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.

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.

It would have gone great with my paint splatter web site theme.

Here’s the tutorial.

From Anuchai Secharunputong:

Here is where I first saw it.

Update:

The link is dead.

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.

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. 
 

It took me awhile to come up with exactly what I wanted to do for this contest. The theme was Compose an engaging animation or motion graphic video incorporating the Photoshop brand logo that illustrates the theme of “See What’s Possible.”  I ended up taking the design of my web site and animating it, hence the similar look of the random elements coming out of the computer.

The bulk of the work was done in After Effects, with some Photoshop, and I even managed to use a little Cinema 4D in there, I couldn’t resist. The color spectrum look comes from the “Color” blending mode (shocker). The steps are shown after the jump. Basically I exported a color wheel from Shake:    

Then I went about animating my elements the way I wanted it to:

I adjusted the saturation of a lot of my images, because the color overlay blending mode replaces all of the color information but it retains the saturation. So in order to allow more color to show through on my elements, I reduced the black levels on a lot of my elements.The final result:

I thought it came out well, I mixed the music too in Garageband. I hope it came out well enough to win the first prize of $20,000.

Photoshop is the backbone of graphics. Whether your medium is print, broadcast, web, or anywhere else, you need to know Photoshop. There’s really just no way around it.

I found this site PSDTUTS and it has a bunch of great tutorials and examples of work done in photoshop. I’ll be using some of them to enhance my own work, and when I see work like this round-up of examples from Photoshop-Masters, I will be humbled all the way back to the drawing board.