Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Motion Graphics

I remember being a kid in elementary school after school care program and one of my favorite activities they would do with us was to take a full pack of index cards and a binder clip and draw card by card to produce a flip book. Like every kid I loved cartoons but I was really fascinated in how they were produced. I remember being very fascinated by the show Samurai  Jack because of the elaborate hand painted backgrounds of the late night cartoon. In older age I remember getting excited about MTV's idents and the pop up graphics on VH1's pop up videos.

Recently I've been trying more and more to work with motion graphics. I really enjoy learning new things. A friend of mine tipped me off to a great resource, videocopilot.net. This site has really helped me learn Adobe After Effects. But motion is something that I've always been attracted to. The addition of timing, motion and physics give art work a human feel that people can relate to. Still images instantly become alive. They move the way we move.

Learning motion graphics has been very natural so far due to my work in flash. Currently I'm working my way through over 100 tutorials on the videocopilot.net website in order to master the tools of the trade. Hopefully soon you'll see some original motion graphic projects coming from me. 


But until then please enjoy this college project of mine using a scanner and still images mixed with Photoshop effects in order to produce stop motion animation. I used pieces from a broken VCR and images/scans of myself to create tension between man and machine. It's loosely supposed to be a narrative about robots. Could androids exist? Maybe, maybe not but it was a lot of fun to do and the process matches the concept (a little bit of hand work and a little bit of computer).





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