This month features promos by myself and the Foxtel Box Office design team include The Hurt Locker, World’s Greatest Dad, Green Zone, Gentleman Broncos and Crazy Heart.
Green Zone
Motionworks recently featured a shot from the Green Zone promo here, created by team member Brett. Below is another example where Brett integrated 3D text (created in Cinema 4D) using The Foundry’s CameraTracker plug-in for Adobe After Effects.
This super variation, integrates various satellite shots, playing on a key theme in the film.
Crazy Heart
For Crazy Heart the supplied key art was portrait and cropped at the sides, rendering it useless for a landscape packshot. However, the high contrast colour grade used in the key art was striking, so I replicated in that in Photoshop, using a more suitable, ungraded still.
Ungraded shot
The final packshot includes the graded shot and a stock image of timber sourced from DarkNews. The timber echos the weathered and worn nature of the lead character and compliments the high contrast grade.
Final Packshot (minus date and order details)
A Fast Blur adjustment layer, adds depth-of-field over the right shoulder, and Red Giant Software Key Correct Light Wrap and Edge Blur help integrate the talent. Key Correct is not only for preparing shots for cleaner keys, but also for creating cleaner, more believable composites of pre-matted imagery. Check out some training, including a Getting Started tutorial by me here. You can get a 10% discount using the code motionworks10.
The timber is also used for the text and background in the super. The font is Clarendon.
World’s Greatest Dad
World’s Greatest Dad was simple and fun. The text was laid out in 3D in After Effects, with a single letter dropping forward, reflecting the “damaged” nature of the son and the less-than-perfect relationship with his father.
I keyframed the rotation and position of the letters manually. Each letter was tweaked slightly to ensure they weren’t identical. A simple Shape Layer gradient for a floor and reflection on the text using Video Copilot Reflect works well to give it depth. The font is Bebas Neue.
Gentlemen Broncos
Gentlemen Broncos could have been a forgettable project but the inclusion of a few expressions really added some personality to the type animation. Gareth and I worked to together using a combination of keyframes and expressions to give the letters a natural, organic feel as they dropped into place. The bounce was created using the Decaying Bounce expression available at Motion Graphics Xchange. The strings are actually the Beam effect, linked via an expression to the Anchor Point of each letter. Check out this short tip on how to use Beam. The font was cut from key art, so please leave a comment if you can identify it.
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker is a good example of taking a concept from a tutorial, in this case Andrew Kramer’s Animating a Still tutorial, and making it your own. Here team member Gareth used techniques from the tutorial to animate a key art image from the film, giving what might have been a dull flat image, depth and dimension. The font is Helvetica Neue 93 Black Extended.
The super features Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 dust and heat displacement created using FX Factory Heat.
14 Responses to this post
September 9, 2010 at 9:02 pm |
Good stuff and thank you. This is how I learn about various motion graphics tools.
September 16, 2010 at 9:23 am |
Good to know Jansen!
September 10, 2010 at 2:09 am |
keep up the good work John, it’s great to see how many tools you use that are at your disposal, like anything there are always many ways to skin a cat….poor little things.
September 16, 2010 at 9:22 am |
Thanks Darren, it’s fun to work on many short project that give me a chance to try a range of tools. Cheers, John.
September 10, 2010 at 6:55 am |
great work – thanks for sharing the detail of the production. Btw, I am having issues watching those movies – they are really long loading. I never had this problem before on your side…
September 12, 2010 at 12:46 pm |
Hey John,
The camera tracker shot looks cool, it needs a touch more ‘dirtying’ – looks kinda too clean IMHO.
Thanks for sharing!
HK
http://bit.ly/AfterEffectsMalaysia
September 16, 2010 at 9:21 am |
Brett and I discussed this too Hussin. Thanks for your input. Best wishes, John.
September 16, 2010 at 11:38 pm |
I love how natural the text looked in the Gentleman Broncos spot when it dropped in. The extra decay touch really makes a difference!
September 20, 2010 at 5:57 pm |
Thanks Kurtis. It would have been easy to have it just drop in stiffly, but a little work can give a far more pleasing result! Best, John.
September 28, 2010 at 10:50 am |
love it, defiantly can appreciate the quality for short turn around projects.
October 7, 2010 at 8:27 am |
Thanks Phillip, it’s definitely something that you get better at the more you do. The key for me is to keep the quality high and that’s where a good supply of stock, presets, expressions and other tools that allow me to work quickly are critical. Best, John.
October 8, 2010 at 11:13 pm |
I am so excited to be back…….
Thx for making ur feel gr8 again…
December 12, 2010 at 2:31 pm |
hello, first of all great job on the titles above, i liked the last one so much i created my own
http://jump.fm/KRVDH
July 7, 2011 at 3:59 am |
AFTER EFFECT bilmiyorum ama denicem saol john dickinson adam ol …
Akıllı ol…
thank you!!! …..
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