My 1st GSG 5 Second Project CMYK
In my stumbles across the world wide web I found this guy, Nick Campbell who is pretty amazing. He took the high road in motion graphics and decide to venture off on his own and one of the many reasons were his 5 second projects. The 5 second project is based on a theme that he gives and you have to create an animation to it. He’s had a lot of really fun ones and I wish that I took the time to do each and everyone but until today I had never submitted my own project. He has many blogs that venture in the realms of Cinema 4D and After Effects tutorials, how to make cool shit, photography, iPhone apps… he’s got it all. Really great guy and you should check him out at greyscalegorilla.com
The theme of CMYK is so awesome because everywhere we look and everything we see is based of those 4 beautiful colors. Its such a universal language in design that I couldnt resist taking the time to do one. As the rules state, its no more that 5 seconds long. Thats it. I’ve see a lot of amazing work done in 5 seconds so I just wanted to try something new. Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot loves particles. I mean… LOVES particles and he also broadcasts a ton of amazing tutorials. On his blog he posted a project that used many different particle emitters in sync to audio. But the way he did it was pretty awesome. He based not only the amount of particles but the velocity at which they emitted with some basic interpolation expressions and the result was amazing. So I wanted to experiment with my own music doing a similar effect and what better way to try something new than to have a project that can be so vibrant with color like CMYK.
I used Cinema 4D to model and texture the letters as well as animate the camera. I tried a bunch of different things with nulls and ended up with a compositing tag on a null rotating the type so when I exported the AE file I linked my light to the path and then had all of my emitters emit from the light. I also have Video Copilots optical flairs and thats the shiny tip of the emitters.
The audio is from Sasha’s Airdrawndagger. I took the intro 5 seconds from Drempels and the beat from Wavy Gravy and slapped them together inside of Ableton live. Since I had the melody, bass line, bass drum and rim shot on separate tracks I time stretched everything to match up then exported the different tracks and put them into AE. From there I used Red Giants Sound Keys to get my frequency data for my expressions and there you have it.
After compositing everything and I wanted to add some motion blur, depth of field and a little twitch that syncs to the bass drum. I used RSMB and Frischlufts Depth of Field along with Video Copilots twitch to get the final touches in place. The render had some issues because I am exporting so many particles that the processor really has to think about it. I’m pushing this computer as far as I can with this project and its pretty cool to watch this come to life. I hope you enjoy the 5 seconds and wish me luck in the competition. Did I mention that? Yeah, there are prizes involved too!
It was kind of a pain to get this project to get of after effects. I had a lot of issues with the particles. The computer just couldn’t handle all of them… I also had problems with the audio export from AE. The sync was way off and I had to cut it out and add it in FCP… I’ll try to render a new one on my Mac at home and see what happens.
This post is tagged: 5 second project, after effects, cinema 4d, cs5, greyscalegorilla, gsg, Motion Graphics, vfx
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