Working with Bryce Media, I was brought on as an on-set VFX consultant and as the post-production VFX/Motion Graphics artist for a 30 second web spot for Legends Boxing.
The Prompt
The primary goal of the spot was to show how Legends Boxing can be used as a tool for empowerment. With this prompt Neil Bryce and one of the owners of Legend Boxing scripted a 30 second spot featuring a woman between 35 and 40 reviewing the daily struggles that she and many other face. 3D text/graphics would be incorporated inside the real space of several shots, words representing these negative feelings. Throughout the spot, this woman would be punching a punching bag, and at the same time destroying these negative words floating around her. The spot continues, the words finally all destroyed, the woman “resolves” these negative emotions, with a visible sense of relief. Graphically, positive words are illuminated on her arms and travel upwards.
On-Set Production
Stitched 360 Degree Textured Used for Reflections in Virtual Environment
On-set, Neil and I decided to simplify our shots as much as possible in order to fit the available budget of the job. Our primary tool for this was to stick to lock-off or on rail shots in order to eliminate any 3D camera tracking that would be needed otherwise.
Beyond these suggestions, I stayed on-set to act as director of photography and help setup lighting and shots for Neil. Just a second pair of eyes to get ensure attractive and usable shots.
Post-Prodcution
All post VFX work was done in blender. Most shots were locked off, so it was just a matter of matching focal lengths, and figuring out approximate height of the camera and other distances for masking our punching bags and other objects in the scene. Then, just placing animating and exploding text where appropriate.
The tricky shots were the arms and the blue glowing words on the woman’s arms. I had to create 3D maquettes for the arms, and then manually rotoscope the maquettes to match the movement of her arms. Besides a single 2D track to get the basic movement of the arms, this needed to be an entirely manual object track.
The maquettes where rigged and modeled as closely as possible to the real arms, but 2d masks for the silhouettes of her arms were still needed to restrict the textured glowing letters to the positive space of the woman’s arms. After masking and animating the maquettes was finished, I was able to add and composite anything on the the arms of the woman. At this point I did a 2D animation of the veins and words that would appear on the arms, and then applied this has a texture on the 3D maquette.
The composite on top of the real footage was simple to approach. Blurring and film grain in Blender’s compositor was added. With one special case of the last close up shot, near the clavicle where her shirt covers some of the text, I needed an additional mask to blur and diffuse the light of the text to simulate it passing through the cloth of the shirt.
All graphics went through about 3 revisions to get to their final product.
Wrap Up & Telly Award
The entire production of the spot has about a month turn around, and I believe was re-edit several times to multiple social media posts for the company
Me and Bryce Media were both happy with the final result of this spot. We decided to put this in for a Telly Award and won Bronze in General Online Commercials.
Thor Media was commissioned to produce a company introduction and services video for Franchise Business Law Group. A business that helps other businesses with legal protection and future planning for franchises.
Prompt
The commission was for a two minute motion graphics video. Something particularly emphasized by the client was to have a handmade feel, as opposed to a high technology feel. In their copy online they emphasize a customized or tailored solution for their clients. By bringing that out with symbols of creating or making things with one’s hands with everyday materials that people interact would help establish the idea of customized or tailored solutions.
Production
Upfront, time was spend working out the Audio/Video script. This usually takes a few revisions to get something that everyone agrees on. The voice over script usually needs to go through the client’s legal department or a copy editor for final approval. Then, the video portion of the script is always a bit ambiguous for the client, since they aren’t used to the idea of some explaining motion and other visual ideas with text. This portion of the script typically serves as a starting point for the artist, and help rangle in the visuals in the case the client tries to push the artists into ideas that exit the scope of the Audio/Video script.
Because of the amount of effort that would be needed in regards to object modelling and texturing for props and other animated objects, we decided to approach our final product with an animation to begin with. This helped establish camera shots, compositions, lighting, and objects. Along with generally testing out ideas and overall tone and mood without the full investment into a final product. With a heavier production workload these kinds of animatic tests facilitate conversations between the client and artists to check their ideas long before bad ideas manifest themselves after a considerable amount of work done.
As the animatic created and checked ideas and conversation are had on what the final product might look like, I was busy building and rigging animations for buildings and objects, made out of paper, that would self-assemble.
Learning how to rig a completed model of a building, and then deconstruct in such a way to not make permanent changes, and give me controls that would easily animate and adjust animation when need was fun puzzle to work out. I was able to do this all in Blender without the need of additional plugins. Below are two examples of me working out the all important rig, but also the overall look of the paper and possible lighting styles for the final video.
As the final vision for the video is finalized, through conversation and test renders, I began the longer process of building the set for the video, along with all the objects needed to fill that set. Couches, desks, writing utensils, books, shelves, lights, etc… Many of these objects were sourced from online repositories, but often they still need work done on them in order to get them fit the scene as a whole.
After objects and the space have been laid out and built, lighting and rendering the space is next. The idea of a small business space was picked to match their target customer, and I chose an afternoon or evening time frame to create the base for the lighting coming through the windows. A natural light, I believed, would fit well with natural/customized/tailored fit, as opposed to a structured clean cut feel that pure white or artificial lighting would create.
Wrap Up
The client at one point felt that the push too hard to a naturalistic look might be a bit too much. We decided to include some technological elements into the motion graphics, while maintaining our connection to the paper motif for flat motion graphics, and the marker board with a hand drawn feel for later in the video. This ended up creating a good relatable balance for the viewer, since most people exist in both the physical and the digital life in various parts of their lives.
The client felt final video turned out really well. The are some obvious deviations from the original animatic to the final video. The biggest was the inclusion of text cards to visually represent questions and other important text information. I personally like these because they help reinforce that paper feel used throughout the video, it gave us another use for the brand colors, and it made some really good visual breaks between different sections of the script.
Over the last half year or so I have been doing little odd marketing graphic design jobs for Lance Conrad. Below are short breakdowns of these jobs.
The first of these projects was creating materials for Lance to use to inform his consumer base about his appearance at the 2017 Salt Lake City Comic-Con. Specifically a digital/real flyer to hand out as he did his presentations at schools and other events that he involves himself in. Along with digital campaigns on social media and email mailing lists.
When discussing the copy to be used on the flyer, we sought to distill the essence of his books, or find a through line that all the books could relate to, for a slogan or a basis that copy outside of information text could be derived from. What we eventually settled on was “Worlds Colliding”. This theme ended up informing not only the copy but also the visuals as well.
I decided to take a literal approach, and changed the theme to “Worlds will collide..”. Making it more urgent and dangerous. Using a mixture of stock photos of some mountains and some 3D rocks, I modeled the books and did the whole design, layout and final composite in Blender. No 2D application was involved here. Making literally two worlds colliding in the background, the viewer is stuck in the last moments of twilight. The last moment of what one knew of existence, just before the sky falls and the light is snuffed out.
Later on, we took this same visual motif and applied it to some digital signage for use in Utah. Specifically roadside billboards. The only change/addition was Lance’s face, which crowded things a bit for the book advertisement, but was good fill for the Best of State advertisement. Unfortunately, we couldn’t predict exactly when these advertisement would show up on actual billboards, but I did put together a mock-up inside of a preexisting photo of a random billboard below. This was to help pre-visualize the ads before they were sent to whoever controls the ad space for billboards.
The last piece of marketing materials based off of this “Worlds Colliding” theme was a bookmark. Lance uses these as free giveaways at his at school presentations and conventions. This is something he has done before, so communicating what he wanted here was simple, and with some small adjustments to previous project files I was able to export these as finals directly out of Blender as well.
Three years of learning. Three years of programming. Three years of drawing. And it all should have taken three weeks. Flappy McFur is finally in the hands of the masses, or at least the 80 or so individuals that were actually interested.
The beginning
Atari Jaguar programming has been something that my brother and I have been interested for years, and ever since returning from my church mission from Taiwan, I have made it a primary goal.
With the formation, branding, and online presence establishment, all that was left was for me to learn a bit of programming, and start making games. To help facilitate the programming learning curve, we took on a request from Paul Westphal to put together a demo specifically for his booth at the Portland Retro Gaming Convention.
Programming at this time wasn’t completely foreign to me, but C programming was. So this little demo was a great opportunity to start my C coding adventure, and it led well into Flappy McFur.
Development
Version 0.3 was the first fruit of my efforts, and the fruits were bearable. The gameplay was there, but it was far from enjoyable. McFur moved around more like a horizontally locked fly than a disembodied Jaguar head falling in style. But, the core gameplay was there, and this little demo was well received by those out there who look out for anything new for the Jag.
After the demo though, there was polish. I planned out menu systems, with a simple achievement system. Worked out four different play modes that changed the speed of the game and how the pipes behaved. With Bryce’s help, a simple text engine was implemented to facilitate menus, and he also implemented the save code system. All of this along with an end game made Flappy McFur a much more noticeable product and a more enjoyable experience overall, with a bit of depth to the gameplay.
Development also included some play testing. Usually I would setup our Jag-In-A-Box at family parties, Draw Nights with friends, or just let all the nieces and nephews have a go at it. It was interesting to see how some people caught into the gameplay really well, while others found it impossible. It made balancing the difficulty a bit of a challenge, this is one reason why the additional play modes were added. To try and accommodate a wide spectrum if players.
Even though the game overall is fairly simple, there was a massive learning curve for me to overcome. Overcoming that learning curve has had its payoff though, and I feel much more prepared to takle our next project.
Art
Sprites and Palettes
Though few, painting sprites for this game was a highlight if the whole experience. Working with reduced color palettes and putting together simple animations like rotations of objects and the achievements, to more complicated animations like Cutter’s run cycle, all were a joy and remind me how much I love animation in general.
We used the Gimp primarily for sprite work. I have been using the Gimp for nearly two decades now, and it is great support for paletted graphics with a more than adequate tool set. I did use Krita for Cutter’s run cycle animation because they had recently implemented a basic 2D animation tool set in Krita, but with the lack of palettes graphics support, I still needed ti pump those graphics through Gimp to prep them for Jag. Krita is supposed to have palettes graphics support in the near future, and I am looking forward to using Krita exclusively in my pipeline.
With all that in mind, when I actually started putting together Flappy McFur, I was a bit lazy in figuring out how to do 8-bit paletted graphics. So, for a long time, I was dealing with performance issues, especially when music was implemented. It wasn’t until late in development that most of the graphics were converted to 8-bit paletted sprites for 16-bit sprites. This was a good switch though as it allowed us to do fade transitions easily.
Box and Manual Art
I initially wanted to do more artwork for the game, but the 3 primary illustrations ended up working really well for our needs.
The first illustration was used to establish the character relationship and heavily influenced the game in both tone and narrative. The colored pencil and crayon look of the artwork was intentional as well. It gave it an elementary, non serious feeling throughout, inviting everyone to come and pick up the controller and play.
Video Content
I tried to keep any video advertisement minimal since the beginning. Primarily because if how time consume it is, but also because of the uncertainty of actually releasing the game.
When we decided to actually finish up the game and release, effort was spent to get a good video for advertising the game, and a good gameplay video. At the end of the day, I am not too sure how much these videos helped at the end if the day, but they were nice to have, and will be good to have for history’s sake.
The release and marketing
Newsletter
In and effort to reward our mailing list subscribers, we made sure that everyone that had signed up knew about the game first, we also provided a small discount for them as well. The discount was taken advantage of by a handful of our subscribers, and is something that we will definitely do in the future.
Press Release
It was fun to actually learn how to put a press release together for news websites. I distributed to a handful of people, with little response. Again, this was good to get familiar with, and it serves a good historical purpose. You can read the press release here.
Before people actually had the game in their hands, many of the comments were about the pixel art, and general support for the release. Responses to gameplay have been… mixed, maybe. Its hard to tell if people don’t want to say anything bad about it, or they are just a bit frustrated about its’ difficulty. Either way, below are a few reactions for the AtariAge forum thread.
My wife and I enjoyed spending the evening playing Flappy McFur a couple nights ago. It’s certainly addictive. I found myself getting the controller back less and less. My wife and I probably haven’t played Jaguar together in 10+ years. She buys me Jaguar games as gifts and watches me open them. Maybe she’ll watch me play a bit. It was nice to actually play together. Thanks for the effort you put in to it!
Already a month away from Inktober, and I haven’t been too involved in the social media department at all. There is good reason for that though. During this month, I have been working on assembling my Inktober work into a printable book format. My first publicly published collection of my artwork.
As many of you already know, I work primarily digitally. My paintings, sketches, inks, everything, all digital. This obviously has it’s benefits, but it also has some big cons that come with the convenience. The first and the most nagging for me is the fact that I don’t have a physical copy of my artwork for preservation, and for sharing with others. I have done prints before with a normal inkjet/toner printer, or through a printer like Inkleys, Walmart, or Costco. These options work, but these printers don’t really tailor to the visual artist, and, as a result, prints come out lackluster, and in some case, I don’t have the option to compile multiple images into book format. It also feels like a “You get what you pay for.” situation.
I set out to find a on-demand printer who tailors to printing pictures/artwork. After looking at popular self publishing websites, like Lulu and Amazon, I discovered that most on-demand printers are tailored to writers, with some options for artists. I then stumbled onto Blurb.
I decided to take my chance with them, as their store included a ton of content that other independent artists have produced, and after reading quite a few positive comments about their services and final printing results. The shear number of tools available to the would-be self-publisher are abundant, with their own custom software (BookWright), In Design, or Scribus, all viable options for prepping your content. This was important to me as well because I work exclusively in open source software with my art. I used Krita for my art, Inkscape for logos, Blender for my video content, and Scribus for my book layout. Looking up specs for the book size you want is easy, along with a useful “Help” section, putting together my final book was time consuming but easy. The only downside to this experience were the limited size options for books. They don’t provide a “custom” option for size, but they cover the basic sizes well, with my book having a final size of 8″x10″ (I wished I had a taller format book to work with, as most of my work was 11×17).
Speaking of the final book, it was better than I expected. The print came out beautifully in the softcover format. The cover was a lamminated gloss, while the inside has a slight gloss. The blacks and other colors came out great.
My book is finally up for sale at Blurb and I will encourage your support by asking to purchase a physical or digital copy. If you purchase by December 11th with the promo code GIFTS30, you will get a 30% discount, which is awesome!
The book contains all 31 pieces from Inktober, bueatifully printed, along with a 15 pages of sketches and thumbnails that help illustrate my process to the final inking. Please let me know what you think of the final collection, as I am hoping to publish a few more books in the near future of some of my current work, and any feedback will be valuable. Also, if you haven’t seen my work for Inktober yet, you can view it all for free in here, or on Instagram.
Over the last few months Overstock.com has given me the opportunity to work on a few 15 second broadcast motion graphic spots/commercials for Overstock.com. These covered three separate sales that aired on national television between March and July of 2015.
I first want to thank the branding team at Overstock.com for their help in putting this together with me. They usually have me come into their office to work, in order to speed things up. These spots are as good as they are because of their input and critique. Thanks guys!
Mega March Markdown | 15sec broadcast commercial – Based heavily on the in-house design teams playbook, with addtional consulting from Trevor Rimmasch. Thanks Trev!
Most of the work done on these was in After Effects, due to time constraints (all of these were put together withing 2-3 days!). I would have rather had done these in Blender, as I would have had more options available to me. Overall the experience was good working on these commercials, and the highlight was to see some of the designers faces light up when they first say their work animated in a final commercial.
Generic Summer Sale Spot | 15sec broadcast commercial – Again, based on an in-house Play Book. The title card is one of the first photo maps I have done. Cutting out pieces of a photo and placing them within 3D space to give the illusion of parallax and depth.
Something that made these so different from previous work I have done, is the inclusion of a “Play Book” or “Style Guide” put together by their in-house designers and artists, for their web departments. These guides are awesome in that they reduce the amount of questions needed to be answered when approaching the commercial, and debate is brought to a minimum as well. If there is a question about what something should look like, color to use, typeface, etc… no guess work, just look at the Play Book. A huge help when working as a team on something.
Once in a Blue June Sale | 15sec broadcast commercial – There wasn’t much of a Play Book for this one, but it was still based on the designs of an in-house designer, with additional input by Aaron Syrett and Trevor Rimmasch.
And to top it all off, I also had to edit down the Once in a Blue June spot, and an additional Jewelry Sale Spot, for the Geoffrey Tron at Time’s Square in New York City. It is an awesome feeling knowing that some of my work is getting exposure in Time’s Square.
Club O, the membership/rewards program portion of Overstock.com, did a rebrand. Different colors and designs, and they asked if we would take the old version of their Club O introduction video and revise it to fit the new branding.
At first glance, this seemed like something fairly easy to pull off, but once we began discussing more about what they wanted, what the new script entailed, and additional shots of the dog were needed, turned out to be allot more work than expected.
It was interesting to revisit green screen keys we did over two years ago. There were quite a few things I didn’t quite understand about keying, and it is amazing that we were able to get the key as good as we did back then. Time was spent cleaning up these old keys, and also keying additional shots of the dog. This was made more difficult since they didn’t want to have any shots of the dog with the red cap. Shots without the red cap were limited, as at the time it seemed like the cap was the way to go. So, there just wasn’t a whole lot of the capless dog to chose from.
Most of the video was composited in After Effects. The 3D percentages were originally done in After Effects, but because of file path issues with Elements 3D working between a Windows and Mac machine, I ended up doing the percentages in Blender. Another portion done in Blender were the shipping boxes. This was a last minute addition suggested by Trevor Rimmasch. The boxes help fill and anchor some of the shots, as well as create a consistent visual thread throughout the video.
Some of the issues when approaching an older project and “re branding” it that the foundation of the original is based off of key components. Such as music, colors, and script. The original expectation when I was asked to do this was that there was going to be some timing adjustments, along with some color changes. As we dug into it though, because some of the key components changed, it was almost more economical to start from scratch. The end product could have been rethought and something better could have been produced, and it felt like some of the elements were just bandages to keep the video together (the shipping boxes).
As it stands, it is a good video, and certainly nothing that I am ashamed of. But the lesson learned was when you change key components of a production, like color, music, and script, exception to make major changes throughout.
Neil Bryce of Bryce Media has been keeping me busy the past while with jobs here and there. Bryce is an awesome person to work with, and is always concerned with getting things right, if you are in the Salt Lake City area, I highly suggest getting in touch with him, definitely someone you want to know if you are involved with video in the Salt Lake area.
This vanity logo for Bolt Construction had a really quick turn around (about a day) and the creative is simple but effective. This video features a stone wall background with wood shingles in the upper third, but a few more versions were rendered out without the background, with a blue background, and one without movement.
The background assets used were from a website that hosts public domain photography, vectors, and other graphics, called Pixabay. Definitely a site you want to add to your bookmarks in case you need some quick assets on a budget. There is no guarantee that all the content is public domain, as there are no actor/actress release forms. But images without people should be fairly safe.
For those who are interested, here is a screen capture of the my Blender compositor. A fairly easy setup. Background, logo, a couple of particle effects, and lighting.
With only about a week and half, Neil Bryce asked me to get a creative together based solely based on a website and a few suggestions on what it should feel like. Not much to go on. With this in mind, and with that much freedom, I decided to put a bit more effort in this one by prepping a storyboard. Allowing the client to get a clear picture of what I had in mind, in order to make the most out of the coming week. (If you have 4k, be sure to change the YouTube settings.)
Very simple creative based primarily off the website for the conference. The first day I put a simple style guide together along with a storyboard for the video. The storyboard was quickly accepted by the client, and I was able to move into picking out music that I could mock something up to.
The music was the first and only bump in the road during the week long production. They had chosen one song, and I had begun to mock something up, and about 3 days into production, we all decided that the song needed to change. This forced us to have to re-time things, and make some other small adjustments to movement. Other than that though, the video flew together, and result that everyone was happy with was born. I am not sure if the 4k version was actually used at the conference, but it is still pretty awesome to see it playing on a 4k monitor.
Putting together a storyboard was the best part of the project. Because the creative was wide open for whatever, I had allot of freedom in what the final result would look like. It is an awesome feeling when people just trust you as an artist to make something cool.
The storyboards and style guide below were assembled in Inkscape for the sake of speed and clarity.
I used Blender to put the entire video together, and final encoding with FFMpeg. Because of the simplicity of the content, editing in 4k and rendering out previews was smooth. Compositing was simple, with everything essentially on one layer. But there was a final glow added to the music drop on the end, this was done in the Blender Video Sequence Editor before the final render.
The blue polygon, or what I like to call the “host”, was a simple particle system, with a blend texture applied to the particle size to make the particles come in and out of existence smoothly. The host was added to help create a consistency to the video, or a thread that binds it all together, but to also add energy and urgency to the video with the seemingly erratic movement and the natural corners of the polygon.
My brother and I have been working hard on the Atari Jaguar stuff, and new ideas, art, writting, and code, trickles into each and every project everyday. Flappy Mcfur is the first fruits of our efforts.
Obviously a Flappy Bird clone for the Atari Jaguar, this program really was just a training ground for me in C programming. It was fun getting the basic assets together, and code the various aspects of game. From menus, to score keeping, and movement of Flappy McFur. Speaking of movement, it is very rudementary, and the next version will have movement more akin to Flappy Bird.
The box art and CD art were both put together in Inkscape, with screenshots from the actual game. Currently we are not sure if we will actually be making and selling physical versions of the game, but I though it might be nice to give people who download it, the opportunity to put together something nice for it if they wish.
The Pre-Release trailer was a blast to put together. I wanted something that would build up, and then let the viewer drop, realizing it isn’t anything too amazing. I really like the way the fly around with the console came out. I haven’t used lattices in 3D animation for a long time, and they poved really effective for bending the flowing text around the various contours of the Jaguar console and controller. The footage of gameplay was captured using the Virtual Jagauar emulator, and it plays almost exactly how it does on the actual Jaguar hardware. It’s such a simple game, why wouldn’t it? Also, this video, and the next one, were both completely done in Blender, with 2D assets in the Gimp.
On another small note, Bryce noticed that out YouTube subscription counter, on the JagCorner channel, was almost to 64, and he came up with the idea for a little video to celebrate the 64th subscriber and the 64-bit glory of the Atari Jaguar. Check it out, and subscribe to our channel to keep up with other video content we will be producing in the future.
