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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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Here’s an animation I made in CInema 4D using Mograph. It’s a drum kit, made of words, that reacts to the beat:
Cinema 4D Drum Kit from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
OK so, I don’t think I’ll be getting a job in the music industry coming up with catchy beats. I made this crappy beat in Garageband, and hooked up each drum to a separate Sound Effector to drive the animation. I could make a better beat, but I wanted to make something simple with all the drums involved. I think it’s a cool way to visualize a drum set. The font is called Chunk Five and it’s my new favorite.
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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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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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So I finally jumped in Greyscale Gorilla’s 5 Second Projects competition. Here is my entry/interpretation for the category of “Kick the Bucket.”
Kick the Bucket – 5 Second Project from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.
I guess I can call myself a character animator now.
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My newest tutorial is posted. It shows you how to create an entire space scene in After Effects using primarily the fractal noise plug-in. I got inspired to do this based on part of this tutorial where it showed how to use fractal noise to make a star field and I took it a bit further. Fractal Noise has always been considered one of the most useful plug-ins; I’ve used to create tons of different things from clouds to curtains. Check out the video and you’ll be on your way to creating a scene straight from outer space.
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So let’s see if I still remember how to work this blog thingy.
Here is my updated reel. I removed some car commercial junk that wasn’t going to impress anyone. I added my comic book spot that still hasn’t been on TV and won’t ever be, unless somebody wants me to freelance it for them.
I’ve got an After Effects tutorial idea in the works, but I’m procrastinating on it because things outside of working on computers all day have kept me happily occupied.
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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:
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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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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