of the game, I did my best to recreate the look and feel of the game with Cinema 4D, Photoshop, Motion, and After Effects. If you’ve never seen or played Guitar Hero (or even more awesomer, Rockband) then I suggest you head down to somewhere like Best Buy and take the floor sample for a spin.
Motion Graphics Hero: Guitar Hero Style Intro from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I’m pleased with the way this came out. It’s good to know that all of my research and hard work payed off.
I’m planning on doing more welcome videos to the site every so often. I’ll either have them play randomly if I can figure out how or I will have a way to cycle between them.
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Judging by the date of my last post, I really haven’t done much on here lately. I have been doing plenty of motion graphics work while I’m actually at work, so I haven’t been chomping at the bit to work on extra stuff for this site when I get home. I’ve been playing plenty of Grand Theft Auto IV instead.
A demo reel update is in order…soon.
Anyway… I recently did this in a commercial for a company that builds swimming pools. I used Trapcode Form and this preset by Harry Frank. I tweaked a few things and thought it came out pretty cool. Swimming Pool Commercial Clip from Michael Szabo on Vimeo
I added the ripple transition using the aptly named “Ripple” effect in After Effects. By masking on and off the titles along with animating the width, height, and radius of the Ripple, the water appears to wash the titles away.
I like the widescreen shape I made, the slight bend in it is something a little different, and the spark that traces along the edge adds a little something to it. Expect me to use this element entirely in too much of my work.
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Head to the tutorial Page to check out my latest tutorial, where I use Cinema 4D and the MoGraph module to create a 3D speaker that is powered by a sound file. You end up creating something like this:
MoGraph Speakers from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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Here’s a little clip just in time for tax season. I used mograph to create a scene where someone’s bills are getting out of control. All I used was a cloner object to clone multiple types of bills and a randomize effector to vary the positions and angles of the individual papers that make up the stack. I also modeled all the objects in the scene, even the seagull painting in the background was a vacation picture of mine.Eventually it will be in various car commercials here and there.***Safari 3 is having problems playing these embedded videos, but they work fine in Firefox. You can try that browser or click here to use a different page to view them.***
Mograph: Stacking Bills from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
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