Now I understand why everyone uses Cinema 4D in their workflow for motion graphics! :)
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
A Taste
Yesterday I sat down with some fresh ideas and some new learning bits to design the new Fusion teaser promo. I decided once and for all to tackle Cinema 4D, and besides the camera controls being completely wacked up compared to 3DS Max, it's a really intuitive program. From what I understood of 3DS Max, I was able to really easily create results like this below:
Now I understand why everyone uses Cinema 4D in their workflow for motion graphics! :)
Now I understand why everyone uses Cinema 4D in their workflow for motion graphics! :)
Monday, April 26, 2010
Green Light
Finally an update on the Fusion Comcast station. We have been given the green light, and will sign the contract this week. After that is when the content creation begins. The station's official go-live date is not yet set, but I think it's sometime in early June.
May 10th - Fusion Dance TV teaser ad due for comcast airing around May 17th.
May 24th - First group of content, shorts and intros for locally produced video.
June 7th - Final phase begins, largeer group of content and new content due every two weeks after.
I will be given credit on Fusion's website and in the locally produced content as the "Video Graphic Designer", and with future compensation and perks dependant on the success of the channel. I will be given creative freedom over all content, and most of it will involve quick intros and outros to videos recorded in their studio (a la artist interviews, DJ promos, and events). Plus, they want to change the design pretty frequently, every couple of months or so to keep things fresh.
Wow, that's quite a bit of work. I was looking for additional freelance positions, but this is going to take up most of my time. And doing it pro-bono is a little disappointing, but I know I have to start somewhere and this is a great place to be!
The future is like a mystery box, who knows what's in it! Maybe... NOTHING!!! :)
May 10th - Fusion Dance TV teaser ad due for comcast airing around May 17th.
May 24th - First group of content, shorts and intros for locally produced video.
June 7th - Final phase begins, largeer group of content and new content due every two weeks after.
I will be given credit on Fusion's website and in the locally produced content as the "Video Graphic Designer", and with future compensation and perks dependant on the success of the channel. I will be given creative freedom over all content, and most of it will involve quick intros and outros to videos recorded in their studio (a la artist interviews, DJ promos, and events). Plus, they want to change the design pretty frequently, every couple of months or so to keep things fresh.
Wow, that's quite a bit of work. I was looking for additional freelance positions, but this is going to take up most of my time. And doing it pro-bono is a little disappointing, but I know I have to start somewhere and this is a great place to be!
The future is like a mystery box, who knows what's in it! Maybe... NOTHING!!! :)
Friday, April 16, 2010
Best royalty free music
This is probably the best $80 investment that I've ever made. What's better than great soundtrack music? Royalty-free soundtrack music!
Digital Juice has a special offer going on now, where you can get any 5 of their StackTraxx volumes for $80. Their StackTraxx arent just a collection of great musical scores, they're layered musical scores, and you use their proprietary program to build tracks and then render them out as WAVs to use them in any program you want. At $80, it's a massive steal.
In an effort to save time and money, most studios, even the big name ones like ABC, NBC, FOX, etc. all use pre-produced music in which they have purchased the rights to use in their production.
Hell, I've even seen many movies use musical tracks that were produced for other movies in the past. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the musical repetior of Gladiator in many commercials, promos, and other movies.
It's a good feeling to have a full library of musical scores that can fit whatever it is I am working on.
Digital Juice has a special offer going on now, where you can get any 5 of their StackTraxx volumes for $80. Their StackTraxx arent just a collection of great musical scores, they're layered musical scores, and you use their proprietary program to build tracks and then render them out as WAVs to use them in any program you want. At $80, it's a massive steal.
In an effort to save time and money, most studios, even the big name ones like ABC, NBC, FOX, etc. all use pre-produced music in which they have purchased the rights to use in their production.
Hell, I've even seen many movies use musical tracks that were produced for other movies in the past. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the musical repetior of Gladiator in many commercials, promos, and other movies.
It's a good feeling to have a full library of musical scores that can fit whatever it is I am working on.
Monday, April 12, 2010
1/2 of the reasons why I love this field
New toys... simple, that's probably the biggest reason why I love the computer field, and especially Motion Graphics. Today, I've been reading about all the new goodies found in After Effects CS5 as well as the rest of the suite.
Besides the entire platform going to 64-bit ONLY, and significantly increasing multiprocessing speeds, there are some nifty plugins and new render engines that I look forward to playing with.
The one thing that is biggest on my list of new features is hardware assist rendering. This enables big projects in Premiere Pro CS5 to playback real-time without having to render!! I've seen it in action and it's amazing to say the least. That alone pretty much makes the upgrade worthwhile! The problem is that the new render engine only supports CUDA, which is an NVidia GPL only found on their GeForce and Quadro line. This sucks because I just recently made the switch to ATI in hopes that their OpenCL would be supported considering CUDA wasn't supported in the last 3 versions of Adobe CS, boy was I wrong, and it's going to cost me. Aparently a lot of other people fell into this trap as well.
Notable Features:
64-bit: For obvious reasons, being able to address ALL of available memory is a huge plus, and with most of the After Effects core being rewritten for 64-bit, it looks to significantly reduce crashing as well as increase speed and productivity, joy!
Roto Brush: A cool tool to dynamically define foreground (rotoscope brush) and background (alpha channel). While not perfect, it will significantly assist in the creation of rotoscope mattes!
Digieffects FreeForm: Once a 3rd party commercial plugin, now a bundled tool within AE, able to arbitrarily warp layers within 3D space and use other layers as extrusion mattes. Finally able to create some 3D text, among other things, that look MORE like 3D instead of having to create several layers that only LOOK 3D from the front.
Adobe Repoussé: This has definately cropped my eye. An interesting tool in Photoshop for extruding and inflating selections, and then importing directly into AE while also using the Photoshop Live engine so that we can interact with the 3D layer in AE just like Photoshop, pretty cool. I still havn't delved into the 3D support that Photoshop has to offer, it seems pretty limited to me, but this might just give me the motivation to do so.
Color Finesse 3: Another valued 3rd party commercial plugin now bundled with After Effects. Allows greater control over color, saturation, vibrance control, and ability to export Color Look Up Tables. I luffles color control.
Integrated RED R3D support: While I have vivid, heavenly day-dreams of having $25k to buy a RED camera, this is cool to know.
Vibrance: A new effect to better increase saturation in footage. Increasing saturation gave much more color but also removed details, it was kind of a love-hate relationship, look forward to this one.
Black & White: Another effect from Photoshop to better control colors (Not just black and white), offers control over individual colors in highlights, middtones, shadow and much more.
Two new blending modes Subtract and Divide: I always had issues trying to apply alpha mattes, never could get it right on the first go, subtract should help a lot with that, as well as other cool effects too. Divide takes a colored layer and when applied to another layer, creates a middle-ground between that picture/video and the solid color. This provides much more accurate color-blending.
Besides the entire platform going to 64-bit ONLY, and significantly increasing multiprocessing speeds, there are some nifty plugins and new render engines that I look forward to playing with.
The one thing that is biggest on my list of new features is hardware assist rendering. This enables big projects in Premiere Pro CS5 to playback real-time without having to render!! I've seen it in action and it's amazing to say the least. That alone pretty much makes the upgrade worthwhile! The problem is that the new render engine only supports CUDA, which is an NVidia GPL only found on their GeForce and Quadro line. This sucks because I just recently made the switch to ATI in hopes that their OpenCL would be supported considering CUDA wasn't supported in the last 3 versions of Adobe CS, boy was I wrong, and it's going to cost me. Aparently a lot of other people fell into this trap as well.
Notable Features:
64-bit: For obvious reasons, being able to address ALL of available memory is a huge plus, and with most of the After Effects core being rewritten for 64-bit, it looks to significantly reduce crashing as well as increase speed and productivity, joy!
Roto Brush: A cool tool to dynamically define foreground (rotoscope brush) and background (alpha channel). While not perfect, it will significantly assist in the creation of rotoscope mattes!
Digieffects FreeForm: Once a 3rd party commercial plugin, now a bundled tool within AE, able to arbitrarily warp layers within 3D space and use other layers as extrusion mattes. Finally able to create some 3D text, among other things, that look MORE like 3D instead of having to create several layers that only LOOK 3D from the front.
Adobe Repoussé: This has definately cropped my eye. An interesting tool in Photoshop for extruding and inflating selections, and then importing directly into AE while also using the Photoshop Live engine so that we can interact with the 3D layer in AE just like Photoshop, pretty cool. I still havn't delved into the 3D support that Photoshop has to offer, it seems pretty limited to me, but this might just give me the motivation to do so.
Color Finesse 3: Another valued 3rd party commercial plugin now bundled with After Effects. Allows greater control over color, saturation, vibrance control, and ability to export Color Look Up Tables. I luffles color control.
Integrated RED R3D support: While I have vivid, heavenly day-dreams of having $25k to buy a RED camera, this is cool to know.
Vibrance: A new effect to better increase saturation in footage. Increasing saturation gave much more color but also removed details, it was kind of a love-hate relationship, look forward to this one.
Black & White: Another effect from Photoshop to better control colors (Not just black and white), offers control over individual colors in highlights, middtones, shadow and much more.
Two new blending modes Subtract and Divide: I always had issues trying to apply alpha mattes, never could get it right on the first go, subtract should help a lot with that, as well as other cool effects too. Divide takes a colored layer and when applied to another layer, creates a middle-ground between that picture/video and the solid color. This provides much more accurate color-blending.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Seal the Deal...
Well, it's just about a done deal right now. All that's pending are signed contracts to get started on building the Comcast music station.
Most of my designs for the Fusion promo videos will be used for the station graphics, which means that there isn't a whole lot that needs to be done on the design side. But there will definately be a lot more creating new videos using those designs and assets. I need to build a library of readily accessible assets to be used in any new videos, these will enable me to cut down on render times and decrease my turnaround time significantly.
Late Teusday night, there was a rush of excited texting from the marketing manager at Fusion congratulating everyone, and he asked me if they can announce my official "coming on board" to everyone.
This is really new to me. I know that I've become their official Motion Graphics Designer, but what about when the revenue starts to come it? What do I charge? How do I negotiate my fee? Is it a percentage? A set rate based on the project? All these things make me feel like I've coasted off the deep end.
Making money in this field is something that I really look forward to, but am I ready to do it now? I'm still learning the ropes, coming to grips with new ideas vs reality, and working things out in my head before I create my first composition.
And everyone has their own opinions on what to charge, so going by someone else's experience (which would be in a different market, different time, different experience, different everything) is not a good idea. So I have to learn as I go and see where I end up.
Most of my designs for the Fusion promo videos will be used for the station graphics, which means that there isn't a whole lot that needs to be done on the design side. But there will definately be a lot more creating new videos using those designs and assets. I need to build a library of readily accessible assets to be used in any new videos, these will enable me to cut down on render times and decrease my turnaround time significantly.
Late Teusday night, there was a rush of excited texting from the marketing manager at Fusion congratulating everyone, and he asked me if they can announce my official "coming on board" to everyone.
This is really new to me. I know that I've become their official Motion Graphics Designer, but what about when the revenue starts to come it? What do I charge? How do I negotiate my fee? Is it a percentage? A set rate based on the project? All these things make me feel like I've coasted off the deep end.
Making money in this field is something that I really look forward to, but am I ready to do it now? I'm still learning the ropes, coming to grips with new ideas vs reality, and working things out in my head before I create my first composition.
And everyone has their own opinions on what to charge, so going by someone else's experience (which would be in a different market, different time, different experience, different everything) is not a good idea. So I have to learn as I go and see where I end up.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Done!
Sitting with the crew from Fusion, going over last minute changes, in the middle of a breast cancer fundraiser on the 95th floor of the Hancock building (The Signature Lounge), we finally ironed everything out.
It wasn't all work; during some of my many long renders that night, I was able to get up and enjoy the view of Chicago, and the really tasty h'orderves. Fusion Radio was there to host the event with live music, raffle events, and just random sillyness from the DJ.
So, I tagged along and worked through the night to finish all the videos for their presentation to Comcast on Teusday. I was able to finish my Earth Zoom animation that turned into my biggest project yet, and everything together it was about 3 minutes worth of animation.
So, project recap, what did I learn?
-Stick to "their" guns, not "my" guns!
-Even though I had two weeks to work on this project which was plenty of time, I kept the mindset that I didn't have enough time from the beginning. This really helped my time management, and kept the project moving along quite nicely.
-I fell in love with parts of my work, and they wanted to change it. I was a little upset, so I still have to work on selling myself and not my work.
-Plan ahead for rendering parts of an animation seperately and bring them together in the end.
-Create assets and designs to be used again in future work for the same project.
If Fusion gets the Comcast Music Channel, then there will be a LOT more work for me, plus it will be an incredible addition to my resume!
It wasn't all work; during some of my many long renders that night, I was able to get up and enjoy the view of Chicago, and the really tasty h'orderves. Fusion Radio was there to host the event with live music, raffle events, and just random sillyness from the DJ.
So, I tagged along and worked through the night to finish all the videos for their presentation to Comcast on Teusday. I was able to finish my Earth Zoom animation that turned into my biggest project yet, and everything together it was about 3 minutes worth of animation.
So, project recap, what did I learn?
-Stick to "their" guns, not "my" guns!
-Even though I had two weeks to work on this project which was plenty of time, I kept the mindset that I didn't have enough time from the beginning. This really helped my time management, and kept the project moving along quite nicely.
-I fell in love with parts of my work, and they wanted to change it. I was a little upset, so I still have to work on selling myself and not my work.
-Plan ahead for rendering parts of an animation seperately and bring them together in the end.
-Create assets and designs to be used again in future work for the same project.
If Fusion gets the Comcast Music Channel, then there will be a LOT more work for me, plus it will be an incredible addition to my resume!
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