January Meetup Notes

Posted by conigs on Jan 21, 2011 in Meeting Notes | Comments

We had a good meetup tonight with mostly familiar faces and a couple new ones at C2. Several people have requested some form of summary from our meetups. So in 2011, we’re making this a priority. After each meetup, we’ll be posting notes, links, videos, and sometimes project files. In the future, we will see if we can get screencaptures & audio/video of the presentations as well.

If you haven’t been to our meetups, they are fairly free form. We’ll start out with some industry news, move into the theme of the evening (if there is one), then open it up to anyone who wants to show or discuss something. Here are the notes for our January meetup in chronological-ish order.

The Motion Graphic Design Census started the evening. In general, there weren’t too many surprises, except for salary & rate ranges. Through many of us took the census, we didn’t quite remember how questions were phrased, so we didn’t know if that impacted the responses. (You should also take the 2011 survey. It’s only 5 questions.)

The Mill’s new reel is, as always, great stuff.

Anders Hattne’s AE 210% inspired the theme of the evening: more with less. We cracked open the AE project to look at the audio. Interesting techniques in there, though we were a little disappointed to not be able to peek at the animation itself.

30 Motion Tests in 30 Seconds was a different way to do more with less. 30 days to complete 30 separate one-second animations. Possible group project?

Two projects were demoed: Glue Gun Rain and Radio Smoke. The first was an attempt at finding something useful to do with CC Glue Gun. It’s one of those effects you rarely, if ever, reach for. By tinkering around enough, and with the help of a few wiggle expressions, we managed to get a semi-decent, if not slightly stylized way to get the look of rain falling on a window or pane of glass. What really helped was a high-frequency wiggle (300Hz) applied to the position. It managed to create dots instead of a solid line.[Project File]

The second project, Radio Smoke, produced (again, somewhat stylized) cigarette smoke. Using an ellipse shape layer with wiggle path, we were able to get the radio waves effect to behave somewhat like smoke. Adding turbulent displace on top of that further helped sell the effect. However, this was quite a render hog. To get the shape layer into radio wave, we had to use the “image contour” wave type. That coupled with the high frequency for smooth shapes slowed everything own dramatically. So it might not be practical, but it works. [Project File]

Our next meetup will likely be combined with MCAI Milwaukee. MCAI is a community of media communications professionals and expressed interested in what we do. It should be an interesting time.

Rick Kump brought up why he likes & hates Million Dollar Money Drop. It was an interesting aside.

We watched Make It Better. General consensus: great stuff.

Jack Packard got up and showed some of his work in progress videos which should be on Funny or Die in the near future.

BG Renderer was pushed (by me). Surprisingly, few people were using it. Hopefully, that will change.

Along with BG Renderer, Andoru Labs came up for the great RenderQ and AEae utilities.

Chris Larkee brought up using Premiere as an intermediate to get a FCP sequence to After Effect. The free Popcorn Island script was also mentioned, but agreed that it works better for smaller sequences.

Chris also showed a video about “LensWhacking,” a technique of not locking a lens to the camera to allow light leaks and a subtle tilt-shift like effect. He also showed off a video where he used natual lens flares shot over black and composited over footage instead of using a lens flare plugin in post. The technique was much more organic and interesting than simply using Optical Flares or Knoll Light Factory.

Rick showed off a recent broadcast commercial he worked on for Austin Straubel Int’l Airport titled “Liesure Travel.”

Of course, at Jack & Rick’s request, watched the music video for Major Lazer’s “Pon De Floor.” (Possibly NSFW, no nudity or language, but pretty lewd.)

To close off the evening, we watched the video for “No Room to Live” by Times New Viking. It’s an interesting video where portions of live-action footage of the band were given to several different animators and cut together.

It was a productive meetup. Hopefully you can make it to the next one.