Palladia

This piece, which I based loosely on an animation concept I developed months ago, took about three days from start to finish. I shot it at 20fps in 1080p with my friend’s Canon T1i, and then used frame blending to stretch it out to 24fps. The effects shots were tracked using PFTrack and exported out to After Effects where the animated elements were created and composited. The song is called “Your Mouth” by Telafon Tel Aviv. If you’d like to see how I created the animated elements for this piece, feel free to check out the tutorial I wrote on the subject for AETuts Plus.

Icarus

This is the opener to a fictitious television show I created called Icarus. It was done as part of a class assignment where we had to design a broadcast graphics package for a television show.

Music: “Shine” by Ulrich Schnauss

War

This was done as my last assignment for advanced motion graphics! The idea was simply to move the visuals to the music. It took about two days from start to finish. Music: “Tales From the Pigs” by Teenage Bad Girl.

Diesel

While this may not be the most polished piece of work I’ve uploaded here, it’s not without a lot of ambition. A week and a half from start to finish! And I’ve never animated a stitch of 3d in my life… well… a little. Not to mention, integrating 2d elements. wow! Anyway, all the modeling and 3d animation was done in Modo 302. And the compositing and effects were added in After Effects CS4. As far as the subject of the ad itself… this was a “trans-demographic” project. Meaning I had to sell a product to a group of people of whom I was not a member. So I chose to sell something to the ladies.

Music: “Love Is an Unfamiliar Name” by The Duke Spirit.

Anime Explosion

I’m not a huge anime fan or anything, but lately I realized that I like the treatment of light within the genre, so I thought I’d give a classic anime explosion a try.

Nike id

For the past two months I’ve been developing this three part ad series for Nike as a student project at Full Sail University. The ads are nebulous by design, and are simply meant to provoke interest in Nike’s design personalization service called NIKE iD. The imagery is meant to show a person looking at an unknown, yet desirable object. The person tries to reach out their hand take hold of it but it manifests itself as a shoe. Again, this is not meant to make immediate sense to the viewer, it’s simply meant to provoke interest in what Nike is doing. I feel like I had the freedom to do this in no small part to the strength of Nike’s brand. This is also why I abstained from providing any additional information like a web address. On a technical note, this was shot completely in front of a blue screen. All of the 3D modeling was done using Modo 302 and the compositing and additional effects were added using After Effects CS4 and a third party plug in called Trapcode Particular. I’d like to thank my three actors: Lenox Cruthers, Liz Kandel (My wife) and Atanas Djibirov. I’d also like to thank Mike Bennett and Kristian Zabala for their work as grips even though that’s way below their abilities. Also, the music was composed by Craig Armstrong, one of my favorite composers.

Take a look at this side by side comparison of the storyboards, blue screen and final edit and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Valentine’s Day

This is a freelance piece I was hired to do last week for a nonprofit in Indiana called Community Marriage Builders. The only thing I didn’t do on this was write the copy… or the music for that matter.

Six Million Dollar Vitruvian Man

The idea for this little retro masterpiece was to advertise MTV HD by drawing a comparison between that and the six million dollar man. HD is better, faster and stronger right? Any way, I’ll probably tweak this a little bit down the road. Mainly because we were limited to working within 2D space for this project, and I have a few ideas to spice it up a bit with 3D camera moves and what not. Any way, hope you like it.

Music: “Go Back” by Le Castle Vania

Geometrika

This is my bumper for motion graphics at Full Sail University. We were limited to working within 2D space and using only keyframing, color correction and blur effects. The assets were created in Illustrator and animated in After Effects.

Music: “Bring It On” by Steve Aoki

After Effects: Bumper Two

So this may not seem like much… but it was actually kind of difficult… at least for a motion graphics noob like me. The easiest thing (conceptually) to make, while testing new techniques, is a bumper, so I’ll probably be making quite a few of these little self promotions. One word about this little piece is that it’s a milestone for me because it’s the first After Effects piece I’ve assembled without standing on the shoulders of a tutorial… at least one that looked halfway decent… Yeah!