I’ve been incredibly busy lately and the bad part of that is that most of the projects I’ve been working at Sequence are under NDA [Non Disclosure Agreements] which sucks because I have no projects to blog about, until now!
Our latest project, a series of 10 episodes divided into 5 chapters of Batman: Black & White, a 4-issue limited series of comics published in 1996 were released a couple weeks ago on the US iTunes store, hopefully soon to be available worlwide.
Here’s the Press Release by Warner: “The “Batman: Black & White” stories are told from the perspective of Batman and range in theme from the unsettling drama of solving a brutal murder to the light comedy of fighting bad guys with a broken nose. These short episodes also touch on elements of romance, mystery and even the supernatural. And like any exciting Batman story, classic villains such as The Joker, Harley Quinn and Two-Face make heralded appearances. It’s Batman as seen through the prism of some of today’s most eloquent graphic artists and writers.”
At the beginning of the day we got a brief: to create a motion piece showing a different version of the famous case of the hatchet murders that occurred in New England in the late 1920’s. Everything from concept to delivery had to be done in under eight hours.
Leading my team to find less obvious solutions, we focused on giving the message the time it needed to be compelling; when we got out of our initial pitch meeting we convinced the panel that we got the most compelling story. When we presented our piece, we won both the audience and the judge’s choice awards.
This is my first experiment using the dynamics module of Cinema 4d. dynamics is a module that recreates real life physics, such as gravity and wind. In this experiment I have two cubes at a certain height, that I then drop by the magic of gravity and a little bit of wind.
The trickiest part was to merge all of the elements of each cube into one single object. This is because dynamics only work with single editable objects. So I modeled everything separate, then merge everything in steps, starting with the extruded type, and then the same type with the cube.
Mograph is, in the words of one of my instructors, Cinema4d’s “Do Cool Shit Button”. Because with the minimum knowledge of Mograph you can do some crazy cool stuff with it. This experiment features Mograph’s most basic object; the Cloner Object, which as you might’ve imagined it creates copies of an instance.
Using the Cloner Object and the Random Effector, which scatters all of the clones randomly according to the values that you input. I created a small animation of letters that cluster around typography.
The bar is rising, now I am using all of the above plus the Sound Effector, which means that the animation parameters that I input will be in sync with the music that you load on the application. Giving you something worth watching almost instantaneously.
Nesting, that’s the important term here, I placed two Cloner Objects that each animate a wheel, inside of a Cloner Object that animates the whole bike. Then I exported everything to After Effects and added the little tittle on the far lower right corner.
Cloth, it took me a couple days to figure it out, and for the most part it was quite easy. The big problem was, there’s almost no documentation online; all they have is “throw a cloth on a cube” Which is kinda cool when you are starting out, but not enough when you are actually trying to accomplish something.
So I started fooling around with Clothilde, the Cloth Engine of Cinema4d, and as I mentioned before, the only tutorial online was the let’s throw a cloth on a cube.
Then I started to fool around with the physics of the engine, wind, resistance, flexibility, you name it. As a side-note, it took me almost a day to figure out how to wrap something with the cloth before the animation started, in other words, the initial position. If you ever encounter the same problem, all you have to do is go to the Dresser tab and click the “Relax” button, after that click “Set” on the Init Position Area.
And later on, I worked on an animation that featured everything that I learned on the Cloth engine.
Here is some of my experimentation with cameras in 3d. Nothing too crazy yet. I haven’t been experimented enough on this area, but I think it’s worth showing.
My first attempt to cameras was a target camera on a freehand spline, which means that I drew a line by hand and then attached a camera to it, what target camera means, is that no matter what the focus point of the camera will always be the water bottle.
Continuing the idea of cameras on splines, I created this quick logo bumper. Although instead of a freehand line, this is a circle, which gives it a more controlled and smooth movement.
Here’s my Motion Graphics II final project piece, it revolved around the whole blue-screen concept as I talked about a while ago, but I’ve been crazy busy and I just found some time to update the blog.
This movie’s concept revolves around an abstract version of creative thinking, from the overused yet effective gear moving representing thinking, to a quite abstract journey of a guy trying to come out with an idea, and the final idea was the concept of what an idea is.
The major challenge was the time factor, I had my storyboards ready to go but some areas of the movie took much longer than I expected, and after a few sleepless nights I finished something that kinda made sense, if explained, which wasn’t the intention, but by the end of term due to a not well organized self-schedule I ended up trying to make major fixes a couple days before it was due, sound being one of them. I’m quite happy with the output though, and this term I organized myself better in order to give each one of the projects the time they deserve.
It’s been a while since I write something, mostly because I was out of the country, and second because I’ve been quite busy with projects, anyway I found a space to write about what I think was the highlight from last term’s blue screen project.
The brief stated that we needed to create a motion graphics piece incorporating blue screen footage and computer generated (CG) graphics, I personaly think the project could’ve been better, I didn’t structure my work as good as I thought and ended up trying to develop my concept out of the media I had created so far, I think visually it looks good, but the concept is in a way shouting for help.
Though I think it was a success, because thanks to this I realized that what drives me the most is creating graphics, environments where graphics, or in this case footage, can come to life and transport people to a different place.
The highlight of this project was this image, I think this image gave me a step forward on finding my own style as a designer, I like playing with textures and shapes, and this illustration helped me go a little further into this style, not a style for everything that I will do but rather something that I will use when I design personal stuff, or when necessary for a client.
*I’m having some difficulties with the sound of the video, I will post it as soon as I fix that.
Term two, the brief for the first assignment for Motion Design II arrives, create a 20 seconds character animation with a voice-over.
I took my little doodles from my sketchbook put them in Illustrator and there it was, Me… well a childish almost girly version of me, reason why the voice-over is my fellow mexican classmate Jadyn. I’m not saying much but the fact that I wanted to make it as minimal and clean as possible, and give it the Sesame Street kinda feeling with the sound effects.
I was going through my Foundation stuff and found this, my first Motion Graphics Project. This project had two goals to deliver, me going a little more in depth with after effects and try to create something that could be a portfolio piece.
I got a hold of After Effects quicker thanks to this project, so that goal was reached and the other one, well, personally I don’t mid showing this to people so I think I covered it as well, but see for yourself.
I’m going to finalize this series of posts with my Foundation Final Project, why? Because it contains some of the work I wrote about on the reminiscent series, it also contains other previous projects I worked on.
This piece was developed with the intention to serve as an intro to a client, job interview, it’s fast-paced essence would quickly showcase some of the work I’ve done, with a brief explanation of the problem and the solution given.
