Some Assembly Required from MYX on Vimeo.
Short promo I produced and edited for an upcoming company convention.
I shot the footage during the setup of an earlier convention on a Canon 5D mkII.
I thought that the dub step lent itself well to the mechanics of the environment.
A Better Way from MYX on Vimeo.
This is a piece I did for the women’s group at Primerica. My producer wanted something organic looking that resembled water colors.
I played with a number of idea. I eventually decided to use Particular as the brush source. Once the particles were released, I grew them slowly so it would look like the paint was spreading into the paper. This was used as an alpha matte for the tie-dye backgrounds.
I was approached by Dan Thurmon to do a promotional piece for his speaking tours. Dan is a motivational speaker and author. We discussed a number of ideas and set out to make a clean yet interesting presentation. We knew it would be an effects heavy project, so we broke it down to sections.
As we discussed the project I discovered several challenges I needed to solve.
While talking through the process and tossing around ideas, we developed an idea of image frames that would go behind him. I was worried that the image would be somewhat stark if it were just Dan standing on a surface talking to us without some sort of environment. We needed a vehicle that would be clean, visually interesting, and add to the presentation while not becoming a distraction. So I developed a screen ‘system’ that could be driven from the main comp and switch images and move the screens from expression controls.
I needed juggling patterns that would be able to shift to allow additional balls, and a way to work the hands so they would be in the right place at the right time, they would need to open and close at the right time (considering that the frequency would need to shift dynamically based upon the number of balls. More, Dan is a juggler (and I am not) there was also the potential that the pattern I animated would not be correct (in the eyes of a juggler) so the shape of the pattern might need to shift. If I went at this using hand animated cycles, it could have been a terror as if I needed to move one thing, potentially thousands of keyframes would need to be changed, so I decided to animate both the hands and balls with expressions. This led to several other challenges as well…
Once all that was sorted out, then I needed to figure out how to have the hands match up with the balls.
How to have the hand know when it was done with one ball, and it was time to head back to catch the next ball.
Once matched up, then it was a matter of how to have the hand open and close to catch the ball. Being that the hand plate was technically behind the balls, I also needed to solve how to make it seem like the hand actually grabs the ball with fingers actually gripping the ball. I shot Dan tossing a ball over and over. I stabilized this footage. This result was a rotoscoped plate of the hand, and one of just the fingers which was parented to the hand. The expressions ended up being a couple pages long and slowed renders down a little, but my earlier fears were realized when Dan saw the original pattern and asked me to adjust the juggling cycle. Once the cycle was reshaped, all the updates were already done as it was all programmed based upon the shape.
Like most heavy projects, there were many things learned. These types of things are not easy, and can keep one awake at night. But they spark innovation, and we find more efficient ways of doing things. This was a seriously fun project and pushed me in many ways.
Dan did a talk on TED in which he used the ‘Danless’ version. You can find that video here…
This was the public video I put together after our company went public on April 1st 2010.
OpToday DOME Open from MYX on Vimeo.
In 2009 we put together a graphics package for an convention. We then needed a show open. The original renders that I used in this piece were all frosty white with the only color being the red ribbon seen flying through the city. The original color can be seen at around 15 seconds in and at the end. I wanted to push the colors more in line with the show, and being the many folks had already seen the all the white footage, I decided to try to make this all ‘night’ looking. It was originally rendered as rgb black and white, so while it looked B&W, it really had traces of various color running through it, so it was not just a simple inversion. Being that the red was a color used in the show, that could not be inverted either. It was a fun puzzle to see what little pieces I could use to plus it into something interesting and usable. In this case I edited first so I did not have to fight any extra footage that I did not need to fight.
This is just part of a much larger piece. Many folks would be seeing this so I wanted to make something that would quickly grab attention. Everything is built from stills. My favorite, is the third little vignette. I worked on the background for quite a while. The original photo was somewhat blown out in several areas. I built back in the window. Then I made some dirty glass. The glass was kept semi transparent so that a deeper background could be added. I worked on the baby for a while and eventually found the look I was going for. I selected an appropriate outside environment and put the whole thing into 3D within AE and finally did an overall color treatment.
The following video shows the progression of the baby image build up.
