This is part 2 of the Starwars Iconoscope animation. It’s getting long, 3:11 right now and I’m on scene 23. However the animation went a lot quicker then the previous part, probably because I knew more of what I was doing. I think the timing on some parts still need to be improved though.
The hardest part of this one was first scene for this part, 11. The rope swing was hard to get it to look right and I still think it is off a bit. I looked at the movie for reference, but of course Luke legs are bent up and Leia is horizontal holding on to him. Just a little bit hard to duplicate in Icon format.
I think I’m going to do the sound in sound both so I have some more control. This should allow me to add more little sfx without having a bunch of layers in AE. I’ve only used it once before since it use to freeze up for some reason, so it should be good to learn it again.
This is the official part one of the Iconosope animation. I did 10 scenes so pretty much 1/3. I fix some timing in the first two I had done and notice some other areas I need to improve. Although there not to much “actual” animation there is a lot of timing that is involved in it.
I’m trying to have the icons come up in the same patter as a normal speech. So some parts I sped up and other are slow. I also added some cheesy light saber effect for the transitions to the next set of scenes.
I’m thinking for the music I should either mix the whole sound track into one big mix. Maybe 15 or 30 seconds a song or just pick my fav and mix those few. I need to add some more sfx as well.
This is a work in progrss animation for my new weekend/early next week project. Its an animated version of Star Wars IV via Iconoscope. The original design that every linked to is down. Apparently Wayne Dorrington got the lifehacker effect or digg effect or name a big social link site+effect after it when viral and his site went down. But he has a new site, where you can find it. He has a bunch of other cool graphics as well.
I found out about it after the Kickawesomeshow (fun nonsense web, design, music, tech show) talk about it on there show. I thought it would be cool to animate.
I only have the first 10 lines extracted since I wanted to work on this one in parts, unlike the woot animation where I had every thing setup at one. My goal with this animation is basically to tell the story sequentially with some added movement, maybe one or two full animation movements per line.
This whole animation will be about pacing an timing so that it can be read or understood while not being to stale, which I think was an issue in my woot animation. I need to fix some things in this version already.
Today I was working on a design and I needed the color of a manila folder. So google lead me to http://www.colourlovers.com where I found the manila color . Some how I ended up on a pattern page page of the image below.
Originally I though thats cool, I should animate it. Its a bunch of sliders and knobs it would look cool. Then I found out you could easily make patterns your self.
Then I remembered a cool font I wanted to 3Dify* that Brad Chmielewskilisted for type tuesday called Stereofidelic. So I put the two together and came up with the image above.
My subject was Jitters, a really good pizza, sandwich, stuff to eat place in Rochester, NY where I went to college. So using their website/logo colors I created my image in Photoshop and Cinema 4D for the type. Originally I was going to use sketch and toon and export to Illustrator, but I couldn’t get the right look.
I tried to create the type room pattern wall thing while trying to make the text look like it was shaded that way
I’m finally bringing this project to a close. I took the chance and Rendered out both the long (2:37) & short (1:03) version. No comp crashing from over heating and BG Render let me know while I was out that it finished.
The short is hosted on my Vimeo while the long is on my Youtube.
I think the short version is better, even though you can’t read it I think it flows better.
Today I had some slight technical problem with my computer randomly shutting off due to overheating. I will probably be calling tech support. With that in mind I took it easy on my comp tonight . I decided that I would go through all of the effectors in cinema 4d and see what they do. I used a platonic as my shape to primitive to deform and just went through the list.
The hardest one to figure out how to use was the morph effector, which I still didn’t actually see substantial results with. The only other one I didn’t use was smoothing since I didn’t really have a dense enough and didn’t want to push my comp rendering that.
Still working on the animation from the other day but maybe this will help.
I have two items for today. First it just some simple 3d text. I found or re-found this cool font called killogram. I just wanted to see how it would translate into 3d. Not so well…I need to do adjusting of adjusting kerning and the paths of the font. I did most of it in illustrator and some more in cinema. Still a cool font and I tweaked the G a bit. Might some how use it for a name plate animation or some thing.
The second this is my attempt at trying to figure out this one effect in Sean McClintock‘s Friday Afternoon in the Universe. I really like this animation overall, the tempo, the music, dialogue, and animation seem to feet well together. I also like the retro-esque feel to it.
The effect I was trying to recreate starts around 17 seconds in and end at 22. I’ve added a few images below. So it’s not exactly a new Motion Graphics thing, but it is a nice effect. I have not clue what software they used but since I use Cinema that what I use tried to use to create the effect. I also wouldn’t doubt theres a tutorial for this some where but it’s alway good to try to figure it out first. As you can seem from my result above I didn’t quite get the effect.
I sort of got a sphere to form around another in a circle although it doesn’t look as nice at the one in the video. I used a surface effector to wrap a plane around a sphere and scaled it to grow it around. Which work for the most part. Then I used a wind(right circle) and a formula(left circle) effector to try and create the waving grow. Doesn’t look right at all.
It doesn’t come together, just overlaps and then I tone it down with the keys. Not quite sure where to go from this. I tried a bunch of other options wrap but it didn’t really look like it grey from a point just unwrapped from the middle. I’ll have to give it another shot before I go to the forums or something.
The thickness is also missing but that could be fixed by using a flat rectangle box with a color edge. It slowed down the view port a lot so I used the plane for testing purposes.
So today I decided to work on the woot minions again to try to re-time it for readability. This brought some what straight forward although I did have to go into some precomps a couple levels deep to move key frames. This brought the overall time to about 2 min. and 30 seconds or so.
I did a simple image transition using a gradient to animate the text in since it wasn’t editable text. This force me to set key frames for each line. I though about making an expression but there didn’t seem to be a consistent height to use for some reason. So I wound up just setting it for each set of text.
I think it’s kind of boring having to wait for the text to appear. I tried to time it out to what it should take to read leaving some room at the end. If I had the original files I think I would animate more to make it more interesting. Also a voice over might help too. The music helps some what, but I couldn’t find any as good as the short version. The song I choose from http://www.incompetech.com is cool for a while but gets repetitive after a while. I tried to loop the other song I used but it didn’t sound right.
This is the small version for now since the larger one will take a while to render. I will update it when it finishes…
Edit: apparently I forgot audio… so the next one will have the sound too…and better quality
This is my final version for the QR Code Dunny that I was working on. I render this one out with a linear profile from cinema 4D which initially was very dark but I remembered reading a blog post about linear work flow from heloluxx.com. (Which has a load of stuff for learning Cinema 4D. ) So I was able to switch over the project profile and everything look alright, some what.
I did some color correction and tried to make have some color so it wasn’t so plain with just black and white. In addition I added some sound and time remap effects that work together. I think it make it seem kind of cool and ominous.
The music I found just Googleing monolithic , which brough me to Dr. Mabuse – Monolithic. It a pretty cool experimental video by Angelique van Grootel. Not sure why I originally thought monolithic since I forgot the definition but after look it up it makes sense. Music by Dr Mabuse.
I used the spy photo preset from all bets are off production for the time remapping. originally I was doing by hand(mouse using time remapping but them I remembered this preset).
Well today I was a little busy, have some deadlines coming up but there is no excuse for not being creative and there is always time for some creativity.(Its also a render night)
So today I will share 2 sets of pictures I took with my android phone when I went into NYC on the path. Nothing to spectacular just some images of the train station at Christopher street. I have been playing around with color shift, feature on camera360 app that allows you to easily take any color out or leave in of the picture. This of course can be easily done in Photoshop or a similar program but I think the appeal is being able to do it on the fly. This could would be helpful if you needed to spec something out real quick. I don’t think these applications, at least no on a phone, will replace taking a bit of time and adjusting some curves and levels. But it is fun to play around with.
Now for someone with real photography skills I would like show two cool images from Jordan Matter’s photo series Dancers Among Us.I found out about this on Designers Couch in their Inspire Log.
This photo series taken in NYC that started in 2009 is a whole bunch of images taken in various place in the city with professional dancers. The images are all great, and truly inspiring that shows the dedication they have to their craft. The photographer as well has great dedication to taken these photographs in paces where he was not exactly welcomed.
What I really like is that he all so tells about his process and his inspiration about how the project came together on his website in the Dancers among us section. His process was pretty much just show up to a cool place with a dancer and find something iconic to NYC to take a photographer in front of. Through the behind the scenes video you get a peek of what is was like to be there with all the people. His artist statement explains in more detail about the project and how it was made for his children. I think the first line sums up the project perfectly which is
