XScriptorium: New AE Script/Expression Resource

I completely understand that expressions and scripting in After Effects can be intimidating to users of a more artistic bent. And you can certainly create great work in AE without using expressions or scripting. But every now and then - more often than you might expect - knowing just a little can save you time in creating repetitive, tricky, or precise animation. I liken them to having the ultimate unpaid intern hanging around studio. Fortunately, there are several free web resources available that allow you to dip your toe in these waters.

The latest is Ole Sturm’s XScriptorium site. It has just launched in public beta, and contains a lot of content from the AE online help file (you use Help, don’t you?), but already shows some very nice organization and a few expressions described clearly from a “so you want to do this” point of view. It is based on code contributions from users; not just Ole. He also allows you to “tip” the expression or script’s creator should you find their contribution useful. Check it out.

In this vein, make sure you also check out the established sites MotionScript.com by the friendly guru Dan Ebberts (which is as much about learning how to write expressions and scripts as it is a resource for useful expressions), and AEnhancers, a moderated forum on scripting and expressions with multiple contributors.

And of course, our own books Creating Motion Graphics and After Effects Apprentice have introductory chapters on expressions. In particular, check out the bonus chapter on CMG’s DVD-ROM which is a rather detailed resource for writing more advanced expressions, with examples.

A few hours spent learning “just enough to be dangerous” will more than repay you in time saved, I promise.

TED Talk: Where does creativity hide?

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conference is a place where Big Thinkers gather annually to inspire and be inspired. Fortunately, TED tapes their presentations, and has been making an effort to post their huge archive of talks for free on the internet.

While browsing these talks, I was particularly taken by Amy Tan’s presentation on “Where does creativity hide?” It’s a humorous review of her own creative process. Although she comes from a different field (she’s the novelist behind The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses), I found it very entertaining as well as insightful, as it bounced from personal creativity to deciding to what we’re going to do with our lives, using her mother, advanced physics, and world events as touchstones. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Spotlight: Promos for FOX’s “Fringe”

As mentioned earlier, we will be discussing motion graphics projects executed by other studios. This time around, it’s Buster Design and the on-air promos they created for Fringe, a new series premiering this September on FOX - click here to view movies of the final animations. I had the chance to chat with Brandon Pleus of Buster about what went into this project.

Spotlight: Nordisk Panorama Filmfestival 2008

As we mentioned in a recent post, we’d like to start featuring projects by other motion graphics artists, including some background on what went into their creation. First up is a promo for the Nordisk Panorama 5 Cities Film Festival 2008 created by André Hedetoft. Two of the components of this promo that particularly caught our eye were the use of silhouetted figures, and the lovely particle effects.

Adobe will support RED

Sorry for the short post, but I know this is news many of us have been waiting to hear (and sooner than some of us thought):

“Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects.” On both Mac and Windows.

This is not a rumor; this is the real deal.

Here is the thread on Reduser.net.

Mobile Animation for Comics

We wake up most mornings listening to the new on NPR (National Public Radio). This morning, after a story on Comic-con (the huge annual comic book convention), there was a piece on the boom in “mobile animation” in Japan. Japan is a big market for comic books (”manga”), as well as a big market for mobile phones and new trends in mobile media. The story indicated that distributing comics through mobile phones had become The Next Big Thing over there. Some advancements include touch-interface phones such as the iPhone, which allows a tactile turning-the-page experience. But also of interest is animating the comics for delivery over cell phones and other mobile players.

If you’re looking for new niches or market opportunities, it may be time to brush up on the subjects of converting drawn art to vectors (time to crack open that copy of Adobe Illustrator which came free with your After Effects or Photoshop bundle), creating vector artwork (especially comics), and - most important of all - animating that artwork. This last skill is what can set you, a motion graphics artist, apart from other more conventional illustrators in the field, or make yourself an important partner for them. Adobe Flash is obviously the big dog in this field, but there are also a couple of other solutions out there worth exploring, such as Anime Studio Pro which allows you to add “bones” to vector or even hand-drawn artwork, and the Puppet Tools in Adobe After Effects CS3 and later.

By the way, another news item this morning concerned a new search engine called Cuil (“an old Irish word for knowledge”) started by a bunch of ex-Googlites. A search for “mobile animation” on Cuil returned a subjectively more useful result (arranged in a far more visually useful fashion) than a standard Google search. Keep an eye on them.

Focus On Design

One of our plans for this blog going forward is to not only cover gear, techniques, and business issues, but also motion graphics artists and their art. If you’ve done a cool project recently, and are willing to share inside information on the design as well as how you executed those design challenges, please get in touch with us so that we can potentially cover you here - send email to either one of our first names at cybmotion.com.

In that vein, we thought it would be fun to dust off an extensive article we wrote back in 1999 (the previous century!) that covered designers and design trends at the 1999 BDA Conference. In 1999, grunge type treatments were still all the rage (think “Seven”); it’s fun to look back now and see what from those designs still looks fresh and relevant, and which ones might not have survived the test of time.

Click here to read the main article, which discussed several important design trends including typography, 2D vs. 3D, and the emergence of the desktop-based studio which we now take for granted.

Click here to read a companion article which focused on nine studios, and recent projects they had executed back then (lots of eye candy!).

Leaving Los Angeles

The reason we haven’t been posting up here for the past couple of weeks is because we’ve been packing up our home/office/studio and putting it into storage while we buy a new home in the East Mountains section of Albuquerque, just down the Turquoise Trail from Santa Fe. There are many reasons we’re undergoing this major life change, several of which we’ll be elaborating upon in the upcoming weeks and months. If you’re curious, here’s a few of the reasons why:

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