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.
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
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.
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.
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/
The Discover Boating website is an initiative from the Marine Industry Association of New Zealand with the aim being to educate and encourage people on all matters boating.
I worked closely with the the team at MIA to replicate the content from their existing site and set up a similar structure in the WordPress platform.
Once the structure was developed I then began work on the look and feel. It was important that the new site look and work pretty much the same as the existing site so as not to present any undue suprises to the users. I did manage to squeeze in a few subtle enhancements and for those using browsers that support some of the newer CSS3 options (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) then the interface is enhanced with rounded edges, shadowing and more.
Overall the transition from the old platform to the new WordPress based environment went very well indeed.
Check out the discoverboating.co.nz web site here.
I recently needed a blurred futuristic grid / network style image with a dark background. Instead of grabbing some stock imagery I decided to create the image myself using Cinema 4D, Adobe Photoshop, Lens Blur and Fireworks.
Here is my take on another fantastic Greyscale Gorilla tutorial from Nick Campbell – Precomping in After Effects.
You can find the original tutorial here.
Thanks Nick.
