Business of Design Banner

by Markos on August 28, 2010

I had a great time working with John from www.motionworks.com.au on his last banner and was really flattered when he asked me to put together a new banner for his first Business of Design product; Success with Twitter.

John supplied the bulk of the imagery and I put the design and animation together. The whole thing came together really quickly and looks great.

View the finished banner here.

Cinema 4D HDRI Light Kit Pro

by Markos on August 15, 2010

Just a very quick post to say a massive thank you to Nick Campbell (greyscalegorilla.com) for his superb HDRI Light Kit Pro for Cinema 4D.

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Photoshop Composite: Ash meets Gandalf

by Markos on July 31, 2010

Ash meets Gandalf

I found another picture of my young lad on my phone. This time he was holding a toy windmill up to a fan (He loves fans).

I needed a break from cutting html and css so decided to open up photoshop and see what I could put together.

This isn’t complete as yet … but overall I was pretty pleased with the look so thought I would share :)

View the large image here.

I have a good friend who is an amazing guitarist and he recently recorded a stunning instrumental version of Eric Claptons ‘Tears in Heaven’ for his YouTube channel. I took the opportunity to tidy up the video and make something quite cool at the same time.

Read more and see the video here

Animating still photographs

by Markos on June 28, 2010

The rain was coming down today and I thought I’d try out a few techniques that I had seen in some After Effects tutorials recently. These aren’t high quality renders or finished animations. Just enough for me to try some new techniques. Read more

I’ve been following John from Motionworks for quite some time now and he’s one of the people that is doing great things for the motion graphics community online.

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We’ve just launched the Australian version of www.dts.net.nz over at www.dtls.com.au. The site was pretty much a copy of the New Zealand site with content adjusted so that it was appropriate to the Australian market. The homepage however had a different feature image and the image that was selected was pretty bland.

I suggested that the image might look a bit more appropriate if we included the DTS circle logo on the laptops in the image .. that would give it a bit more punch and reinforce the brand (plus it gave me a legitimate reason to try out the photoshop vanishing point feature). Read more

WEBSITE LAUNCH: www.dts.net.nz

by Markos on May 25, 2010

DTS is one of New Zealand’s leading business broadband providers and I was really honored to be asked to design & develop a new web site for them.

The site was developed with the WordPress framework so that it’s easy to maintain and is built around the concept of progressive enhancement. This basically means that it looks it’s best in new, CSS3 capable browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc) and still degrades to work nicely in Internet Explorer but without some of the visual niceties.

Check out the new DTS website here.

Compositing two photos in photoshop

by Markos on May 9, 2010

I was looking through some photos on my phone recently and came across this hard-case photo of my boy. This is his “I’m stuck to the floor” pose but to me it looked more like kung-fu … and an opportunity to try a little more photoshop compositing.

There were a number of steps in putting this image together, and though I wont go through each of them I’ll mention some of the more interesting ones.

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Sticking with my theme of actually doing tutorials (and not just watching along) I wanted to experiment with a very cool lighting technique demonstrated by photoshop legend, Russell Brown, in this fantastic tutorial.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-russell-brown-show/samurai-poster-part-2/

Read more about how this was put together.