Over the coming months I’ll be showcasing graphics created using After Effects, Cinema 4D and a variety of plug-ins, by the team, some original and others influenced by existing spots.

With a Stars theme, the campaign includes a competition to win a trip for 2 to Cannes Film Festival. Given the theme, I suggested we use the tagline “follow the stars”. This has the dual meaning of following the logo stars throughout the promo (which represent FBO), and mingling with movie stars on the red carpet in Cannes.

The background is a combination of a C4D Floor object – lit using a large softbox from Greyscale Gorilla’s excellent HDR lighting kit, and Background object with a gradient texture from black to dark orange. The stars in the sky were created using a Star spline, the MoGraph Cloner Object and Random Effector, with a Plain Effector (-1 Scale,with Falloff) to clear stars away from the text and logos.

The extruded stars were created using MoGraph Spline Wrap. This was far more flexible than a using a Sweep Nurb along a spline, and allowed me to animate the Offset of the Star extrude rather than simply the Start and End points. Thanks to Tim Clapham for his expert guidance here. The particle trail is a Particle Emitter linked to the Spline Wrap Offset value using Set Driver/Driven and was set-up by Michael Tan, who assisted me with this project.

After Effects CS5 Rotobrush was used to do some quick roto work where the stars fly behind people. The shots aren’t perfect but with this tool I wouldn’t have even bothered given the tight deadline. The final project included 5 x 30 second spots and 2 x 60 seconds spots. The following example movies include the fully graphic 30 and a selection of shots from the other spots, and the fully graphic 30 with final audio mix.

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Watch movie (final audio mix)

Generally, when creating a boxing promo, we are given between two and five days. This project was different, or at least appeared to be different at first. My colleague Brett Morris and I, were given two weeks to design and produce a promo for the upcoming Green V Jones Jr fight here in Sydney. However, after the first two days of work the deadline was cut by a week!

Not so bad considering the footage had already been shot, but we had no storyboard, no edit and no idea what we were going to do with the footage. By the end of the five days we delivered the following promo, created in Adobe After Effects, shown here with the original untreated cut (with draft audio).

Brett motion-tracked the green screen footage using SynthEyes. Brett also demonstrated flair with Trapcode Particular to add the swooshes and impact particles to the fight vision. I particularly like the particle trails and how smaller particles shoot out like sweat as punches land.

The fighters were keyed with Keylight using a very effective technique Brett learned from Mark Christiansen in one of his courses presented on fxphd.com. The fight vision treatment is a combination of Zaxwerks 3D Warps to bend the vision and CC Ball Action, with Trapcode Starglow for the Jumbotron effect.

The fighters were graded using a combination of Magic Bullet Looks and a cool blue Tritone and Photo Filter (both standard AE filters) adjustment layer. Maltaannon’s handy CE Light Wrap was used to help composite the boxers with the background. The flares come courtesy of Knoll Light Factory but, it must be stated, that I would have have used Video Copilot Optical Flares had it been available at the time – that plug-in is mind-blowing. I did however use Video Copilot Twitch to add some flashes and other artifacts throughout.

The title text for the pack shot was created by Brett in Cinema 4D and imported into After Effects with the 3D data for final compositing.

Personally I think the final result was great considering the circumstances of the project. However, the client felt it wasn’t right. So we ended up being given another week to make modifications based on an updated script supplied by the client, along with a new music track.

As Chris Meyer mentions in Unplugged “there’s always time to do it over”! Unfortunately though, I was pulled off of this for another campaign, so it was up to Brett to make the modifications, with the assistance of DesignFTC Art Director – Mark Bowey. Here is the final.

The client wanted a much hotter look, including fire, smoke and sparks. For that Brett turned to Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2. The new text was added in After Effects based on a camera move set up in Cinema 4D and exported to After Effects. Brett finds Cinema 4D camera animation more intuitive than After Effects.

I don’t mind the second version but prefer the colour of the original, especially in the video walls which really highlights the action. I feel the original has a premium, black-label quality which the re-do lacks. Brett mentioned he also prefers the original.  So how about you? Which do you prefer?

Watch movie (no audio) (30sec, 12MB)

The spot was created using Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects. The bullet casings and gun are free models and the shoes were purchased from Turbosquid. The evidence markers were created from a cube object. The floor has a Layer Shader applied with two materials, combined using the Overlay mode. Layer Shaders are an excellent way to create detailed looks easily within Cinema 4D.

Soft omni lights with falloff were used to light each of the “evidence” models individually. The red and blue flashes were created using a red and a blue spot light parented to a rotating null object. Include and Exclude modes were used with the lights to ensure nothing was over exposed.

The police tape was created using Mograph Spline Wrap and Displace Deformer. The Displace Deformer also uses a Layer Shader, including a gradient to give the plastic a stretched appearance and a Noise layer animated to make the tape vibrate slightly. Here is a top view of the scene.

The scene was rendered with various passes, including a Depth pass, used as a blur map with Compound Blur in After Effects, to create the depth-of-field effect. The red and blue lights were also rendered separately so the illumination could be adjusted in After Effects.

The Cinema 4D scene was exported with an After Effects composition (AEC) including the camera and lights. Trapcode Particular 2.0 was used to add smoke particles into the scene (thanks Nelson Alves). In Particular 2.0 particles recognise After Effects lights, allowing the smoke to be illuminated by the lights imported in the AEC. For a 10% discount on Trapcode Particular 2.0 or other Red Giant Software products use the code “motionworks10”.

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I used a series of position animations around the image, combined with flash frame close-ups of the bloodied areas. Once the full image is revealed it shatters to reveal “Damages 2”. Notice how before the shatter, a large specular highlight on the glass is revealed; I didn’t want any specular on the initial reveal but needed it for the shatter for a more glass–like effect. Rendering out the specular pass as part of a multi-pass render allowed me to fade up the specular only when it was required. One problem with the specular pass was obvious banding (a bug perhaps?) but this was disguised with a subtle noise effect in After Effects.

Notice also how after the initial shatter the image fades to reveal clear glass; I decided to do it this way to make the glass obvious and also to allow for a faux refraction effect created in After Effects using the Displacement Map Effect. Trapcode Particular was also used to add some detail to the shatter effect. These techniques and more are explained in the tutorial.

Watch movie (10 sec, 1MB)    Shattering Glass Tutorial

Here are some helpful links to learn more about Spline Wrap, let me know if you have more:

• Cineversity (Ko Maruyama): Text on a path   
• C4D Cafe: Spline Wrap Review

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I could have used Cinema 4D for  the text supers as well but they didn’t require any reflections or enhanced features of Cinema 4D, and using ProAnimator allowed me to set them up and render as proxies in After Effects whilst the Character supers were rendering in Cinema 4D. Prerendering the ProAnimator layers as Proxies sped up the workflow quite dramatically, making the final render of over 20 ProAnimator supers take about 15 minutes. Making It Look Great 1 covers using Proxies with After Effects and ProAnimator in detail. 

The lens flare was built from multiple Knoll Light Factory elements, linked together using the expression pickwhip. The extra circular shapes around the flare are four Shape Layers which add interest to the flare and add enhance the overall look of the graphics.

A Compositing Tag was added to a back light in Cinema 4D and placed behind the text, this was used to position the Knoll flare in After Effects. As Knoll flares are 2D only, I used this expression:  thisComp.layer(“Back_flare”).toComp([0,0,0]) applied to each flare element’s Light Source Location property to position the flare correctly on the Back Flare layer (which is 3D). Thanks to Harry Frank for that one.

All of the main elements of the Character supers were rendered out of Cinema 4D with object buffers, allowing easy color correction in After Effects. The characters were cut out in Photoshop and saved with alpha channels, then imported into Cinema 4D as textures and applied to simple plane objects. These were animated to rotate towards the camera to hide (as much as possible) the fact that they had no depth.

If you look closely at the edges of the Horton character in the “This Summer” movie you’ll see I used the handy Maltaannon Light Wrap preset too.

The delivery time on this was pretty tight so some of the graphics including the film-specific supers were set up by my co-worker Michael Tiong. 

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The K1 logo and the video wall are reflected in the floor but this is a fake, since ProAnimator 4 doesn’t support reflections. To create this look in ProAnimator requires duplicating and flipping the object you want to “reflect”. First I set up the look using one ProAnimator, then duplicated the ProAnimator layer leaving the wall and logo in one and the reflections in the other. Having the reflections as a separate layer allowed me to drop the Opacity of just the reflections.

The logo uses the footage comp as a reflection map. Notice how the bevels are also reflecting the map, which looks cool but a problem is that the right hand side of the logo is also displaying the reflection, that’s because the reflection map is applied to the object and there is no way to control where the reflection will appear. This wouldn’t happen in a real scene as because the bevels on the right side of the letters are facing away from the screen. This won’t be an issue when ProAnimator eventually supports true reflections.

None of this would have been an issue had I used Cinema 4D and the only reason I didn’t use C4D for this project was time. This was a 2 day job and had a feeling I would spend too long experimenting in C4D to make the deadline.

Three After Effects lights illuminate the scene and the After Effects camera (controlled with a null object) does a simple dolly in to the wall. The sky (a large stock image) moves believably with the camera thanks to Trapcode Horizon.

The music is only a rough placeholder and obviously doesn’t start early enough.

Check out the intro to the promo below and grab the modified project file to see how it was put together. Nothing earth shattering but video walls are still a great way to make bad footage good again.

Watch movie    Download project

Watching the spot you’ll notice that some shots have been rotoscoped and some haven’t. We decided to roto key shots and leave the more complicated shots in the background, and did so for two reasons: it saved a lot of time and cutting all the shots out would have removed much of the character and charm, leaving the whole thing kind of sterile. Notice how the rotoscoped shots have been used either side of the other shots to hide their edges. I always feel with this type of animation that you are taking the viewer on a journey, which must appear seamless, otherwise it upsets the flow. 

As usual for Fox Classics the color palette had to be orange, black and white. I used a range of effects to get the poster-style look and adjusted each shot individually to get a uniform look and feel across the entire spot.  Watch movie

The main text effect was created using two AE text layers, one with ones and zeros and the other with the title “Untraceable”. Each layer has an Opacity text animator applied with the zero/one layer set to animate from 100 to 0% opacity using the Randomize Order setting and the Untraceable layer animating from 0 to 100% using the same Randomize Order setting.

The text was treated with a series of effects including Fast blur, CC composite (to comp the text back onto the blurred version) and a light blue to white Ramp effect. A second adjustment layer with CC Lens was used to warp the main text but that introduced some tearing at the edges of the frame. To hide the tearing and add further detail, a Mosaic effect adjustment layer was used with a soft feathered mask to restrict the effect to the left and right edges of the frame.
To finish, the overall color and contrast was adjusted using a Curves adjustment layer followed by a vignette (Magic Bullet Misfire Vignette) adjustment layer. The entire look took 2.5 hours.

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