Slow Motion Heroes vs Wall Of Sound

It's been a very busy few months, only getting time to blog stuff now! I finished up college for 2011 at the beginning of December and spent the next couple of weeks developing animations for projection at the Slow Motion Heroes Wall of Sound gig. The three animations looped on a projected background through out the gig. The animations were based on the artwork for three of the EPs. It was my first time doing anything like this, if I was doing it again i'd definitely make a few changes but over all I was pretty happy with the result.

I uploaded just a minute of each animation to Vimeo (see below). On the night the animations were longer with lyrics from the songs overlaid on top. Definitely enjoyable and something i'd like to do again! Unfortunately I took no photos *kicking myself* but I have this pic of the lads soundchecking before the gig with "One Liners" in the background.

Anni Albers - Original Op Artist?

I'm doing some research for a vj animation i'm currently working on for Slow Motion Heroes. It's for the upcoming "Wall of Sound" gig on the 28th of December. I'm doing a short projection animation of about 4 minutes, each minute reflecting one of their 4 eps, at the moment i'm working on the (soon to be released) "one liners" ep. My idea was to make something based on op-art, initially I had the work of Sol LeWitt in mind, the textile designs of Anni Albers (which I LOVE!) also sprang to mind as being very similar. I just wanted to share some of the images i've found here. If you're interested, Gunta Stolzl (her peer) also has some amazing textile designs, very inspirational stuff!

MAI Animation Screenshots

Just finished a first pass of the MAI animation, there's a lot of camera movement in the animation which is nice, gives it some fluidity. Have to find a backing track now, aargh! It takes ages to go through the stock music sites.

Nairtl Screenshots

Wow, so i'm just back from Dubai almost TWO WEEKS late due to the Icelandic Volcano God.

I'm tearing busy, lots of lost time to make up for, some niggling adjustments to the Nairtl promo (screenshots above) plus I have a lot to prepare for the Sloop2 meeting in Romania next week. First time going to Romania! Am intrigued.

And to finish... best volcano joke i've heard so far... "yo momma so fat, when she was cremated flights in Europe were cancelled for a week!" Ahaha!

New Essential French Demo

Happy New Year!

So here are some stills from the Essential French demo I was working on before Christmas, again the demo was made in aftereffects, a mix of vector graphics and stock photography. The course itself was developed by us in DEIS using a mix of articulate studio and flash. In terms of design I concentrated on colourful, chunky, fun graphics to appeal to the secondary school target audience. As part of the design I developed icons for the three sections of the courses; Listening, Reading and Vocabulary, and Grammar, you can see these in the screenshots above. We worked closely with the Essential French grind school to develop an online moodle portal populated with French language lessons. The lessons were informed by the schools face-to-face experience as well as our own expertise in the area and feature a mix of accessible learning resources (such as mp3s and vocab lists) as well as interactive, self-corrected exercises with intelligent feedback and step-by-step introductions to key grammatical points.

DEIS also developed a site for Essential French, see; essentialfrench.ie

Sigtec Animations

Here are some screenshots of what's been keeping me busy lately,

Sigtec is one of our first innovation voucher clients in DEIS. The job involved developing three animations to represent Sigtec's main product - the Bluebox Solution.

Sigtec supplied the scripts and I began work on the images. The three animations consisted of an overview, an example of the system in operation and a run through of the benefits of the system. I developed the illustrations and icons for industries in illustrator. The photos were downloaded using our subscription to a stock images site. As the content was very explanation-driven (particularly in the second animation) I wanted to develop images in an information graphic style, this is pretty broad I know! I concentrated on developing clean, minimal images, using colour to signify the more important elements in each image.

Once detailed storyboards were developed and signed off on and voiceover was recorded, I began work in aftereffects. The animation is quite simple, concentrating on information diagrams and sequencing of images an photographs to illustrate points being made.

One of the more difficult aspects was to develop an interesting animation introduction involving the logo. After looking at a number of tutorials, I developed the 2d illustrator logo file into a 3d image using this tutorial: http://hottek.net/2008/07/advanced-extrusion-with-shatter.html I animated the logo with camera movements to produce a sweeping / zooming effect, the background was more difficult to develop. I worked with after effects presets, but problems with a slow machine, and the general unsuitability of the presets limited me. Eventually I downloaded stock video from videohive.net.