Author: Greg2B

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Daily 365 Xpresso Tasks

Xpresso Task 7

 

This is my submission for Robert Leger’s Xpresso Task 7. The task was to create you standard product table. After the last hair puller the straight forwardness of this one was welcomed. This one was hosted by Ryan Hamilton, a xpresso task regular who is always producing some great work. To add even more awesomeness to it this one is a contest of for an Iphone App…although I don’t have an Iphone.

As far as the xpresso setup I didn’t hit any major snags while building it. I did however run into an issue where instead of using the radius of the shape to control the size I used the scale so I wouldn’t have to link up each different shape. My main reason for this, besides not wanting to make a bunch of connections over and over, was so I could use any custom shape. So I used scale with a small increment to make it seem like the radius is getting bigger.

I didn’t add any other features to this one like I normally do. Instead I focused more time into creating this animation.

 

Lego Mario Build Up

I wanted to do something then just have a random product on a table with it rising. My original idea was to have mickey mouse’s head and shoulders one the table and have it rise up as the ears rotate around and land on his head. I couldn’t find a good model of his head and I didn’t want to take the time to build it, so I did some brainstorming and thought a lego would be cool to build up.

I found this model of lego mario on 3d ocean and figure it would be cool to use. After that I just built the scene up and made a little Xpresso setup for the body parts. Then I created the swirling blocks to wrap around Mario while the product table(tunnel) goes up.

It’s a standard effect of sorts but it does look cool I think. I think I was inspired by the stop-motion like work of a recent lego spot that was on tv (web since I don’t have cable),

 

 

Categories
General

Wells Fargo + Wachovia

For this post I wanted to talk a bit about something that has been in my head for a while. When two companies merge or one takes over the other what happens to their brand? I would think this would be a big issue, as to whose brand do you stick with if it is a true equal merger. Now I suspect that it might never be truly equal and the bigger company brand stays intact while the little one withers away but how do you make that transition over.

What sparked this idea is this image where the Wells Fargo, in my town, sign just replaces the Wachovia one with all the blue window panes around it. This just stood out to me at how much the colors seemed to clash with each other and not in a good way. This being said I know that it is very expensive to replace glass, especially coloured ones but shouldn’t there be a way to make a transition with out something like this happening.

Wells Fargo in South Orange

I think there should be a way although I admit I’m not 100% sure what that would be. I like how on the Wells Fargo – Wachovia  FAQ site they use a lighter blue that works well with the red and yellow. I wonder if it would be practical to do something on real signs to tone the colors down a bit so they don’t fight each other as much. I’m sure there are set rules for the branding practices but it could be something that is changed out. The also might try something in black and white and see how that might work out for a bit.

I have no idea about the real practical applications of this or if you might have company representatives saying it’s bad for their company brand. It’s just a thought I had for a while that I thought I would share.

 

Categories
Inspiration

Motion Design Truths

This is a list I’m starting about the truths/ideas behind Motion Design. I’ve linked up the people who said them after the quote. I plan on adding more as I come across them or if anyone else come across something good send me the link and I’ll add it to the list.

 

If it doesn’t look good to begin with, it won’t look better just because you start moving it around.
@bartondamer

 

In motion graphics, timing is everything. When something is too quick it’s disrupting, when too slow it is annoying.
@JMDesign

 

camera moves are what separates the men from the welkers.
Mograph.net –killkillakillyo

Categories
Daily 365

I Kill Giants

 

This is my final animation for the I Kill Giants spot for a fictional motion comic. In my previous post I talked about my reasoning behind the project so for this one I thought I would just pick a few scenes from the animation and talk about them and the overall animation.

Overall the animation process went well, I worked in a bit pretty much every night in some fashion. You can see my progress for each day on my 365 project, it pretty much took over for the past week or so. The animation in the beginning up until the action scenes stayed pretty much the same from my original storyboard. I didn’t have any big issues working on those scenes. I did have to take out the artifacts, moiré patterns, which came when I scanned some of the images. It wasn’t big issue on these images but on later ones is was very noticeable.

The I Kill Giants scene that begin the action scenes stayed true to my storyboard/animatic. I added some sfx for the word bubble that might seem somewhat out of place but they match up with the ones that I have at the end. The giant in a row gave me a bit of trouble, the way I envisioned it didn’t translate as well in after effects. So instead of showing each giants full body I opted to just show their heads/upper body. I put a sky from another part of the comic as the back ground so it wasn’t just plain white. Having the motion blur on I think makes it look pretty cool although you can’t really see any detail about any of the giants.

The scene after this with cool perspective looking up at the monster is probably on of my favorite scenes. It was pretty much setup for the way I wanted to animate it and of course it had to roar after you zoom in. The sfx is actually from boss from duke nukem video game. [Random side note: Duke Nukem Forever, the infamous vaporware game for the last decade or so is actually coming.  Check out the trailer for some typical duke nukem vulgar awesome action.]

The next scene that gave me some issues was when the hammer comes out of the purse. This 3 part sequence I felt might be kind of quick, but then again I did want this whole part to be quick. The glow out of the purse was another issue with the mask flickering but with the blur it seems to cover it up. I hope I’m not trying to depend on that too much.

The last part I want to talk about is the stillish action pose part where Barbra is holding the hammer. My idea for it was to make it look really cool and somewhat 3D like even though it’s just a 2D plane. Originally I thought of doing some camera projection but I decided to just stay in after effects. I went with have a camera pan around the image plane and had the main part of the hammer on a higher z depth. The made is seemed like it had some dept to it but move way too much. So I just did some key framing to reduce the movement a bit. I think the background gave me the biggest issue as far as what to use. I wound up using a background from another part that was the sky storm.

So above is what I ended up with this was a cool project to work on and I figured out and learned a bunch as always.

 

 

Sound effects from:

www.freesound.org

www.partnersinrhyme.com

Background Music from freeplaymusic.com

 

 

Categories
Daily 365

I Kill Giants Sneaker

I have been working on the same project for a while now and I wanted to try work on something different.  I came across this sneaker template psd  on deviant art.sneaker temp I though t it would be cool to try and animate a texture on to the sneaker.  I never got to the animating part as I just kept working on the design more and more try different things on the shoe.

After all I tried I decide to keep it simple similar to how the comic book it designed with just red and white. I added two images from the comic that I already had broken up with the man of action logo.

 

 

 

Categories
Daily 365

No Auto Save In Photoshop

I didn’t really have a good title for today but since my comp over heated twice using Photoshop I decide to title this post a feature I wish it had. It seem working with Photoshop files that are 5000px+ by 5000px+ causes my comp to overheat…They where big scans.

Anyway I’ve been working on my I Kill Giants Spot that I should have finished in a few days. You can check out what I have so far on my 365 project. I have the beginning slow parts done, just have to do the giant fighting scenes.

I didn’t get to any animation today but I did make this image while I was working on breaking up the images. It didn’t fit the style I’m going for with the single frame images but I thought it was cool so I kept it. I took an extra 15 mins. to add some more stuff to it to make it look even cooler and below is what I came up with.

I used some water colour paper textures for the edges and some grunge paper over it all to try to bring it together.

Categories
Daily 365

Reel 2010/2011

I felt that I need to update my reel with some of the work that I’ve done recently so I decided to crank out a reel so that I can continually have something to work towards updating this year. Granted most of my work is geared toward that end but having a new one for this year makes it seem more significant.

So it’s time for a personal reel crit…were to start.

Let’s start with the beginning, the opening slate so to speak which is actually a third of my whole demo reel. I sketched a few idea’s based around my new logo that I developed and I decided on what I dubbed the “Platonic journey”.  I wanted to have a platonic travel through my logo and then transition in to my reel clips. Overall I thinks its good, the style is somewhat backwards in terms of mograp with the matte colors and ambient occlusion but I wanted to try something different which for me is no shiny stuff. I also ran into a bunch of technical issues but those problems will be saved for another post.

The reel it’s self I feel is decent for where I’m at right now. My level of work needs to go up but it’s better than my previous one. I attempted to keep the pattern of 3D to 2D work until the end. My strongest pieces I feel is the beginning one, although I have gotten a crit about the shadows, and the grooveshark, although thinking about it now it seems very similar to the standard circle logos with a swirl thing around them. Although I did it from scratch (I don’t even have particular, I wish I did) and the swirl thing I added at the end it seems kind of typical, so maybe it’s not so strong.

The weakest I would say might be the anime mx or the woot one at the end. I though of cutting either one per the GSG instant demo critique but it wasn’t the weakest thing I had laid in the timeline. When I create some more stuff those will probably be the first to go.

The ending I went for the simple text on black. I thought of bringing back the G2B from the beginning but it seemed like a bit much. I opted instead for the simple clean name and year at the end with my logo.

So now its time to post it and get some feedback from people about what they think needs to be changed.

 

Random side note: my spell checker is trying to make me type British with colour instead of color. I always though colour was just a cool way some people spelled color, learn something new all the time.

 

Categories
3D Modeling Daily 365

Coveleski IKG Hammer

I thought the Hammer from I Kill Giants was pretty cool so I wanted to see how it would look translated into 3D. I although that I may do some projection mapping on to it for my IKG spot to have some fake rotation on it.

I the modeling of it was pretty straight forward, it’s all composed of primitive object with booles to cut away certain parts. I wasn’t to sure of the color since the comic is black and white so I went for the shiny reflective feel.

The hardest part was the chain, in the comics it’s just a mass of lines that look like a chain but is more just a black shape. I made the chain links and put it helix with the cloner, I believe the duplicate on spline would off set 90 degrees perfectly but the cloner gave me more flexibility. I found that the sync option allow the random effector for almost near perfect equal rotation on each item.

The chain kills the render time, not to bad overall(5 mins) but it does push my computer near the magical number of 90 degrees Celsius for instant shut down(at least if I try to do other stuff while rendering).

I think as far as modeling this hammer it’s pretty much done for what I need and more. I’ll probably tweak it a bit and post on my DA page and here when it’s finished as an extra post/

Categories
Daily 365

I Kill Giants Spot Animatic/Story Board

I read the comic(graphic novel) by Joe Kelly + JM Ken Niimura called I Kill Giants. I got it when I went to comic-con last year and I got it signed by Joe Kelly. The story is very good and the art is cool black and white stylized comic style for the drawings.  It sort of reminds me tekkonkinkreet as far as animation goes.

My goal is to create a 15 second spot for a fictional motion comic. I picked 15 seconds because I thought it would be a reasonable amount of time to give a little peek into this comics world. My inspiration for this the unofficial titles of the walking dead tv show. I really like the 2.5d effect in this animation and how it all flows together.

I began by re-reading the comic and picking out cool parts. There where few key scenes that you will see in the PDF that I thought where epic and had to be in it. After that I started breaking it apart so I could have all the parts I needed. I started out trying to make it fairly good then I thought this is just for my own personal storyboard so it can be messy and quick so I can just get to the storyboarding.

I made an out line of what I wanted to show  Home–> School –> Giant Fighting. As I progressed with the boards I realized I wouldn’t have enough time so it got scaled down to School –> Giant Fighting.  My goal was to go from calm to chaos.

You can check out my pdf storyboard if you want to see my notes. It may have some(a lot) of spelling error since I just type my thoughts quickly and and theres no spell check in the program I used. I still need to tweak some parts like flash after the hit so it’s more noticeable. I also seem to need to fix the scene numbers.

Categories
Daily 365

James White Rocker Head

James White Rocker Head from G2BProductions on Vimeo.

This is a quick little animation I put together of James Whites’s(signalnoise) design with his Character Head  for his nomination for Faces Magazine in Halifax for their Faces Choice Awards 2011. Vote for him on the voting page.

Originally I wanted animate his character head that he has up before his broadcast. I had the idea to have it do sort of the typical talking head thing, probably sync it to him saying “Keep the metal alive”. Then I saw this one and I just had to animate.

I recreated the design in Photoshop and Illustrator. Then I animated it in After Effects. I made sort of pseudo rig that allows me to flip the eyes down easily and open the mouth. The tongue I animated with the puppet tool. I designed the tongue by looking at reference of Gene Simmons tongue…I also looked at some Youtube videos for the tongue animation…(I would not really recommend doing this, I should have used a safer place).

So in the end I got this James rocker head poster animation that rocks out to the music as the text comes in with a little tongue action at the end.

I got the music from http://dig.ccmixter.org/ – ruin roads-Basement 8.