My job as a volunteer was to assist the multimedia students with titles for their videos along with various design jobs for the behind-the-scenes workshop video.

Here is a highlight reel of some of my work this year produced over two and a half days starting with the WKU and workshop front bumper and ending with the full Mountain Workshops end bumper logo. The 3d logo was created in Cinema 4d and all motion graphics animation was done in After Effects. Enjoy!

You can see more multimedia stories from this year’s workshop here along with this behind-the-scenes workshop video produced by Tim Broekema:

Mocha is a really nice tracking tool, but when you first open the app the interface can be a bit intimidating in that it looks nothing like what you’re used to if you’re used to After Effects.

Mocha is not a 3d camera tracker, but instead it’s strength is a method of 2.5d tracking known as planar tracking. It’s far superior than AE’s built in point tracking, it’s more accurate, can deal with motion blur and doesn’t always stumble when one of the tracking points ventures off screen or out of the camera’s view.

Here are some samples I worked up yesterday while studying how to use Mocha AE. In these examples I took some handheld HD footage of a picture frame and comped in a photo of my good friend Indiana Jones. Before shooting the source footage, I removed the actual photo from the frame and inserted a piece of black paper. This way, once I track the footage and add in the new photo, I can set the transfer mode of the photo to screen thus preserving the original reflections in the glass. This subtle effect goes a long way in increasing the realism of the comp.

At the start of each example you will see a few seconds of the original source footage, then a wipe to reveal the final comp.

The top shot featuring the empty hallway worked quite easily with default settings. The 2nd clip feature the school children walking down the hall way worked fine, but the synthesize edges functionality really struggled to generate clean edges.

This video is very rough and comprises just a few simple shots of my kids around the kitchen table. The first thing I discovered is that I needed to choose a few different wheels. I had a set of 8 wheels that I pulled from an old set of roller blades that I bought at a local thrift store for $4. Of the first four that I put on the dolly, two of them had little flat spots, probably from the original owner skidding to a stop. Also, I need to apply some WD-40 to the wheel bearings to loosen them up and allow them to spin more smoothly.

In the video you will notice the slight shake when the dolly rolls over those flat spots. Last night I did try out some different wheels and it is smoother. I will try to shoot an updated video soon. Also, I have plans for a simple, inexpensive, track system that I want build.

UPDATED: Here are two MP3′s of the songs we recorded that day: Queen of the Holy Rosary and Cheer for Holy Rosary.

This is a short proof-of-concept that was put together rather quickly to use as a title and chapter divider for an internal corporate video. It didn’t get used, but I thought it had some fun little elements like the train routes and station names.

It has some neat history about the film community there and plenty of interviews with the major players.

Following along with this tutorial from C4D Cafe, I inverted the gravity to make the balloon (in this case, still just a stand-in pyramid) fly up.

Here’s a recent motion graphics title project that I completed for my #1 client: my son’s Cub Scout pack! Not only am I the cubmaster of Pack 84, but I’m also the self-appointed “video guy” ready to photograph and document all of our big events. Of course that also includes our annual pinewood derby, held just last week.

This piece is meant to play on the idea of personalization that is a part of every car that a scout builds with his family. To that end, I designed about 15 different car shapes in Illustrator based on some real and imagined pinewood cars. Those shapes I brought into After Effects and used as alpha mattes on a nice stock image of polished steel.

You can watch the complete video here.

The fall was animated by passing a plane effector over the fractured wood object. Finally, the rendered frames were taken into After Effects where I added the saw dust, smoke and spark effects using Particular. In C4D, I animated a null over a spline path then used an external compositing tag so I can use that null in AE to drive the particular emitter.