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.

Here’s an animation I made in CInema 4D using Mograph. It’s a drum kit, made of words, that reacts to the beat.

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.

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.

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.