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.
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.
I have to confess that I spend invest a lot of my time in keeping up with the huge number of fantastic tutorials available these days. I’m addicted. Vodafone will be happy to hear that as I’m almost always going over my monthly data limit.
One of the things that really interests me is motion graphics so any chance that I get to fire up After Effects and Cinema 4D is welcomed.
However .. I recently went to attempt a small job that a Cinema 4D render would have been ideal for. Upon opening Cinema I realised that I actually had no idea how to do it. This was very strange as I was certain that I did know how to do it because I had seen a tutorial somewhere.
This quickly brought me to the realisation that, though I had been investing my time in watching these fantastic tutorials … I hadn’t actually been following along. I hadn’t been using the tools. It was theory vs practice and I wasn’t doing the doing.
So with that revelation I decided that I would follow along and complete at least one tutorial per week then take that work and put my own spin on it.
The first one I attempted was the fabulous ‘Cascading Text tutorial’ from the Nick (HE is the gorilla) at www.greyscalegorilla.com
All in all – I highly recommend you putting aside a bit more time and working your way through the amazing tutorials that these talented people are kindly sharing.
Check out the links in the sidebar to some great Motion Graphics resources.
For some reason, copying and pasting between Illustrator and After Effects hadn’t been working for me. Perhaps I had changed an option somewhere.
Turns out it was a really easy fix. So for all those that haven’t had any luck with copy and paste from Illustrator to After Effects (CS4 at least) it’s as easy as changing the following:
Preferences > File Handling and Clipboard > Clipboard on Quit
Then enable the Copy As > AICB checkbox, and then enable the Preserve Paths checkbox.
Click here to play the game. (1MB)
Sometimes you get a Flash interactive project that is just great fun to work on … this was one of them.
While working at Martian Design I had the opportunity to develop a series of Flash based games for the mintshot.co.nz website. This was one of my favourites. The goal of the game was to disarm a bomb and save your prize from exploding. If you saved it, you won it.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Adobe Fireworks and just recently I was reminded why.I was putting together a small job for a client who needed to put the finishing touches onto his website. He has a video trading website and one of the requirements when listing videos for sale is to include a censorship rating. We have about 9 common labels ranging from G through to R .. and in typical fashion the artwork available was pretty poor and needed to be redeveloped. Read more
Like so many businesses, Creative Space had a web site that simply didn’t reflect the nature and quality of their work. Until now that is.Creative Space are a Tauranga based architectural studio who had outgrown their previous web site. They needed a new look to aid in a marketing campaign and it needed to be very clean and very sharp .. just like their work.
Sometimes you want to be able to show an object in 3d on the web. If you are looking for a high quality render then the best way that I know is to use pre-rendered footage and import that into flash. Sure it’s not a true 3d environment but the end result is very convincing. Let me show you how I made the example here.
