Just some of the speakers at motion09. All photos ©2009 Chelsea Nicole. All Rights Reserved.
Earlier this month, we were happy to participate in our third straight Motion Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with talks on animation, motion graphics, and visual effects. In contrast to many other conferences in this industry that focus primarily on hardware and software, Motion’s focus is more on design. Indeed, the conference this year was divided into three sections: motion{u} on Saturday, which consisted of our all-day After Effects intensive; planet*motion on Sunday, which focused on software and techniques; and motion09 on Monday through Wednesday, which consisted primarily of presentations by artists. With up to three sessions going on at once, and the day sometimes stretching from 9 AM to 11:30 PM, we weren’t able to attend all the talks; here’s some highlights from the sessions we either presented or sat in on:
After Effects Intensive
It’s impossible to teach all of After Effects in a day, so for our one-day intensives we select a variety of topics in After Effects that we feel are important to master – but which aren’t entirely obvious or intuitive. For this session, we focused on Color Management (including how to best create web versions of broadcast animations), Text Animators (it’s all about the selection…), 3D Lighting Tricks (including the use of Material Options to enhance footage, Light Transmission, and a side trip into Puppet tools (a lot of fun), and 3D Integration (focusing on using Maxon’s CINEMA 4D with After Effects).
We trade off during the day, with one of us teaching while the other helps students keep up. For a hand-on class, we prefer to limit enrollment to 8-12 students to ensure we have time to get around to everyone. We were surprised when 15 seats “sold out” before the conference. Then four more called on the Friday before, begging to get in. Then by Saturday, we were trying to find enough tables and chairs to fit 21 into the room! We apologize to those who we may not have been able to get to often enough, but overall the class went really well, with great spirit in the room. Considering this is twice the class size than previous years, it shows that a lot of people are trying to improve their skills as an answer to a bad economy.
Apple Motion Sessions
Everyone who has Final Cut Studio has a copy of Motion, but in the past it seemed that users were slow to adopt it; recently we’ve noticed far more people now use Motion. On Sunday, fellow PVC writer Mark Spencer taught a series of seven sessions on Apple’s Motion that were helpful introductions into the capabilities of the program. Mark made a special effort throughout to translate Motion’s features for After Effects users, which was appreciated (if you find yourself in that camp, Mark wrote an article comparing the two for PVC, and also has a training video on the subject).
Editing & Animating to Music
We both come from musical backgrounds, so it’s only natural for us to rely heavily on the soundtrack of a piece (be it music or a simple voiceover) to help inform our edits and animations. However, very few take advantage of this potential synergy in their own work. In this session, Chris went over the basics of spotting “hit points” in a soundtrack, editing or keyframing based on those hit points, and fine-tuning an animation to better suit the mood of the music (click here for an article on this subject on PVC). At the end, Chris showed how to link animations directly to sound using Expressions, the Trapcode SoundKeys plug-in, and the built-in Audio parameter behavior inside Motion.
Which Text Tool is for You: Motion or After Effects?
Both After Effects and Motion have very powerful text animation engines, which work in surprisingly similar ways. However, there are important differences in how they work as well as what options they offer. Trish compared and contrasted the two in an effort to help an artist choose which tool to use, as well as translate their skills from one program to another. (You can also read this article on PVC to glean some of her thoughts and pick up important tips.)
next page: Crash, Terminator, and opening titles
Machine Vision: Through the Eyes of the Terminator
On the following Monday, Rod Basham (VEX Supervisor at Imaginary Forces) broke down how they created the “machine vision” look, including using a Bumblebee Stereo Vision camera to generate depth maps which were then massaged and fed into Trapcode Form to create a three-dimensional dot map. The resulting imagery is not perfect – which worked just fine for the concept that the terminator’s vision would be an imperfect exercise in developing technology working in harsh environments. Indeed, they learned to exploit faults, such as poor lighting on one side of a face causing errors such as tearing in the shadow areas.
Crash: Creating the Look; Delivering the Product
The Art of Title Design
left to right: event co-organizer Elaine Montoya plus panelists Jamie Caliri, Karin Fong, Synderela Peng, and William Lebeda.
After a long mid-day break for attendees to visit Albuquerque’s charming Old Town, four designers – Jamie Caliri of DUCK, Karin Fong of Imaginary Forces, Synderela Peng of yU+co, and William Lebeda of PictureMill – shared with us some of their main title design work and talked about the process of trying to find middle ground between a film’s needs, the director’s desires, and their own creative vision. Although many like to quip that the difference between editing and motion graphics is that motion graphics doesn’t need to tell a story, in reality the best motion graphics do – and this is paramount when setting up the story of a movie.
The Rise of Visual Effects
After the main title panel was a second keynote, where Andrew Orloff of Zoic Studios went over the historical perspective of how major shifts in technology brought with them major shifts in techniques – such as the move from stop-motion animation to 3D character animation, and how the dropping price point of desktop workstations helped open the door for the use of more visual effects in movies.
left to right: Elaine Montoya, Rod Basham, Lee Roderick, and Bryan Thombs.
This was followed Tuesday by a panel consisting of Rod Basham of Imaginary Forces, Bryan Thombs of PictureMill, and gun-for-hire Lee Roderick discussing The Art of VFX Supervision. What was interesting is that – in opposition to the stereotype of the big-brained visual effects guru – none came from an engineering background; instead, all came from design or otherwise worked their way up from being an effects animator to supervisor.
next page: trends, trailers, and motion graphics in unusual places
Tuesday morning, Trish had a plane to catch to go speak at Postapalooza in Michigan, while Chris stayed behind to catch the final two days of motion09. Chris slipped in at the tail end of Mark Coleran’s always-excellent talk on producing data screens and other visual interfaces for films (it’s interesting to see how many elements Mark pre-renders so that he can quickly re-use them in different contexts) before seeing a few more talks, panels, and keynotes:
Experience Design: Unconventional Content Delivery Systems
Bubbles in the Wine for the Guggenheim Museum’s New York, New York exhibition on the last 50 years of New York architecture. Video was projected from inside eight 20′ cones that ended in bubble-like screens of varying sizes, all synchronized to a soundtrack. They built a stencil in Final Cut Pro of how the bubble-screens would be arranged so that the editor could check how the images would sequence and flow. (Follow the link above and select the “play movie” option to see the template and actual show side-by-side.)
New City for the Museum of Modern Art’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition on “the concept of a living virtual world that is parallel and simultaneous to ours.” Here, a faceted space was constructed in a corner of a large hall in the museum. It consisted of 12 trapezoidal images that required careful matting to ensure that one projector’s image didn’t spill over onto an adjacent screen. Projector position and throw distance had to be taken into account; in at least one case, a projector would have needed to have been placed in another room to work (oops) – fortunately, a hybrid overhead projector by NEC saved the day.
Lake of Dreams for the Wynn Las Vegas hotel. The projection surfaces consisted of one large rectangular screen (which doubled as a waterfall), a circular screen overhead (which moved up and down), and a large head sculpture that rose and lowered in front of the main screen. Special challenges included matching the physical motion of the circular screen and head, plus matting out the image intended for the head from the image that appeared on the back screen. Also interesting was distorting the faces of the various talent to fit the generic (and not quite human) features on the giant head.
Trailer Design – Putting Butts in Seats
Branding – create a “visual signature” of the film for the campaign. The goal is to create a consistent vision – which is sometimes made more challenging by a studio drawing upon pieces intended for different purposes to create the trailer.
Evolution – what to do when a franchise shifts its focus, or you’re trying to resurrect an old brand.
Fixing – occasionally film marketing fails; testing reveals problems in how a film is perceived. It then becomes the job of the trailer to re-cast the film in the desired light.
Lying – “because sometimes, the truth isn’t enough.” A trailer sometimes needs to project a persona that implies the film, but doesn’t contain actual scenes from the film. One example was the “music video” that was created for the trailer of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
William and Bryan also spent some time discussing the new requirements that 3D filmmaking has presented for trailer graphics. You can no longer use 2D cheats to imply 3D space (such as scaling a logo to make at appear to recede or come toward you); you actually have to move it in 3D space. Same goes for smoke, particles, rays, volumetric light, and the such – actual 3D effects are now required, as a flat image on a 2D plane won’t convey the required depth.
What’s Fresh – Get Your Trend On
right to left: Chris and Trish Meyer hanging out at a keynote with Erik van der Wilden and Michael Waldron of nailgun*.
Michael Waldron and Erik can der Wllden packed a lot into this talk – so much, that we covered it in a separate post we made earlier, including videos of many of the spots they presented. Some of the overall trends they highlighted were film upping the ante of quality (they recently done their first shoot with the RED One), 3D that doesn’t look like 3D, and using interesting transitions to help make pieces special.
After an hour of showing us examples of cool, trendy spots, they admitted that – to a degree – they use trends as a guide of what to stay away from, so that they keep their own work fresh. However, knowing the current trends is still necessary so that you understand what your clients may be asking for.
Promos & Show Packages
The next day, Michael and Erik of nailgun* showed off some of the promos and show packages they created themselves. They often find themselves pitching for a show that has not been shot yet – so need to ask a lot of questions up front (and even then, the direction of show might change during the initial shooting). They invariably show the client a minimum of three storyboards with different approaches, with a minimum of six frames per storyboard to convey mood and direction. Of course, sometimes they client likes more than one board, so they end up synthesizing different ideas together.
Although every job is different (and they went through four jobs in great detail), there were some constant themes. Among them was that they tend to sketch their storyboards rather than create them in the computer; it’s faster, and they don’t get bogged down in the details while trying to get an idea out of their heads. Once a direction has been agreed upon, then they go back and do “real” storyboards with something closer to the actual elements. After they get a sign off on the colors, editing order, and the such, then they create some motion tests to make sure the client likes the style of movement. In all cases, they strongly prefer to start with music – even if it’s not the final music – because they find it really informs their edits and animations. Rather than hand off style frames to someone else to animate, a designer sticks with a project from start to end to make sure the idea the client fell in love with at the start is what they see at the end.
The End of the Marathon…
left to right: Elaine Montoya, Phil Young, Dan Haskett, and Phil Nibbelink. All photos ©2009 Chelsea Nicole. All Rights Reserved.
By the fifth day of motion09, we were hitting the saturation point – but there were still some good sessions, such as three veterans of Disney (Phil Young, Dan Haskett, and Phil Nibbelink, pictured above) talking about the downfall of Disney animation, and what makes/made good animation (“schmaltz sells – Disney knew how to tug heartstrings and make the viewer connect to a character”).
The closing keynote consisted of Synderela Peng of yU+co walking through a trio of title sequences she worked on, including the very elegant Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the shadow-puppet-inspired Enchanted, and the very edgy Gamer (some of which was shot in New Mexico), for which yU+co also created the immersive environments. This last movie was a great challenge, as the director shot very “fast and loose” with very little greenscreen – eventually requiring a team of 100 to perform rotoscoping and matchmoves. yU+co worked on 500+ shots in all, about 300 of which made it into the film.
Next year the Motion Conference will start on 10/10/10, and the organizers are promising to further rework the format (and further drop the price). Hope to see you in New Mexico then…
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