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.

With this project the first thing to do was see if I could tame the video a bit and shift the focus onto Baz (our guitarist) and tone down some of the background noise. I used some vignettes, blurs and general colour correction tools as well as overlaying some brighter colours to create a bit of visual interest and faux lighting.

I then duplicated the video clip, masked out the background and inserted a few layers of gently drifting particles. The particles only appear in places where there is light so they kind of resemble some magical looking dust gently floating toward the sky.

I added some video footage of children playing onto the wall behind Baz and gave it a home movie projector look as well as ramping up the colour intensity as the track intensifies toward the end.

The final video is viewable here (Baz would love a comment on the video or a click of the ‘Like’ button so don’t be shy).

Here are a couple of stills from the video showing the before and after.

Before

After

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.

Displacement Maps & Sky Replacement

Original photo

For this photo I added some movement to the water with a displacements map. I also masked out the sky using the very cool Refine Mask option in Photoshop CS5 trial. It can certainly help when working with more complex masks. The Sky was animated in 3d space and then used as a reflection in the river.

I also added a light leak to the right side and experimented with some interesting colour options. There is a lens grime layer in there too.

Liquify and Particles

Original photo

In a nod to Andrew Kramer’s recent ‘Animating a Still’ tutorial I thought I’d try something a little similar  by animating an eruption of Mt Ruapehu.

I found a suitable photo and sliced it up into various layers which I arranged in 3D space. I added a camera and a really basic move that was supposed to resemble someone running (I should have got hold of some actual footage with someone running and motion tracked it .. but I was being lazy).

I Used the liquify tools to animate the mountain smoke and After Effects built in CC Particle World plugin to create some basic dust floating around.

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.

His site (www.motionworks.com.au) offers a wealth of information & great tutorials for After Effects and Cinema 4D. He also has as a great business based series called ‘The Business of Design’ and a fabulous interview show called ‘Unplugged’. So when he mentioned that he was looking for someone to help him out with creating an animated Flash banner for his ‘Making it look great 7‘ product I jumped at the chance to help.

John gave me free reign over the initial concepts and as we got closer to the end product we worked collaboratively with John giving me some great animation tips along the way. He has a keen eye for detail and a solid sense of design and was also open to any suggestions that I had. So working with him was very refreshing for me.

Initial concept

My initial concept for the banner consisted of 3 scenes. An intro, a small clip from one of the teasers for his product and a call to action scene. Here is the original design below.

Original concept

‘Making it look great 7‘ features 6 individual workshops and because I wanted to use a few seconds of video from each of the teasers I decided that maybe the best way to approach this would be to make 6 individual banners with a different video in each and just rotate them around on page load otherwise the file size would become too large to include video from each into a single banner. No-one wants to download or serve a 500k banner with each page visit.

I mocked up a couple of these concepts, but in the end it just didn’t come together as I had hoped. The video had to be no more an 2 or 3 seconds at the most and that just didn’t really give the viewer enough time to get the message. It was more a “what the heck was that” experience rather than an “ahhhhh that’s what I want to know how to build” experience. Plus the video compression was pretty intense to keep the file size down to around 100kb and that degraded the overall look of the banner.

Final concept

Instead of creating 6 individual banners with a few seconds of video in each we turned things around and went with 1 banner that contained 6 stills (1 from each of the workshops). Each still had it’s own title and each stayed onscreen from around 3 seconds and was animated off with a simple slide transition. The text was changed from oblique to regular to aid readability and after a few tweaks with different alias settings we were sorted.

Here’s the final banner (the image is slightly reduced to fit my layout). Click to see the animated version.

Final banner - click to play

It wasn’t all plain sailing though … here are a couple of ‘gotchas’

I have been spending more time using Adobe After Effects of late and I much prefer the animation tools inside of AE. I have always found Flash’s animation tools to be a little clunky and it seems all to easy to make an edit on something which inadvertently screws something else up. So for this project I really wanted to use After Effect’s export as XFL option for flash. The idea behind this was that I could use After Effects to lay down the  grunt work of the animation and then export that animation data over to flash and hook in my desired graphic elements. Also, John is an advocate for Adobe After Effects so I thought it would be great to keep things in the family so to speak.

I spent a few hours on this as I really wanted to be able to use this technique for projects in the future, but try as I might, I couldn’t get a good result from it. It seemed that AE and Flash use different anchor point positions and that was proving problematic. I also had issues with the canvas size that was being created in Flash as well as the general placement of the elements. Things that lined up in AE just didn’t line up in Flash and the timing of the animation was off ever so slightly.

I went over the little documentation that I could find and looked over examples on the net I couldn’t find an answer to the problem. So I ditched that option and went back over to using the motion time line in Flash to pull the animation together.

If you have managed to use AE to drive a flash animation via XFL then I would love to hear how you found it. It looks like something I could really use if I could get it to work reliably.

One of the other oddball things is that flash refused to render the regular version of the font that we were using. No matter what I selected it kept rendering out the oblique version. So in the end all the text was put together in Adobe Fireworks and rendered out as 32bit png files.

The end result?

The end result was very satisfying and working with John was fantastic. I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity and I look forward to working with him again.

If you’re not already a Motionworks subscriber then head on over to www.motionworks.com.au and hook into his RSS feed.

PS. Don’t forget to checkout his Making it look great 7 product while you’re there.

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).

What is vanishing point?

Vanishing point is a pretty cool feature and it has been in photoshop for a couple of versions now. It basically lets you create a series of planes in perspective and then align artwork or use the clone tool along those perspective planes. You can also use vanishing point to create 3d environments for Adobe After Effects .. which is very cool too.

What is the process?

It’s pretty simple. You open your image and click Filter’ > ‘Vanishing Point’. Your image opens in the vanishing point workspace and you can then select the appropriate tool and begin drawing out perspective planes over reference points in your underlying image.

Once those planes are in place you can click OK and they are then saved with your file (you don’t need to recreate them each time you apply the filter).

How did it work?

The result was pretty cool . .but I found that vanishing point didn’t seem to be as simple as it should have been.

Drawing the planes was easy .. but when I had the planes in place and copied my artwork into vanishing point I found that as soon as I dragged it onto the perspective plane it did indeed snap to the correct perspective (which was the correct thing to do) but at the same time it became very large. So large in fact that the transform handles disappeared outside of the plane area .. which meant that I couldn’t see them .. and that meant had to keep moving my artwork around in the plane to find the handles in order that I could resize it. Frustrating. I also found that using the transform handles was a bit unreliable .. sometimes they would transform the object, sometimes they wouldn’t. Even if I scaled down the artwork considerably before bringing it out onto the place the problem still happened.

Another slightly annoying thing was that I could only paste 1 instance of my logo artwork into vanishing point at any one time. I’m sure there is probably a reason for that but it just meant that I had to go through the steps a few more times than I would have liked. Basically this meant ‘paste, hunt for transform handles to resize, move to correct position along the plane, resize some more then hit OK. Then go back into vanishing point and do it over again for the next 3 logos.

End result?

Overall I was pretty pleased with the end result. This was a pretty simple transformation (and yes it was simple enough that I could have just used the free transform tool) … but I’m glad that I gave vanishing point a go and It looks like something that I would use again in the future. I didn’t think it was quite as intuitive as it should have been. The oddball resizing of the logo was pretty annoying and wasted a bit of time .. but overall it’s a nice tool to have in the box.

Here are the before and after shots.

Before

After

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.

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.

1. One of the first things that I had to do was cut Ash off the background of the original photo. This was just a camera phone shot and was pretty noisy and blurry. I used the quick selection tool to get a pretty close selection then tidied it up by manually painting in black or white where required.

2. Ash’s shadow was repainted. I selected a shadow color from the background image rather than just black as that helps to keep things a little more believable. For the shadow layer make sure the blend mode is set to multiply.

3. I applied some back lighting to Ash using the same technique as in the luminous butterflies image. I also dropped the intensity of the original highlights on him to try to better match the light in the background image.

4. Because Ash hadn’t had a haircut for a while I decided to go for a sort of “70′s look”. I adjusted the overall colour with curves and then applied some orange-ish gradients. I set the blend mode on these to ‘color’ to blend them in a bit more and get the effect I wanted.

5. Lastly I added lots of lens dust  and some vignettes to seal the deal.

You can see the final composite below. Click for a larger version.

Final photoshop composite

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/

We had a nice afternoon out at a local park when something caught my little one’s attention. We took a quick photo (as you do when you have kids) and when we returned and looked through the photos I realised that this was the perfect pic to try out the technique.

I wont go into all the details here unless some really wants me to break it down. Suffice to say that I sourced an image of something that looked like butterflies and composited it into the the original photo. I then made some color adjustments, added some noise and integrated the awesome relighting technique from the tutorial above. Click the image below for a comparison and be sure to click through to Russell Browns great tutorial.

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.

Cinema 4D

1. To set things up in Cinema 4D I set my render size to 1280×720 and dropped a camera into my scene.

Then, to create the net/grid object, I dropped in a ‘platonic’ basic shape and set it’s radius to 385m, segments to 6 and Type to Icosa.

1. Initial set up in Cinema 4D

2. Then, to turn this into a grid / net type of look I dropped in an ‘Atom Array’ and then, in the objects panel, dragged the Platonic under the Atom Array so that it became a child of the Atom Array. I then adjusted the settings in the Atom Array as follows: Cylinder Radius 0.65m, Sphere Radius 3.46m, Subdivisions 11. You can obviously change these to be whatever works best for you. This gave me the basic grid look that I was after

2. The Platonic as a child of the Atom Array

3. I duplicated the Atom Array a couple of times and positioned them to the left and right of the original so that my grid had a bit more substance.

3. Duplicated Atom Array

4. I then made a quick material to apply to the objects.  It’s a very simple material as there isn’t going to be a great deal of detail in the final image. I adjusted 3 settings. Firstly I gave the material a light blue colour. Then secondly I added a little bit of luminance and lastly I added a little bit of glow. Once that was complete I dragged the material onto the 3 Atom Array objects.

I also added a basic omni light into the scene just to brighten things up a bit.

5. A quick render of the grid showed that it was too sharp. I could have applied a general blur in Photoshop but I wanted to try and create a bit more depth and interest so decided that I would use Photoshop’s  great Lens Blur option. The best way to get a great result from the Lens blur in Photophop is to use a depth map. A depth map is basically a grey scale representation of what’s in focus and what’s out of focus.

Because we’re using Cinema 4d we can simply adjust the depth of field setting in the camera and then, when it comes time to render the image from Cinema 4d, we can also choose to render a depth map as a separate file. Nice.

TIP. There are a couple of advantages in rendering a separate depth map and applying the lens blur in Photoshop. Firstly, it takes a bit longer to render with the depth of field turned on in C4D. Secondly, if we have a separate depth map, we can then tweak the settings in the Photoshop (or After Effects) over and over until we’re happy with the result. It’s much easier to experiment with the different options, it’s much faster and it gives you a lot more flexibility than just rendering the depth of field as part of your main image from Cinema 4D.

So .. to add a Depth Map to your render just do the following. In the Cinema 4d Render Settings options choose, ‘Multi-Pass’ and then choose ‘Depth’ from the bottom of the drop down list. Then make sure, under the ‘Save’ options to tick both the Regular Image and Multi-Pass image.

Render Settings in Cinema 4D

Here is the final render from Cinema 4D. It’s pretty plain and way too complex to be used as a background but we’ll fix that with some effects in Photoshop and Fireworks.

Final render from Cinema 4D

Photoshop

7. I opened my render into Photoshop and then opened the separate depth map file in a new Photoshop document, selected it, copied it and then moved back to my original Photoshop file with of my render, clicked into the channels panel and pasted the depth map in. I then named the channel as depth1 and turned off it’s visibility.

Depth Map pasted as a new channel

8. Now we add the lens blur. Click back onto your render in the layers panel and then click ‘Filter > Blur > Lens Blur’.

Lens Blur window in Photoshop

In the options on the right hand side, in the ‘Depth Map’ panel click the ‘Source’ drop down list and select the depth map that we added in the step above. Now try adjusting some options like the radius and the specular highlights etc. You can get some pretty cool results here and it’s so much easier to do this in Photoshop rather than having to render different options from Cinema 4D.

Experimenting with the Lens Blur options

9. When you are done just click ok. This will close the Lens Blur window and take us back to the main workspace in Photoshop.

I still felt that my image needed a bit more work so  I duplicated the layer and then set the transfer mode on the duplicate to ‘Overlay’. This created a more vivid image. I was happy enough with that look so I saved the PSD file and then moved onto Fireworks.

Ste the transfer mode of the duplicate to Overlay

Fireworks

Fireworks is my web design application of choice. It will do some of what Photoshop does but because it’s specifically geared toward making web ready images it’s much faster and easier to create website layouts in. I wont go into all the details with Fireworks but basically all I did was set up a new document with a black background and then drag in my photoshop file.

I added a Gaussian blur to the Photoshop image as I wanted to knock back the detail considerably (this is a background image after all) and then added some black to transparent gradients over the the top, bottom and edges of the grid image just to blend them out to the dark background. Lastly, I decided that black was too dark, so I added a new layer over the top of everything and set it to a dark blue colour. I then set it’s transfer mode to ‘Color’ and was left with the result in the screenshot below.

Basic set up in Fireworks. Note the layers.

When all that was done I then went ahead and produced the first draft of the web site with the background in place.

First draft of the website with background in place

To wrap up

I really enjoy experimenting with different applications and one of the key things that I love about Cinema 4D is the way that it can easily create Multi-Pass files. These are incredibly useful when it comes to compositing images  as in the example about with our Depth Map. Being able to take that Depth Map and use it inside Photoshop or After Effects is very cool indeed.

I hope you found something useful in here and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or email me.

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.