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Drum Kit made with MoGraph

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.

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A Cold Case Without a Trace of Law & Order CSINCISNYPD Blue: Miami

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.
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Marvelous Spider Text, Man

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.

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 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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Aetuts+ Logo Reveal Contest Entry: Puzzle Pieces Animation

I had this idea in my head for awhile. I wanted to create a 3D model of a jigsaw puzzle that can have the pieces animated into solve it with just a few keyframes. It can be textures with whatever, it’s a puzzle so it can be a replaceable image of anything. Well I finally got around to doing it for the Aetuts+ Logo Reveal Contest.

It’s based on my old animation in Mograph, the Current Cubes animation. I thought that if you cloned puzzle pieces into a grid cloner that you could control the assembly of a whole jigsaw puzzle. You could do some could random effectors to make the pieces scatter and have it pop back into place. This logo reveal contest came up with Aetuts+ and I couldn’t come up with anything special in After Effects off the top of my head, so I grabbed the puzzle idea off my idea whiteboard and got to work. I have no graphic moral compass apparently, since I’m primarily using a 3D application to do a logo reveal for a site devoted to tutorials in a 2D application. I’m a monster.
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5 Second Project: Kick the Bucket

So I finally jumped in Greyscale Gorilla’s 5 Second Projects competition. Here is my entry/interpretation for the category of “Kick the Bucket.”

I guess I can call myself a character animator now.

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New Tutorial: Create a Galaxy with Fractal Noise

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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First Demo Reel Update of 2009

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.

The Exciting Adventures of Savingsman

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.
 
I don’t really think it’s very hard to come up with something different and creative to sell cars. This is merely a spec spot, so it’s unfortunately never been on television. I really hope it does, but at the rate were going, it might never make it on. It was an even better idea when I thought of it this summer when gas was like $13 a gallon. Continue Reading

Yep, They Bother Me Too

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.

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