The Dreaming Machine

This week’s Adobe After Effects tutorial comes from the wonderful Videocopilot. You will need to shoot some footage of your own to complete the tutorial, and setting up a green/blue screen that’s large enough to cover the action is really the most difficult part, but the results are definitely worth it.

The tutorial uses step-by-step video instructions and shows you how to add effects onto video footage and simulate a car hitting a pedestrian. It takes place in a suburban street and involves a car driving along and slamming into a pedestrian from the side. The pedestrian falls dramatically onto the bonnet and is pushed along out of frame by the car. To add to the realism, the car bonnet crumples and you can even download a sound file from the website that helps with the illusion.

This tutorial can be applied to any situation, so long as your vehicle drives in from one side of the frame and out on the other side. It could be a truck or a bus, it doesn’t really matter because your actor is never in danger, so you can just drive whatever vehicle you have into and out of the frame.

When we tried the tutorial, we used a green bed sheet to replicate the blue screen, and two people stood on either side and held it, but because of perspective, it was quite small in the frame and our actor used a lot of movement in his fall and so parts of his body overshot the sheet and had to be masked out manually, because we couldn’t key them out. A little more time consuming, but it still worked quite well.

It’s also a good idea to use a tripod when filming your actor and don’t move anything when you film the blank plate so that the two plates line up perfectly.

Providing you are mindful of these few issues, it’s a surprisingly simple tutorial that produces really professional results. Once we had shot the footage, the effect really only took a couple of hours to impliment. The only thing that could take you a long time is extracting your actor from their background plate. It all depends on how clean your footage is and how well your green screen worked on the day. The technique demonstrated in the tutorial is clever, simple and effective.

If you need a road accident shot in your project, or just want to improve your keying skills, this is a great tutrial to try. We had a lot of fun with it. We hope you enjoyed our Adobe After Effects tutorial of the week. Please leave a comment.

Göran Forsling is a freelancer from Stockholm, Sweden.

For the last 10 years he has been working for leading international companies with product campaigns, commercials, and branding for small businesses. He has a broad experience in producing work for many types of media, ranging from graphic design to digital video and audio. His portfolio website can be found here.

My Pet Skeleton has been around for a very long time, and the fact it has a ‘guestbook’ tells you just how long, but I still enjoy the interface, illustrations and spooky music. It’s basically a Flash portfolio site for digital artisit Vincent Marcone and he has some great imagery on there. Check it out, and also his very cool site for Johnny Hollow, a musical act. Check the moths and ladybugs. I just love them! This site was programmed by his longtime collaborator Tomasz Dysinski.

This week’s featured folio is from New Zealand.

3D Cluster are a collective of very talented freelance artists working together to bring advertisers visions to life. They specialise in: High quality 3D for print media, Photorealistic 3D modelling and texturing, Architectural Rendering and Stylised 3D.

The image shown here is part of an ad campaign for Sky Digital New Zealand through DDB New Zealand and shows the unlikely scenario of Alien Vs Predator playing chess to advertise Sky TVs screening of the film. Such a great image. They also have a fantastic walkthrough of how the image was created, along with a bunch of other great work.

The Basic Human form tutorial is intended for new users to get them familiar with the tools and interface of Maya 6 and above. Begin by creating an image plane as a guide for modelling the basic shape and proportions in nurbs. Once the character is blocked out, switch the nurb geometry into polygons to start connecting all the loose parts together to form one piece of geometery.

This free Maya tutorial is available at Simply Maya. Register a free account, login and you can download video tutorials for Maya. Certainly helped get me started.

onedotzero adventures in motion is now open for submissions!

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FRIDAY 29 MAY 2009

download submission form

download guidelines

onedotzero_adventures in motion is acclaimed by artists, audiences and creative industry alike for being the world leader in audio-visual arts and entertainments at the forefront of a new experiential festival experience which combines music, film, play, live performance, interactivity, digital arts and culture.

onedotzero_adventures in motion festival is now open to receive visually progressive moving image work for their 2009/2010 global touring festival.

The festival premiere takes place in London at BFI Southbank, 9-13 September 2009, followed by an extensive international tour which kicks off in Buenos Aires, 25-27 September 2009.

onedotzero_adventures in motion is one of the few truly international showcases of innovative talent where it is entirely free for creatives to submit their work, offering the opportunity for new and existing talents to gain global audiences and recognition for their artistry.

onedotzero seeks explorations of new creative expression, visionary moving image and progressive visual ideas from three key disciplines:

animation + short film renowned for uncovering the most innovative and exciting moving image work from all over the world, onedotzero continues to champion digitally inflected works across music video, animation, motion graphics, narrative shorts, experimental, documentary and generative art on a global platform.

installation: expanding out from the cinema, into the art gallery and beyond, to expose cutting-edge urban interventions, compelling interactive experiences and engaging audio-visual installation. both existing work and proposals for new projects will be considered. Consider the technical delivery in your ideas.

live audio-visual performance: onedotzero has a passion for narrative driven live cinematica, explosive vj sets and intoxicating collaborations between musicians and artists. Most recently onedotzero presented a series of dazzling one-off live events at the BFI IMAX, as part of the onedotzero_adventures in motion festival, London 2008.

To find out more, visit their website, and enter now!

From the hoop on Vimeo.

This week’s showreel is a great little animation from three French students: Remi Dessinges, Guillaume Fesquet and Anthony Arnoux. This is their graduation movie, made last year in Supinfocom Arles. It’s a suspenseful little number and very filmic in its style. The story is loosely inspired by the life of Earl Manigault, one of the greatest basketball players of his generation who lost everything to drugs. The end of his life was devoted to stopping children from Harlem walking the same path. He started the “Walk Away From Drugs” tournament for kids, and died in 1998 from heart failure.

You can see their drawings and renders and find out a little more about the film on their website: www.fromthehoop.com

The movie was made with 3D Studio Max 9 rendered entirely in default scanline (with an additional Ambient occlusion pass). They used Adobe After Effects for compositing and there is a “making of” on their website. Three talented graduates to watch.

Adobe After Effects CS4 has finally been released and is an essential, but expensive tool in any digital designer’s arsenal. Should you upgrade?

Here’s what Macworld have to say:

“After Effects CS4 represents one of the most significant and useful upgrades in recent history. The new version’s interface now integrates more seamlessly than ever into the rest of the CS4 suite. As the demand of most content creators and motion graphics producers increases significantly, it’s good to see that Adobe is still providing tools to help make the workflow easier and more intuitive, allowing the artist’s creativity to come to the forefront.”

Hear hear. I’ve ony just recently started playing with it, and getting used to the charcoal interface might take me a while, but the ability to import 3D layers from Photoshop is awesome and I look forward to the plethora of tutorials that will no doubt exploit this fact.

Here are six ways After Effects CS4 saves you time and money, according to Adobe.

Michael is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator mainly specializing in humorous pieces. His work is primarily digital, though he also works in watercolors now and then.

His digital illustrations have graced the covers and interiors of many books and magazines, and he’s placed in the CGSociety Challenges a few times (Excellence Award in ‘The Uplift Challenge,’ 4th Place in ‘The Journey Begins’ and Honorable Mention in ‘Master and Servant.’) He was also a Top 20 Award recipient (14th place) for the 2008 Dominance War III international game character design competition, and also a Chesley Award winner for his  cover for Peter S. Beagle’s ‘The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche,’ which won the Chesley for Best Paperback Book Cover of the Year in 1997, the first digital piece to ever win a Chesley. (The Chesley is given out by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists at the World Science Fiction Convention each year.) His work has also been featured in ‘Spectrum,’ ‘Expose,’ ‘ImagineFX’ magazine (Britain), It’s Art Magazine (France) and Fantasy Art Magazine (China)

Check out his fantasy/steampunk portfolio here.

Welcome to the Dreaming Machine. This website will showcase the best in Motion Graphics, Animation and Digital Imaging. Please feel free to submit any work you think qualifies, and check back every week. Better still, subscribe to the feed and keep dreaming!