Jun 102013
 

BOOM from MYX on Vimeo.

For this years convention workshop open, Dave (co-producer) and I decided to go a different route than we had in the past. We wanted something that was unique to the company. So, we wrote down all the little sayings, themes, and concepts we could think of that would resonate with the field. We then started to pair it down until we had a solid bit of structure. We then did something very scary, we wrote a rap song based on all of this. While this song would not mean much to the rest of the world, the field loved it. We don’t have actors, we have the field agents of Primerica. We used some of the most notable people in the company as our tallent. This is great as they can get behind something that means something to them. The only difficulty was that most of these folks are not necessarily musical. We made a scratch track for them to hear as they were walking in. Many really took to it and gave it a go. We shot the majority of it over a weekend. It was all shot on greenscreen with my 5D mkIII and Roland recorder. This is a lot of people and a lot of takes. But we got it all sorted out and made sure that if they volunteered, that they made it in to the piece somewhere. We had to do some time correction as some folks couldn’t find the beat, but none the less, it all worked out. We originally had planned a little over 2 weeks to edit and produce the open, but several other projects started bumping this out of the way. Finally we had to draw the line or else there was not going to be an open. This was put together in a week. We would have liked to do more with it, but there was no time. We finished rendering at 2:15 am on a Saturday (Sunday morning), and we left from the studio and went straight to the Ga. Dome to start working on video work which would be recorded there.

 Posted by at 10:00 am
Oct 102009
 

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.

 Posted by at 1:17 pm
Mar 202009
 

This is a test… It is only a test. Had this been a real explosion… Dude in the truck would be toast. This is a composite that I made in AE some time back. Occasionally, I’ll challenge myself to re-create something I see. I saw a number of clips on YouTube that were IR camera recordings of aerial bombing missions. While I was looking for reference clips to study, I found it interesting how much they varied. I built my HUD in AE (Not saying much as it was really not very complicated). The rest was made with nothing more than the photo below. The explosion was made with 4 separate partial systems. All are Trapcode Particular. The glows are Trapcode Star Glow.

 Posted by at 10:01 pm
Nov 022008
 


This was a quick test using Trapcode Particular and Horizon. I used a number of expressions to self animate the particle system as well as the camera. Even though it was just a test, I really liked the feeling of movement. It would make a really bad amusement park ride.

 Posted by at 8:13 pm