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In honor of Earth Day, I bring you The Culmination of Consumptionism. Natsuki Kato is my former student and created this clever animation about plastic bags. I did bring my own bag to the grocery store this morning, as well as my own mug to snatch a free cup of coffee (no foam!).
Okay, back to the video... The V.O is by AJ Hamilton. Music: Lucas Schurkamp. Natsuki says "I got this idea from what my little sister Jenelle told me in a grocery store: 'I won't take any plastic bags so that I can save polar bears.' I am excited to see how far the message of the green organization at a high school in Bay City will go. My friend, A.J. did such a great job with the voice over by adding his humor based on a lot of info that I gave from my research."
The Red Giant/MyToolfarm NAB Contest submission was officially over earlier this week and we had several terrific entries. Because of a problem we had with our uploader, the entries were also collected via another method, so this is not every entry unfortunately. This will give you a good cross-section of what was entered and if the winning entry is not in this bunch, we will put it online. There were about 24 entries in total. There are some super talented designers and motion graphics artists out there. I was blown away by some of the entries.
For a video to qualify, they must use Trapcode Form or Magic Bullet Looks. The first place winner will receive a trip to NAB and present their project at the Red Giant Booth. The first and second runners up will receive software.
The official winners will be announced next week. The list below is in the order they were submitted from newest to oldest and is no indication of the winners.
I should also note that the star ratings are not accurate if you view at MyToolfarm, so please ignore them. I think they work fine, but I wonder if someone has come through and given them all low marks just to be funny. All of these videos deserve higher ratings than they've received. I'm going to look into this.
Wow. This is a very intense, super-freaky student project. Here's a short blurb:
"SMILE is an impressive 2005 student film by Yuval Markovich and Noam Abta produced at Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design in Jerusalem. Horror films are all too rare in animation, and this short does a solid job of building the tension and creating a mood of paranoia and uncertainty. Technically, it looks like the film was shot in live-action, with over sized CG heads placed on the live bodies. It's a surprisingly effective technique that adds to the film's uneasy mood."
This is "Animated Documentary-Mockumentary about Evil in western civilization from Ancient Greece to present day." It was animated frame by frame in Flash and composited and textured in After Effects. It was designed and animated by Ole-Magnus Saxegard as a student project. It is lots of fun. I really thought it would end with Dick Cheney ;-)
This music video was created by the multi-talented Yohan Daza, for his band D-Syfer. He's also the bands vocalist. This was his first big project in After Effects, which he mainly used, along with Lightwave. He used the Puppet Tool in AE CS3 to give his character organic movement. I love the style and flow of the video and it really matches the mood of the song. Is it because Yohan created the music and the video? I don't know, but I think it's terrific.
Oh, lack of sleep is a brain cell killer. I sat on this one for a full day because I couldn't find the MySpace embed link! After a good night's sleep, whaddaya know, I find it after literally 5 seconds.
I digress, The Skies Revolt is a West Michigan based Indie Rock outfit. Dave Prindle, the lead singer, is also a Kendall student. This was his first real After Effects project, which right there is mindblowing. This isn't the quality of projects you usually see for someones first run in AE. He said he had some friends show him how the program worked and the video took only a couple of weeks to make. He's an AE Prodigy ;-)
The video contains a part one and part two, which combine two different styles (like Justin Timberlake and other artists have done recently). The idea came to Dave when he was creating a flyer with scissors for arms and was shooting laser beams into a city. The style was inspired by Michele Gondry's 'The Science of Sleep', Wes Anderson's 'The Life Aquatic' and also a The Cribs 'Mirror Kisses' video.
Dave says, "I created the scenery and characters shapes in Illustrator and used Photoshop to add the textures. I used After Effects to arrange the scenes and Final Cut Pro to edit them together. I really liked using the cameras in After Effects to get more interesting angles. I liked using its color correction, too."
Real stories about first loves animated by hand and spoken by ponies and sharks. It's very cute. This was created by Julia Pott for her final film project at Kingston University. The music and sound design was done by Christopher Frost. It's just wonderful.
Natsuki Kato was in my class this semester and her work is incredible. This is Thumbelina, her final project. She went far beyond what I expected for the project. She literally had about a thousand layers. She made the children's clothes herself and shot the green screen herself (first time). She uses some really interesting techniques here that she developed herself. The voice over and music work really well with the imagery. She did a great job of setting the mood, which I think is one of the toughest parts of making a video.
No, the video is not perfect, but man, this girl is very talented and she is going to make it big some day. She plans to revise it and make it exactly as she wants it in the future, so I may possibly have a revised version posted to Inspirations.
Simple, yet complex. Really interesting... the kind you want to watch a few times. It was done by Paxson Woelber in his senior year at Middlebury College in Vermont. Very well done. And deep. Very deep. I hope he got an A.
A creative student-created 3D animation. It was their first project and the movement is a little slow for me (patience isn't a virtue that I embody), it is very creative and lots of fun.
Check out this Rube Goldberg 'Half-Life 2', which is amazing. The sound effects really help it out. They used a mod to make this one, not a 3D app.
I've been posting info here and there about Get Outta My Face - a non-profit org that teaches kids to eat well and to block out the corporate junk food ads and messages that we are bombarded with daily. GOMF is taking videos by students about nutrition and healthy lifestyles and putting them into this massive collection of videos. It's to raise awareness for what we all know is a huge problem in the US and elsewhere. They're still taking videos so if you're young enough to participate, please do! Or, help your kids make a video.
Winner of Best of Show and Best 72 hour shootout at BendFilm's Future Filmaker's Festival.
This video took 31 hours to make: 20.5 to film and 10.5 to edit.
They've done a lot of really cool hand drawn animations and some stop motion at the end. It's a great video.
The footage does look like a student project and is not very well lit, but the stop motion animation of the LEGO men is really well done and is pretty funny. The Lego guy tunneling into the burger bun is awesome! I enjoyed it very much. Nice work, Nicks.
A pretty impressive piece from Gill Biddle and Ross Phillips, second year animation students. They used After Effects and Flash, with stop motion and live action footage.
Paul Wood's Final Project for my class was another really interesting music video. It has a total futuristic outer-spacey feel to it, but also is very reminiscent of 80s new wave videos, with the space age girl, wearing a sliced up t-shirt on her head, and the strong video effects.
Paul shot footage of his girlfriend over a greenscreen and took the footage into Adobe Illustrator and performed Live Trace on the sequence. He composited with some 3D and effected the footage even more and combined this all with some experimental designs. He ended up with a really cool music video!
Me& The Moon's Things Aren't Always as They Seem music video was created by Chris Carmichael, a student that was in my class this semester. He shot, edited and did all of the effects and graphics. The only thing he didn't do was star in the video... the girl in the video is his younger sister.
Chris shot the band over a portable green screen one weekend this winter, and I must say, his footage was really dark and I was a bit worried that he would put hours of work into it and come out with a mediocre project. I was amazed at what a good looking video he made with that dark footage. Here and there there are a few issues with the key, but overall, the color effects and correction have fixed most of the dark footage. He compostited the keyed footage over stills of the woods and added some interesting luma mattes and vector paint effects. I was very pleased with the outcome of his project.
This guy is going to do very well in this field. Well played, Chris. Well played.
Unfortunately, the file size was gimungus, so I compressed it into a small file. I just don't feel like dealing with bandwidth issues this month.
We're looking for a few good animators, editors, students or even just fans of visual effects to contribute to this blog. Not HTML skills necessary, but a good eye for the most ground-breaking and rule-breaking techniques and styles out there. We want eye candy! Yes, we do.
Interested? Drop me an email and tell me why you should be considered. You would be expected to make one post per week, but you can post more, as long as they're quality videos. You're welcome to add your thoughts and opinions about the video, too.
The Animation Show is a travelling animation festival that features some unbelievably cool animations from traditional cell to computer animated. The one pictured to the left is Rabbit by Run Wrake. It's creative, although very violent. Collision by Max Hattler is kalidescopic and trippy Islamic patterns and American quilts mix with the colors and geometry of flags. Collision is an abstract field of reflection. City Paradise by Gaëlle Denis is a breathtaking mix of live action and 2D/3D. (Tomoko arrives to London from Japan and accidentally discovers a mysterious, secret city underground, inhabited by friendly little aliens and a beautiful blossom. After she's found it, everything changes… )
SCAD student Jarratt Moody created this Time-based Typography Project using this memorable scene from Samuel L. Jackson's character in the film Pulp Fiction.
This is definitely one of the nicest student showreels I have seen. This was done by Waldemar Borth, from Mannheim, Germany, and this showreel won an Animago award. Hey, congrats.
Students, take note... I teach at an art school, and many student reels are not very good. Yes, they try, and I don't want to be too cruel, but I see some recurring problems with the reels. Many are too long and repeat content, contain that is very amateurish, or looks exactly like something in an iPod commercial/Comedy Central ad/Green Day video. My advice? Be original and make your reel stand out. Make it personal. Put your best work on it. Keep it fresh. I wrote a short article on creating a proper demo reel if you're interested.
Waldemar does it right. The auto commercial and other content looks very professional, not like student work. He keeps it short. He even uses, I believe, original music. He shows a variety of styles, too. Nice work, Waldemar.
The Master Plan is a political commentary on the power of Google. The graphics are a mix of 2D and 3D and is inspired by What Barry Says.
Its a terrific video and interesting concept, but I do think they're a bit paranoid. Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you, right?
This piece comes from Dean Denell at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I envy students. At hand is a daily task to create for the sake of creating without borders, rules or clients. Especially here, where you'll see a mix of traditional animation, stop motion, clay, and motion graphics. Easily caught up in my "branding" and "image" projects, sometimes I lose focus on the 'fun' part. That's what I see here. I think Dean had fun with this.
Clik Clak was one of the student entries at the 2007 Chicago Motion Graphics Festival screening that I attended tonight. Very creative piece with a clever soundtrack and great animation. All that I really know about the piece was that it was created by French artists.
Harry's Note: This was a piece produced by 3 students at the animation school "Supinfocom" in France, which has produced some amazing work in the past, and is a regular recruiting pool for 3D animation studios around the world.
My After Effects students had their final projects due today. Heiner Twenhafel, a motion graphics student, created this phenomenal video. Yes, the footage is from a U2 concert and, no, he didn't shoot it, but the editing and the effects are timed perfectly and are absolutely captivating.
As Dewey Finn says, "One great rock show can change the world..." The other students in the class were darn lucky that Heiner showed his project last.
Another student project, this one is Burn Burn by Heiner Twenhafel. This is the text animation project and his timing and eye for clean, fast paced animation... I really think this guy is going places! He blew away the class and totally raised the bar for the next project.
If you're wondering, the song 'Burn Burn' by The Lost Prophets.
The assignment I gave my class was to use the advanced text engine in After Effects and animate :30 seconds. David Rigoli's 'Dr. Jr.' piece was one of my favorites.
All of the sections of the letters are letters themselves. He animated each either fully by hand or by modifying presets. He used 3 tracks of audio that he created himself. Not quite sure about the bubbles but David wanted to throw in something that you wouldn't expect to see and keep it fun.
Jim Geduldick sent me this very clever and funny video, Humans by Greg Gunn, Casey Hunt, Reza Rasoli of Otis College of Art & Design. The won 'Best of 2006' at the 2006 Global Student Animation Awards, announced August 22. Gunn, Hunt and Rasoli are collectively known as "Three Legged Legs", which have appeared in this inspirations section on a previous occasion... in otherwords, their work is amazing.
Dream Video by Seth Hay, another of my independent study students, came up with this amazing dream montage.
He spent literally 300 hours or more on this project and did everything himself, including the music. He took multiple shots of his friend, Alex, cut them out in Photoshop and put a tv on his head, with young little Seth featured in the video. He used some tutorials from the web and invented some new techniques, too.
Body Distortion was done by one of my students, Dru Nget. This is a ficticious movie title sequence that he did for an independent study in Adobe After Effects.
He shot ink dripping and splashing onto a glass that was level above the camera. He color corrected the footage and used it with the effect CC Blobbylize. He used Trapcode 3D Stroke on the arteries. Dru composed the music himself with Apple Soundtrack Pro.
I was really impressed by the beautiful flow and style of his project. If you like his work and have a position for an After Effects or Flash animator or web or print design, contact me.
The Culmination of Consumptionism by Natsuki Kato
