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 forgot to post this after the start of the New Year, but it’s a little snow globe countdown animation I did for the show Despierta America. It popped up in the corner every hour or so on the TV broadcast to remind you how soon Christmas was coming. I made 2 versions, one counting down the days until Christmas and one counting down until New year’s Day. I had to come up with something holiday themed, so I designed this snow globe and made it happen. The globe was modeled in Cinema 4D with some reflections and glass materials. I added the numbers inside the globe and made them kind of flow back and forth with a Formula Effector in Mograph, then I randomized it for each number so that they would be slightly different each day.

I brought it into After Effects and first positioned and animated it in the bottom left corner of the screen. Once it was in place I created a little snow storm inside it with Trapcode Particular. I have only seen snow once in my life, so I had to do hours and hours of research to study how exactly now moves to get the best looking effect I possibly could (no I didn’t). The rest of it was adding little glows, flares, snowflakes, and sparkles to make it fun and festive to go with the holiday. I drew a simple zig-zag Christmas tree and traced it on underneath the effects. It’s a simple but effective animation.

The New Year’s one was very similar, but instead of the tree I created a confetti particle system that launched colored confetti all over the corner of the screen.

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…

Xpresso links the different shapes together and a 1 set of rotation keyframe drives the entire animation. Simple but kind of cool.

Movilencuesta is not a real word, it was fused together by two lesser words in order to properly describe a segment on the show “Republica Deportiva.” I really, really wish I worked on the show Republica Deportiva everyday. ¡Viva las Senadoras!

Movil means mobile, and refers to a cell phone and encuesta means poll, so I made an animation for The Mobilepoll. As you probably guessed, they ask a question that is answered by texting from your cell phone.

I did the compositing and animation here. I didn’t model the phone, there wasn’t enough time for me to work on that part. It’s a very good model found here.

Phones are becoming really easier to model now because they are largely becoming touch screen-based, so you don;t have to model and texture all those little buttons.

I developed the phone’s interface in After Effects and rendered out the animation to be used on the screen’s geometry in Cinema 4D. I then animated the phone to enter the scene and then serve as a transition to the live show where they ask the question. The text was done in Mograph, with a combination of step effectors with the oh so handy delay effector.

Nothing ground breaking here. Besides las Senadoras.

MoDynamics is awesome, I am using it all the time. You could create some really cool stuff with just Mograph before this addition to the module, but adding the ability to make your clones collide and interact with other bodies make it so much more powerful.

Here is a simple animation I made, it’s a quick revealer that can be used to bring some type, footage, objet, etc. on screen. You basically keyframe the hero box, have it blend in with some dummy clones, and animate the surfaces of the plane to unravel to showcase the contents of the box.

Check out the latest model I made for 3D Ocean:

Film Slate Clapperboard

It’s a 3D film slate with a texture in photoshop that you can update externally and load in yourself. Animate it as you please.

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.

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.

Check out my tutorial on CG Tuts to learn a way to create bar graphs using Mograph and Xpresso. These 2 Cinema 4D components make it so we can create our on data and input to drive the look and style of the graph. Once you create the base file, you can use it as a template to create bar graphs whenever you need to. You can export a video with graphs from Cinema 4D instead of creating a static, boring one in Powerpoint for your next presentation.