Revostock

Welcome! My name is Alan Shisko, and I'm a freelance motion graphics artist working out of Toronto, Canada. I've been very lucky in my career to have had many inspiring teachers, and decided to start this blog to give back to the community that has enriched me both technically and aesthetically. Perhaps my words and images will inspire you to do the same! If you wish, take a minute to view my demo reel at Shisko.com, or view a comprehensive gallery of my past work Here.


Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Walkin' in 3d


A client brought me a nice challenge recently: create an opening based upon nothing more than the client-supplied logo. Free reign on the creative! We bounced some ideas back and forth and finally decided to make the logo speak (or rather 'walk') for itself.

The spot was to be executed in After Effects. The trick is, how does one create an entire world in the "flat" AE 3d space? And once that was solved, how then to give all of the letters some personality as they range around the set? And to compound the issues, how does one animate everything whilst keeping an eye on client-side changes that might necessitate whole-sale changes to the movements on scores of layers?

First, take a look at the finished spot HERE (QT, h264, :37, 8.4 mb) Then take a look at THIS project walk-through which gives you an overview of what I did to pull it all together.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice overview.
Nice use of the expressions for the movement! I learned something from this!

Possible to post the project?Without the media ofcours. Just to check the camera animations,expressions and so on...

Tielman

Anonymous said...

Cant wait to check this out, I learned a lot from the news intro, thanks for your time. Abraham

Anonymous said...

You are an inspiration for new mographers like myself.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge

Alan Shisko said...

I've uploaded an abbreviated version of the project (no footage included, alas!). The link is on the main post.

-Alan

BilletHQ said...

So Alan - what's the H-264 recipe ?
I've been using Cleaner for this task, but man are those passes sllllllllllllow. How is the AE output ?

T-works said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

thanks alan for the project!

Alan Shisko said...

billethq,

I capture at 15 fps, 1024x768 using Camtasia Studio. It's important to go into the prefs of Camtasia and select ".AVI" files for the file-type (defaults to a proprietary codec that can't be imported into Premiere Pro).

Set up a 15fps, 1024x768, square pix project in Premiere Pro, import the footage, drop it on the timeline then go to File-> Export-> Adobe Media Encoder.

Format: h264 (don't choose 'Quicktime' and then choose h264 for the codec... this is a different beast)

Summary: Video tab: 1024x768, progressive, square pix, main, level 4.0... bitrate settings vary on the project, often as low as .192, maybe up to .35 for short projects. Advanced settings... KF distance of 30 frames.

Audio tab: AAC, mono, 11.025khz, quality= medium, 24 kbps.

Alan Shisko said...

Oh, and in further response to Bill, the output from AE to QT h264 isn't nearly as good as the quality via Adobe Media Encoder. I BELIEVE that the AME uses the MainConcept h264 codec, where AE uses a standard Apple h264? Speculation, but it IS much better through AME.