Happy Holidays!

I know I promised a new recipe today, but I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to wish all my friend, family and readers a very Merry Christmas, Hanuka, Kwanzaa and a happy new year. Check back next week for another recipe (trust me, its a good one).

This short clip is made in After Effects using a couple presets: “Distribute”, “Sure Target” and “Falloff”. Sure Target and Falloff handle the motion between text segments with minimal key-framing and Distribute is very useful for randomly distributing the text in 3D space without spending any time actually moving layers.

I plan on putting together a tutorial for this (or a similar) effect. By using the presets and being careful about your layer management you could animate a few hundred layers of text or images in minutes.

Battleship – My First AE Project

I’ve been in a particularly creative mode lately, so I decided to tackle Adobe After Effects. After Effects (AE) is primarily used for creating motion graphics and visual effects. My interest in AE originally was to be able to do dynamic pans and zooms on my time lapse footage, which is captured on a tripod as still frames and can sometimes be rather boring. After Effects will allow me to compose the time lapse at the full resolution of the images (~2000 x 3000 pixels) and then build a ‘camera’ that can zoom and pan around the shot without any loss in quality. Lending interest to slower shots or helping to direct focus on a particular spot.

All that said, I had never used After Effects before this weekend so I spent a long time watching tutorials online about how to use After Effects (Video Copilot is a great resource). Using what I’d learned, and various other Google searches online I was able to put together this shortened music video using the song Battleship by The Usuals.

The whole clip probably took me about 10 hours to build. Its basically a lot of key-framing to get the animation and camera moves.

I had a lot of fun animation the battleship tilting, breaking, and sinking. I played with adding bubbles and flames to certain words and scenes but in the end didn’t render them because they detracted from the overall feeling of the clip. Just about every word in the clip is a 3D object, built as a pre-composed scenes for the blocks of text. I animated the block for simple fly-ins and then used camera moves to rotate the blocks and pan around to each letter. The whole thing was tedius and I had to ask Cody for the lyrics in a few spots to make sure I was getting it right but overall I’m really glad I did it, because it got me comfortable with After Effect and ready to take on the next challenge.

You can see all the camera move key-frames in the screen shot above.

Epic Waterfight

The most intense squirt gun fight I’ve ever whitnessed

Time-lapse Project

Day In, Day Out is a project of mine to capture a typical day in Downtown Sacramento through time lapse. It will likely take me a long time to get the whole thing done, I’ve estimated it will take a little less than 50,000 shots to complete the entire length of the video. Anyway, last night I started sketching out some of the shots to get the timing and ideas “on paper”, and went a little bit overboard so I wanted to share:

Its a very short clip, in case you can’t tell (which is very likely, Adeline could have drawn better sketches than I did) the first shot would be a time lapse of the sun rising over the capitol, a shot which I hope to be able to capture from the Penthouse balcony of my building and the second shot is looking down at the corner just in front of my building (from roughly the same location) at 7th street, and the Light Rail station as people board the trains.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas for some cool time-lapse of downtown sacramento. If your interested in helping with this project too, let me know it might be fun to have a couple people doing time-lapse and join it all together into one continuous movie.

FileSafe Backup

FileSafe is the sister company to Airtop (my current employer), but I don’t work for FileSafe directly. It is an online backup service that automatically encrypts your data and uploads it to data centers where its kept safe. If you delete a file, or drop your laptop in the water trap on the 5th hole your data is safe and secure and can be recovered quickly.

This video was made as part of the marketing arsenal for FileSafe and it just so happened that Electrical Design Consultants (my former employer, and current client) volunteered to have the cameras invade their office for some footage and interviews. I happened to be in their office at the same time going over their upcoming office move and at one point I ended up (unknowingly) in front of the camera talking to John about where we would put the server rack at their new location.

So long story short, I’m in this ad, although I don’t work for Electrical Design Consultants anymore, nor do I work for FileSafe.

The Cleaning

I’ve been fooling around with the SLR a bit lately, getting back into the mood of photography and one of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is setup time-lapse scenes. After perusing some of Sam Javanrouh’s daily images and his time-lapse video I set out to make it happen.

I downloaded the trial version of Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2, setup two angles of my room and got to speeding up time. I struggled for a little bit getting everything setup though and thought I was going to have to give up because I couldn’t get the computer to talk to the camera. After some troubleshooting I realized the USB wire I was using (which is only a day old) wasn’t working. Once I got a working USB wire everything went perfectly.

Its presented here from both Vimeo and Youtube. Youtube allows directly embedding HD, but the Vimeo player is SO much faster. You tell me which you prefer, I’m still undecided.

Chris’ Graduation Party

My good friend Chris Scott recently graduated with his BS in Mechanical Engineering (Congratulations!). This evening his wife and parents thew him a small graduation party. Joanne and Michelle (Chris’ mom and wife respectfully) had come to me and asked me to put together a short slideshow to show Chris as he grew up. I admit that I didn’t get to put quite as much into it as Chris deserved, but I think it turned out fine all the same.

Merry Christmas!

This Makes me want a D90 … Bad

The new Nikon D90 has the ability to do 720p, cinematic 24 fps video captures. Combine that with somebody who know what they are doing behind the lens and in front of a video editor and this is what you get.

United by Individuality

The long awaited ad that was produced from the video taken of hundreds of Scion owners own cars (mine included) is finally out. Actually, I’m a little slow to the punch as it started airing on Comedy Central, MTV, MTV2, Spike and other lifestyle-oriented networks August 4th.

My car is in there, but not really in any place where you can pick it out. I know where it is, but only because I have pictures from the daytime of where the cars were at. Its a good commercial all the same though so without further adieu, here it is: