First Attempt at Rotoscoping
Tracking Done With Mocha For After Effects
And Rotoscoping In After Effects

This is a 1080p shot full screen it for all its glory

you can download the preset [here]

read Robert Leger’s blog post about his pluging [here]

view a tutorial about the plugin [here]

Original Pixels Animation if you did infact spend the last few weeks  under a rock.

New York invasion by 8-bits creatures !
PIXELS is Patrick Jean’ latest short film, shot on location in New York.

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean
Director of Photograhy : Matias Boucard
SFX by Patrick Jean and guests
Produced by One More Production

www.onemoreprod.com

[Register Here]

I am going to break down every App and tell you what i like about it and such and hope as always this information will be useful in your daily work flow.

Effect Editor – Peacock

I am starting with this App first because I am so amazed with what Peacock is. Peacock is a Node Based Effects Editor for the common man, AND IT IS FREE. A while back the great flocks at dvGarage brought the power of node based image editing to Photoshop in the form of a plug-in called conduit, today The great people of Aviary gave us Peacock.

Image Editor – Phoenix

Phoenix is basically a online version of Photoshop nothing much to tell all the standard futures all thou one thing in particular  my attention and that was the fact that you could make a peacock layer in phoenix kind of like dynamic link layers in after effect and Photoshop orPremier

Audio Editor – Myna

Myna is my second Favorite after Peacock its a fully functional audio editor. You can record tracks right into the web app you can save sessions and even export wave mixdowns. The interface reminds me of audacity a bit but it has functional short cut keys and space bar is play and stop like mostly common in this type of app

There is a lot more that the Aviary Tool set can offer you They have a Color suite similar to Adobe kuler and a Vector App and a simple version of there image app. Go and Check them out you wont regret it

www.aviary.com

The links for Series 2 (covering compositing, keying, tracking, paint, and rotoscoping presented by Ron Brinkmann, Stu Maschwitz, and Scott Stewart) are below; watch them while you can:

Masters of Visual Effects 2.1 – Compositing Concepts 1 from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.2 – Composting Concepts 2 from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.3 – Keying from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.4 – Tracking from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.5 – Paint from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

Masters of Visual Effects 2.6 – Rotoscoping from Matt Silverman on Vimeo.

from VideoPro Coalition

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects
are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.

Credits:

CG

|Modelling – Texturing – Illumination – Rendering| Alex Roman

POST

|Postproduction & Editing| Alex Roman

MUSIC

Sequenced, Orchestrated & Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP)

Sound Design by Alex Roman

Based on original scores by:

.Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure)
.Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux)

Directed by Alex Roman

Done with 3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.

EDIT: Original MP4 torrent if you’re interested. Thanks to Brennan

temporarygate.com/TheThird&TheSeventh.mp4.torrent

thirdseventh.com/

Compositing Breakdown (T&S) from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Exeter Shot — Making Of from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

The VFX Show Podcast on AVATAR is a must [hear]

Avatar’s VFX Master: Weta Digital’s Joe Letteri interviews [here]

FXGuide Red Center : on the Cameron 3D camera [here]

For thous of you with much nerdiar tendencys like myself the movie was screened using RealD in Imax this wiki is very informative on the subject. Cinefex , the world leading print resource for anything VFX has a very in depth looks at this masterpiece you can pick up a copy (print or digital) [here]

that is all i got for now i will keep at it and will inform you when i come across new information

on a side note this probably wont ever happen but if Mr. Cameron ever reads this id like to say :

“Hello Sir, i wanted to tell you to keep making epic sagas that changes peoples lives and you have changed my life in siginficant way also if you happen to be hiring for the next bigest movie of all time i am your man. “

First let me apologize for not posting in a while,

<usual excuses> work has been crazy, no time , moving , packing and my building got hit by a meteor</usual excuses>.

Now that’s done with here is what’s new. I just wrapped up an animation project that was quite long, no mere 30 seconds or 1 min but a full 3min:40sec of motion graphics. Now in our Mograph world that is a lot, (too much in fact) and i noticed something very interesting; my animation is all the same. I don’t mean the look of my animation, i mean the way small background things behave, like having clouds animate in the background and using “wiggle.expression” to animate them instead of using  keyframes. Or when i animate fractal noise to drive a texture i just go in quick and dirty with a “time*45.expression” and leave . Now don’t get me wrong, these ways of animating have their place but here is where i came across my problem: when you have 30 seconds of sky and you throw a wiggle.expression on there and move on it works, but when you are looking at 4 min of sky all of the sudden you see the impersonal machine behavior of expressions. I started seeing  noticeable patterns for all my animations. All the little things i stopped doing like animating evaluation values or complexity and substituting it by the exact same time*15.expression.

Now it may very well be that i don’t know any other expressions so all of them look the same but i figured a computer has a set number of rules it works by and no matter how you dress it up it will end up using the same set of rules to apply it. So i set out to modify my project from machine driven monotone animation to something with a bit of personality, and let me tell you it was hard going from  this :

expression from Motionscript.com

to this:

But it was well worth it. My animation took on character and a life of its own. Which made me feel more accomplished (and much cooler).

I did not go to traditional animation school however and the core principals of the art was something i needed to understand well before i could apply them to my animation. Here are some of the resources i found and used to make a learning curve a bit less curvy (?), than it could have been.

A great 3 part article from fuelyourmotionography.com about everything that i just discussed, only written by some one much more experienced than i am.

Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3

Then i came across a very  interesting video by Nick Campbell form Grayscale Gorilla about how not to let your computer animate you.

The Death of the Keyframe – How expressions are making everything look the same from Nick Campbell on Vimeo.

And finally here is a beautiful sample of how manually key-framing your animation can give you 100 times better results

CRAZY ENOUGH – Title Sequence from Jr.canest on Vimeo.

Here are some of the keyframes on that video.

So the underlying point I’m trying to make is – sure you can go ahead and use the built in preset. We all can! But if you really want to stand out from the crowd it’s best to put in the effort to keyframe your animations. After all, nothing that looks awesome was easy to do

That’s all for this time folks. As always i hope that at least one person finds this useful in some way. If you like it, hate it or find it stupid please comment.

Cheers

Free Vector Packs:

Doodles :

[download]

Office :

[download]

Floral :

[download]

Vegetables :

[download]

Free Photoshop Brushes :

Splash :

[download]

Footprints :

[download]

Spaxio :

[download]

Grunge :

[download]

Circles :

[download]

Arrows :

[download]

Free Fonts :

Public Gothic :

[download]

Giro :

[download]

Textures :

[download]