Motionworks

Here’s the link to the recorded version of last Friday’s e-seminar. As usual I walk through an Adobe After Effects project, in this case the graphics for the film “Enchanted”. Light sweeps and fairy dust, oh yeah!

Gridiron has released a video explaining the basics of their soon-to-be-released Flow product. “Flow automatically tracks your work from idea to end result and manages your assets and applications for your most complex projects, all without changing the way you work. Take 10 minutes to watch the guided tour and see for yourself.

Fox Classics channel will be screening a series of James Bond films over the next few months and one of my roles has been to create 4 teasers (short promotions that generate interest/excitement) which will be screening over the next few weeks. All created in Adobe After Effects of course. Here are the first 3, which each took around 1.5 to 2 days to complete:

Teaser 01: Bullet Holes (Quicktime, 3.3MB)
Teaser 02: Gun Barrel Walk (Quicktime, 4.3MB)
Teaser 03: Quotes (Quicktime, 7.1MB)

I’ll post no.4, which uses silhouettes, when it’s finished next week. While watching, keep in mind that Fox Classics has strict guidelines regarding color and font usage, so I had to work within those guidelines.

It saddens me to say that the Making It Look Great series is being heavily pirated via share sites and torrents. Please understand that this training takes many hours to create, by people like myself, Alan Shisko, Harry Frank and Jerzy Droza (Maltaanon). We are all very generous and share our expertise and resources freely on our individual websites, which makes seeing our work stolen even more painful. Piracy really hurts, especially the small players such as Motionworks. Alan, Harry and I all have young children and are not wealthy people, so help us help you. Otherwise I’m afraid this training resource may disappear.

Thank you friends for posting so many so wonderful ideas for MILG5. Most of you were asking for tutorials on creating special effects and such, so I’d like to point something out. MILG series is all about creating great motion graphics and making them easy to build. The fifth edition is not going to be any different. Those of you who know my tutorials from http://maltaannon.com/ could be expecting something else, but it’s still MILG series so I have to keep up with the style and type of content. (more…)

We’re on fire! MILG4 is not yet available and we’re already making plans for MILG5. This time it’s going to be hosted by me - Jerzy Drozda Jr (aka Maltaannon). I am truly honored to do my part and I’d like to thank John Dickinson for giving me this opportunity. Thanks John. (more…)

In this on-demand e-seminar I walk through various techniques used in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop for creating the grungy, dark look of Saw 4. Check out a Quicktime of the graphics here. If you don’t have time to watch the full 55 minute seminar you might like to watch a this short tutorial I posted recently on how I prepared the text in Photoshop.

The author of the great Making It Look Great 3, Harry Frank has another DVD on the way. Whilst doing the rounds through the usual websites i noticed that this will be released soon. One thing in particular that struck me was the price – $100 US for a DVD seems a little steep but it does look thorough in it’s content outline, the clips available to preview online look quite varied and it’s slick image is also quite nice… So I think I’ll be putting my pre-order in shortly.

Particular is a great tool and probably one of the plug-ins I use more frequently, from confetti to galaxies it always comes in handy and saves loads of time.

More info and inspiration from Harry Frank can be found over at makingitlookgreat.com, I’m sure most people know this site now, if you dont check it out.

Mark Coleran just pinged me with this link of an amazing live electronic performance by Etienne De Crecy. That must have been one long render

Hi all, John has a great track record of taking you behind the scenes as he shows you how to create stunning motion graphics. Now it’s John’s turn. There is a wonderful article online that takes you behind the scenes of the life and times of John Dickinson. You can read about John, discover how he got began his career, and what inspires him. Our good friends at C4D Café posted the article here.

Thanks JD, for all you do to help the rest of us. Enjoy!

James Wicks
Zfx Studios

Making It Look Great™ 4 is close to completion, so I thought you might like to take a look at the Introduction movie (40MB) to see what will be covered. The final workshop will be around 2.5 hours duration. Soon I’ll be posting Part 1: The Design, which will show you the finished animation and give you insight into the design of the graphics.

Here’s a quick promo I just completed for Main Event Pay-Per-View. As is often the case, I was given the edited promo in 4×3 frame aspect ratio that needed to be converted to 16:9. That was done using a combination of scaling footage and mirroring the left and right sides. The mirroring is hidden using blur and a soft feathered mask applied to an adjustment layer. The overall color grade was done in Magic Bullet Looks but to add some interest I rendered the graded movie as a Quicktime, imported it into Photoshop CS3 Extended, applied the Halftone filter, rendered that, imported it back into After Effects and mixed it in with the graded footage. Zaxwerks ProAnimator was used for the 3D text. Take a look at the Quicktime movie (11MB), which shows the supplied promo base and the finished graphics. There’s a big space at the bottom of the packshot (at the end) to allow room for various details, which are added later in the edit suite.

This week I was asked to create some graphics for Alien Vs Predator 2 on Foxtel Box Office. I got some inspiration from the opening title sequence for AVP, where the Predator-style text is “decoded” into English. The HUD (heads-up display) was created using pro-emitters from ParticleIllusion, rendered as Quicktime movies and combined with Trapcode Form – pixelated using After Effects’ Mosaic effect. The alien font is a rough version of the actual font that appears on the self-destruct device in the Predator films, and the English font is “Stainless”. The glows, blurs, scanlines, distortion and noise were created using multiple adjustment layers (green layers). Adjustment layers are a great tool for layering effects over multiple layers. Check out a large image here and a Quicktime example here (10MB). Let me know if you have any questions.

The introduction lessons for MILG 1, 2 and 3 are now available for free download. If you haven’t yet purchased these training titles, these movies will give you a detailed overview of the content of each these great After Effects workshops.
MILG 1 Introduction (19MB)
MILG 2 Introduction (34.9MB)
MILG 3 Introduction (36.8MB)

Many of you have been asking when Making It Look Great 4 will be released and the answer is soon. Here are a couple of screen shots from the animation I’ll be walking through in this over 2 hour workshop:MILG04 Shot 1, MILG04 Shot 2

As my first post on Motionworks I wanted to throw a question to the forum, regarding rendering in After Effects. All of us whether students, enthusiasts, professionals or aspiring pro’s need to render.

In my work place rendering is split between approval files (emailable files) and final exports (for quality checks and final renders). My work generally entails the creation of motion menus and transition’s for various DVD projects.

Generally for Emailable files I have been using the JPEG2000 setting, dropping the comp resolution to half resolution at 50% display size, in the export settings I tend to drop the quality down to low - generally this creates a file that still preserves a good quality resolution and is generally small enough (duration permitting).

For final renders and test renders I export Uncompressed Quicktimes, at the highest resolution settings, the biggest draw back here is that the files are very large - 1 Minute quicktimes end up being anywhere between 1 to 4 gigs, longer renders (4 minutes) can create monster files - 15 Gigs in some instances.

I wanted to throw this topic open to the Motionworks community in an attempt to learn more about other peoples preferred render settings for creating small file size renders (for emailing) and final exports, are there any options nestled away in the export settings that are hidden gems and that you cant live without and help speed these things up?

Jonathan

Some of you might have heard that Red Giant Software has released Magic Bullet Looks - a new plugin that is supposed to change the way we do color correction. Well haven’t we heard that a lot throughout the years… My name is Jerzy Drozda Jr (aka Maltaannon) and I am very skeptical about “magical” and “out-of-the-box” solutions. Preview releases from the Magic Bullet Series did not impress me very much. It was just a bunch of presets that were hard to manage and not very flexible - therefore useless. If I hadn’t try MB Looks on my own I would regret it for the rest of my days. (more…)

Here’s another stop-motion style animation, this time using flip books. Very Cool.

Trapcode’s upcoming release ”Horizon” is a camera-aware color gradient and image mapping plug-in for Adobe After Effects.
It’s a straightforward utility plug-in generating a background that corresponds to the After Effects camera’s viewing direction. The camera position has no influence on Horizon, you could say it always uses an infinite distance to the camera. It does this by creating an infinitely large sphere (that can be mapped with color gradients or an image map) and it renders what the camera sees on the inside of this giant sphere. Take a look at these amazing examples that combine Trapcode Particular with Trapcode Horizon: Example 1, Example 2, Example 3. This is a must-have plug-in if you do any kind of 3D animation inside Adobe After Effects.

Great news. Harry Frank has just released a free video tutorial that teaches you how to use ProAnimator rather than 3D Invigorator in his fine Making It Look Great™ 3 video workshop. So those of you who use ProAnimator can take advantage of this great training. Even if you don’t use ProAnimator this tutorial is worth a look.

A breathtaking example of stop motion photography. Quite amazing and strangely hypnotic.

This starry background is based on a starfield preset included with Trapcode Particular. You can grab the After Effects CS3 project here.

I stumbled across a review about Twixtor by Marco Solorio at creativecow.net and I was excited about the capabilities of this After Effects plugin.

Twixtor enables you to speed up, slow down or frame rate convert your image sequences with visually stunning results. Twixtor 4.5 introduces a complete rewrite of its tracking.
It’s much more accurate, tracks objects farther, and exhibits fewer artifacts when there are objects crossing in the scene. This means less tearing and stretching of objects as they cross or go out of the frame.

I downloaded the demo and so far I am simply thrilled with the outcome on some footage I tested it on. But since I am a freelance mograph artist and don’t have a production house purchasing plug-ins for me, I was hoping to find a few others who are using it and hear what they have to say.

What about you? Have you used Twixtor? What do you think? Do you use another solution?

-Greg

Here’s a Quicktime movie (8MB) of the finished Saw 4 promo graphics. As mentioned in the Grungy Text tutorial, all images were sourced from StockXchang. All animation was done in After Effects, with the flickering text created using one of Harry Frank’s awesome expressions.

This week I’ve been working a lot in Photoshop preparing graphics for a promo, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you the technique I used for creating some grungy text. Check out the 11 minute video tutorial. Have fun.