from on .

Apologies for the total lack of action around here recently– my work on final projects capping off the end of my first semester at Parsons ensured my hands were full at all times over the last month or so. At any rate, I’d like to share some of that work with you over the next couple days, there are some exciting things to show. Also, I have been mindful of my Best of 2010 lists practically all year, so that will be on the way as well. Anyway, without further adieu, here is the first project I submitted for Motion Graphics I (taken from my Parsons blog)

I don’t think I’ve ever logged so many hours in AfterEffects on a single project, but, pushed forward tenaciously by my professor to keep adding, improving and tweaking, the final cut of my project for Motion Graphics 1, titled , will come to be a big source of pride. Originally given as a midterm assignment called Hear and See, the project involved animating or otherwise conveying the lyrics of a song. The open-ended nature of the song choice is always as liberating as it is constraining, and in the end, I decided to go with a Freshkids remix my friend Alex Taam aka Mogi Grumbles did for another friend who makes music as Machinedrum and as one-half of Sepalcure. As this was simply for an academic audience and not for promotional use to the artist (the remix is available on a free ISO50-exclusive compilation I did the album art for, called, There Will Always Be Echoes), I had the freedom to explore a concept I really enjoyed seeing, specifically one from some of the professor’s previous students that involved paging through a catalogue or magazine and the items moving dynamically around the spreads. While my initial intention was to animate the spreads of a magazine-like publication to look like moving advertisements, with live-action-style video of people dancing around, time constraints and the availability of materials found me using the pages of a moleskine notebook, the contents of which evolved into a sketched, cartoon-like direction, which was more fitting to the context in the end. The project was largely an exercise in the following:

  1. Traditional style animation (aided by the wonders of a Wacom Bamboo tablet and AfterEffects)
  2. Masking and rotoscoping **cringe**
  3. Precomps within precomps within precomps within…you get the idea
  4. Using warp mesh effects to distort the page content to look more like it is actually there on the page
  5. Patience and perseverance

I filmed myself paging through the notebook using an HD camcorder and a stop motion rig in the DT Lab, chosing the best sequence from multiple takes of trying to keep my page turn and hand position in manageable places, using predictable intervals. Once I had the video I needed, I chose a range of typefaces and imagery to be animated into the video, based on the sketches and simple storyboards we created. I drew the various animated assets using a Wacom tablet (at least 3 versions of each item) and came out with a dancing line quality that evoked memories of hip-hop videos from the likes of De La Soul and perhaps a measure of Keith Haring. I tried to make things as entertaining and fresh as possible, keeping it random and playful, even lo-fidelity with some of the sketches looking literally like bad doodles that would normally not look so great in the notebook. The movement and animation brings the doodles to life, made possible by nesting precomps. The pages and page turns were masked out and rotoscoped painstakingly. The effect of the sketches appearing to sit on the page, going along with the organic bend of the pages, this also had to be animated frame-by-frame during page turns. Finally, a technique I discovered myself during this project involved the use of the Overlay blending effect, leveraging my experience with blending effects in Photoshop, I used a “double overlay” technique for most of the individual sequences, which gives the ink that odd, energetic tone that absorbs shadows beautifully.

After reading back through this list of production achievements, none of which would have been possible before my entry into the course, I feel more proud than I did before I started off the blog post. The haze of a rigorous production push is receding, and as the dust settles, I am very confidant of my newfound skill with the practice and application of motion graphics. I hope to build a presentable reel by the time I start looking for summer opportunities, and this project will no doubt be a part of it.

Posted in Motion Graphics and Parsons Posted by on Dec 21 2010 04:39 pm

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