One of my friends is an amazing guitarist and he asked me for a bit of help in creating a concert sequence for his next music video for his band, AppMantis.

I thought that sounded like a lot of fun and I had been hanging out to do something a bit creative again.

After a couple of months on and off in the evenings, and with lots of help from tutorials from Andrew Kramer and Nick Campbell, I’m happy to say that we got it nailed.

The concert sequence that I worked on kicks off at about 3:45 but go and listen to the whole track. It’s quite catchy and I think Baz and Simon have done a stellar job for something that had pretty much a zero dollar budget. Watch AppMantis – “Here for You” on Youtube and, if you like it, please click the LIKE button (on YouTube) for them.

I recently had the opportunity to work with the nice folk over at Wave Design. They had a design for a one of their clients web sites and needed some help getting it from paper to pixels.

I put this nice simple site together in WordPress and their customer can easily maintain it themselves.

Check out the actual site here: http://yrw.co.nz

Some friends and I entered a competition to create a video for the Comvita Science Challenge. We had a huge amount of fun and quite a few late nights … but we’re really stoked with the end result so please go and take a look and if you have a vimeo account (which is free hint hint) then give us a big ol heart (like).

UPDATE: We Won!

Just a really quick update as I’ve been very quiet posting here lately. It’s the virtually the end of March and this year is zooming on past.

Firstly, I’m still super busy wrapping up a couple of client web design / development projects. That’s keeping me busy far too late into the evenings but the projects are rewarding and the end results will be great.

Secondly, I’ve extended my contract with local software company, Cucumber. They’re a great bunch of folk and I’m very much enjoying working on some high profile projects with them. There is some great stuff coming out of that company and it’s nice to play a role there.

Thirdly is Sentinel Server & Website Monitoring. This started out as a project with a good friend and long time business associate, Tim Philips. It’s going form strength to strength and its continued development is the major reason why I wont be accepting any new clients for a while. We’ve done some amazing things with this piece of software and we have some solid direction for it’s future. We’re getting really positive feedback and, to once again be involved in developing something special is extremely exciting.

Lastly, video production, vfx and motion graphics, are continuing to excite and enthrall me. I’ve been working on numerous small video projects here and there and have recently been approached by 3 separate agencies looking for After Effects freelancers. Guys, once the smoke clears, I would be more than happy to chat with you further about AE freelance work. Thanks very much for taking the time to make contact.

Here’s a quick experiment with Adobe After Effects and Optical Flares (from Videocopilot). I captured this quick video on my iPhone on a recent stroll around Mt Maunganui. The sun was going down throwing a stunning gold light over everything and Ash couldn’t resist a quick paddle in the water.

When I got home, I checked out the video and was pretty impressed with how it came out. Not a bad little camera on the iPhone. However, it didn’t quite have that ‘golden times’ feel that I wanted. That meant it was time to crack into some After Effects

Making a sunset

So the first thing I wanted was a real sunset look. And for that, I needed a sun. Enter Optical Flares from Video Copilot.

I tracked the video clip with After Effects built in tracker and that gave me a position to fix the lens flare to. I had a couple of small issues with Ash running in front of my tracking points and the tracker getting confused.  The way that I got around that was to make 3 tracks, attach them to null objects and parent them together. It seemed to do the job quite nicely.

Once I had that tracking data, I created a new solid in AE and applied Optical Flares to it. I chose one of the presets and changed a few of the elements around (must buy that new Pro-Presets 2 pack) to get the look that I wanted.

Then I created a new light and parented that to the 3d null object that held the tracking data. That made the light move along with the video but a problem that I had was that the actual sun was off the edge of the clip .. it wasn’t visible for the vast majority of the shot.  So I had to move my light off to the edge of the clip about where I figured the sun would be. By using a simple expression I could leave the light moving with the clip and the move it about 400px on the x axis to push it off to the side. All good.

Finishing the look

I’d love to say that I spent a reasonable amount of time creating the right color look. But I didn’t. I just opened up Magic Bullet Looks and chose one of the presets. I dropped the saturation a little and fiddled with another couple of settings and until I was happy with it. Took about 5 minutes. No real manual colour adjustment necessary.

I then added a subtle vignette and some film grain and rendered it out.

Nice and easy and a great way to kill an hour or so doing something creative with video.

Check out the video here.

I’m really happy to announce that the new Bay of Plenty Wedding Guide website is now live.

I worked with the team at Full Flavour Media on this one and we’re all very happy with the way the first release has turned out.

This site makes extensive use of the really handy jQuery Tools tool set to help with the scrolling and overlays as well as another great little plugin to handle the popup images. All very snazzy indeed.

So if you’re from around these parts and planning on tying the knot then I recommend checking out the Bay of Plenty Wedding Guide for a run down on who does what, when and where.

Apologies for the lack of new material here. I know my 4 avid readers are missing out

I’m currently doing a bunch of work with the great folk over at Cucumber Software in Tauranga. That’s keeping my busy for at least 4 days / week.

I’m also investing a heck of a lot of time into Sentinel as well as working my way through a backlog of client work.

At the moment I’m not taking on any new clients but you are more than welcome to drop me a line and I may be able to recommend someone for you.

All the best and thanks for bearing with me.

Mark

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.

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.

I’ve been following along with many of Nicks excellent tutorials for a while now and just this afternoon, after watching his recent tutorial about animating the totem from inception, decided to purchase his HDRI Light Kit Pro set up for Cinema 4D.

I’ve got to say that it certainly makes lighting much more intuitive and it’s much easier to get great results (for a newbie such as myself at least). Here’s my render below.