Posts

Retro Animation/Walk Cycle Test

For no particular reason, I set out to practice making a walk cycle in After Effects a while back. I didn’t have any character to start with, so I threw together the retro looking farmer character you see here. He actually started off in an early sketch as an even more heavily stylized, ambiguous humanoid, but quickly evolved when I got into Illustrator. Once I had the character in place, I decided to take the whole thing further, and build the walk cycle in the context of a old-school animation. To achieve that, I brought in a film preroll (which, if you look closely, you may notice includes flashes of my website logo), film grain and scratches, film reel sound effects, and throwback, Ren and Stimpy inspired, music. I mixed eras up a bit with some 3D elements (which I built and rendered out in Cinema 4D), though rendered in a low polygon style, to make them fit with the 2D look of the central character.

Videography – Camera Rig Test: Joshua Tree

Last weekend I went on an impromptu hiking trip to Joshua Tree National Park, and decided to take my Canon 60D, and cheap homemade rig (see previous post) with me, for some videography testing. I put this short edit together from the footage.

It was all really a rushed job, since the hike itself was the main goal of the day. I shot clips at random points, with no real end-game in mind, but the test proved to me that $10 can go a long way. Without it, even simple pans were harder to keep steady, without the use of a more cumbersome tripod – the DIY rig, meanwhile, was easy to dissemble and throw in my backpack. Previously walking movements would be too jumpy to even smooth out effectively with software image stabilization (which I have also applied here on a few shots).

Laserfiche – Promotional Video

I don’t think any designer likes spec work, but sometimes it’s a necessary evil. Over the weekend, I put together this video piece as a sample of what I can do for Laserfiche, tapping into my abilities in design, motion graphics animation, video and sound editing, and marketing, as a multimedia designer and an MBA. The only asset provided was the raw green-screen interview footage, captured at 2 vantage-points simultaneously, which I have edited down to what you see here. All other elements, such as logos and icons, I have created from scratch (or recreated from online reference, in the case of the Laserfiche logo). I used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, and Audition, as well as Apple’s Garageband, and Maxon’s Cinema 4D.

I should add, the source audio was pretty bad, which didn’t give me much to work with, but I’ve improved it as much as I could through some processing in Audition.