Motion What?

People ask me what it is that I do. I respond with a perky "I'm a motion graphics artist!", which is pretty much universally met with a blank stare. "You know" (I say) "Like at the start of the superbowl when they have that neat animated intro bit. Titles and such. Graphics that move." And they nod their heads, mutter some sort of platitude, then move on. "Well somebodies got to make 'em" I add as they recede into the distance.

I've always thought of Motion Graphics as being a bit of a dark art. People generally don't realize that all those titles and commercials and sports info pages have to be made by somebody. Machines can't (yet!) come up with automated unifying graphics packages, and it's left to people like me to wrap a show in pretty pictures that support the editorial content. It's a very challenging discipline as you've got to be (in my opinion) equal parts artist and gear head.

I use Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and 3dStudio Max for the bulk of my motion graphics design work. There are tons of books out there that show you how to use the software, but I've found that there aren't that many 'workflow' resources. It's my intention with this blog to talk a little bit about the process behind actual projects that I do, hopefully addressing questions often directed my way on the subjects of: project goals, what decisions have to be made, what difficulties are encountered and (hopefully!) overcome and general workflow discussion.

I will not, however, be publishing step by step tutorials of my work: it just takes waaay to long and I'm assuming that whoever is reading this knows a thing or two about the artform and can get the gist of what I'm talking about. And what I'm talking about is going to be unscripted and usually fairly verbose... kind of a one sided conversation with me droning on about things a little bit longer than is necessary, for the most part :)