Recently on Twitter I asked followers which After Effects plug-ins they own but no longer used. I received some interesting responses and thought it would be worthwhile opening up the forum here on Motionworks. Are there plug-ins in your toolkit that have fallen out of favour, perhaps you used to love them but the “look” is old? Maybe another plug-in or application has taken it’s place? Are there plug-ins you’ve purchased but not even used!? Personally I have found fewer reasons to fire up Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator, with Cinema 4D taking it’s place in my tool kit; and effects like 3D Stroke, which was once all the rage, are gathering dust. How about you?

“I was viewing an article on Creative Cow a few months ago, and like usual got side tracked and looked at some of the demo reels. The first demo reel i clicked on started with a 1:1 copy of Andrew Kramers submerged tutorial/effect. I left the site and haven’t been back since. I just watched a world cup game on the BBC and guess what, Andrew Kramers Ancient Titles had been copied, and not even that well. Pathetic.

I think that you guys have actually devalued graphic design and opened a pandora’s box scenerio in pursuit of your own self interest and ego. I don’t like what you are doing. You are stiffling individual creativity and creating alot of dead wood. Yes, all people have to take responsibility but i don’t see you guys doing any of that, you just use caveats and carry on regardless.

And, to people who use deadlines, lack of experience, and so on, as an excuse to put out this rubbish. SHAME ON YOU. What ever happened to hard work, passion and integrity?!

Oh yeah, one last thing. I criticised AK once and i was blocked from commenting. PATHETIC guys, really poor form”.

Read the original post and comments here

This week I received an email from Max Bretherton titled “The Never-ending Tutorial Chase”. Max finds himself overwhelmed by the abundance of tutorials available on the web and asked the following questions:

“How do you see these attractive and well devised ‘tutorial’ sites fitting into an artists work flow? Do they at all or are they just a detour – like watching a movie – that eats into valuable time? Or could we be wise and use them for the advancement of our own creative lives, work and knowledge? I struggle to find the best balance of watching great tutorials and getting work done.”

My approach

I’d love to watch more tutorials but I don’t have the time. So I don’t fight it. Paying work always takes priority over study, so my approach is to allocate a short time each day for tutorials, usually watching about 30 minutes of training each morning before work.

Being a great motionographer doesn’t necessarily mean knowing all the techniques by heart. Often you’ll watch a tutorial and have no use for that particular technique at that time, only to find yourself re-watching the tutorial to refresh your memory later anyway.

So for the majority of tutorials I keep a reference and watch them when they are relevant to the current project. Bookmarks in your browser or an RSS Reader such as Google Reader is great for filing tutorials and other inspirational posts for later reference. There are also numerous tutorial lists that make it easier to search tutorials across multiple sites. Check out this list of 1001 After Effects tutorials over at Filmmaker IQ for example.

What do you think?

How do you feel about the abundance of tutorials available from sites such as Motionworks? Does it overwhelm you? Does it frustrate you not being able to keep up? Do you find yourself spending too much time watching tutorials at the expense of other things? Let’s talk.

The road to excellence is never ending; I don’t look at my work and think “that’s perfect, I’m now the best I could possibly be”. Every day I see superb examples of motion graphics, and am always looking to improve my own design and production skills. You may be thinking that’s easy to say because I already have years of experience, but remember, if you become frustrated with what you see after you hit the render button, take heart, everyone starts somewhere. 

Watch movie (2.8MB)

My new feature suggestions were for the ability to separate and render to fields and keyframable masks (if I was ever to do any roto work). Have you been using Photoshop Extended? For what? What features would you like to see added? Did you even know Photoshop did video?

For example, Dark Knight uses a shatter technique I copied from AETUTS, Quantum Of Solace includes a modified version of the MILG 5 Form Face tutorial. Neither of these are copying the tutorial step-by-step; the technique is much the same but the look is modified based on the project brief and my own design sense and imagination.

Looks from popular tutorial sites can be easily identified and if copied without being filtered through your own design sense and imagination, there is a danger that your work, like thousands of others, will be a simple clone and won’t be taken seriously.

Some people have said to me “I’m just not creative like you”. I believe everyone has the ability to be creative because everyone has an imagination. Some of us just need practice at using it.

Here’s something I do to flex my imagination. I travel by bus to work every morning and often listen to an ipod loaded with my favorite music. While listening I create graphics for the track that’s playing; and I don’t mean on my laptop, I mean in my head. I watch what is going on around me, on the bus, out the window and imagine I’m creating a music video. Changing colors, time remapping, adding effects, distorting, deforming, scaling, using 3D, moving an imaginary camera, your imagination is the only limit.

This morning I was listening to Magificent, a powerful anthem by U2 from their latest release, and was passing a steel tower carrying electricity cables; the first thing that came into my head was the tower transforming into a transformer-like version of the Edge (lead guitarist), sending pulses of electricity down the wires to the next tower which transformed into Bono (lead singer). It may or may not have been silly but that’s not the point, there are no rules, my imagination ran free.

Given that I’m on a bus people feature strongly in my imaginary videos, I look at faces, some of joy, some of sadness, some of anger, most with no emotion. Today there was a young women at the bus stop I was passing, laughing with a friend; I imagined it in super-slow motion then as the bus passed directly in front of her, the camera whipped around to face the bus passing and me in the window looking at her – all in slow motion. Again nothing wrong with that, just my imagination.

Not surprisingly almost all my ideas for projects come to me when I’m on the bus. Oh and for the record I haven’t had a single day of design training. I learned techniques through books and videos and for almost 13 years have been building my design skills on the job… and on the bus.

Despite still feeling like a rookie only having worked in post production for a couple of years, sites like Motionworks have proven a real benefit in developing my skills and improving my understanding of motion graphics and After Effects. In fact I have found that watching how professionals work and the workflow they engage in to be on an equal par to the things covered in the tutorials themselves.  These have expanded my knowledge of After Effects and its capabilities a great deal, and also helped me laugh at some of my previous approaches to doing things.

So in the spirit of collaboration and helping one another, here are some of the major time-savers that, with with the benefit of hindsight, have helped me out a great deal as a professional.

I hope this post can also prove as a suitable reference and contribution point, so that we can all build upon our time saving practices and have a laugh at the things we did the “long way”.

Tidy workflow and precomposing

Whilst still falling victim to messiness in extreme situations, I can’t stress the importance of how much easier collapsing your layers into pre-comps is, it saves a lot of time.  This is particularly useful in longer projects where breaking your animation down into sections is essential in successful project management, rather than the alternative of fighting through dozens of layers.

Using Proxies and Pre-rendering

A great benefit of being able to section off your work into appropriate pre-comps, is that it allows for the creation of more flexible and easily managed proxies.  This greatly speeds up pre-rendering, previews and creating test movie files.  If changes are made to a proxy, simply re-render and re-link the proxy, this way you can lock off sections for quick previewing as they are finished and faster final renders.

Understanding plug-in and preset capabilities and discovering best practice

The web is a great resource, and in this field of work it really pays to keep informed both with the potential of the plugins and how others use them.  Visit plug-in manufacturer’s websites and explore the details, sample projects, plug-ins and presets.  This can save a lot of time lost shooting in the dark when the pressure is on during a job.

Some of the most beneficial things (apart from the great tutorials) have been minor details mentioned along the way.  These include other software that is easy to integrate into your workflow. Gridiron Nucleo Pro and Wondertouch Particleillusion, which receive the occasional mention here, are stand out examples.  One with a more practical function and the other, what I consider in some instances, a project saver;  if you ever need fire, explosion effects or trippy lights Particleillusion operates is an excellent particle generator that produces very professional effects and is easily integrated into After Effects as Quicktime movies with alpha channels.

Knowing when to use Mattes and Masks

For quite some time, because I didn’t know any better, I always used masks by default. I had little understanding of Track Mattes and when they would have been more appropriate.  Now I’m embarrassed to admit that in quite a few instances a lot of time was wasted using a mask instead of a matte.

Scripting and Expressions instead of keyframing

In my days of studying, this was my worst nightmare.  The blame lays squarely with Flash and I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this fear.  Again fortunately there are a lot of great resources out there, to make this language of expressions easier for motion graphics designers to utilise, implement and deconstruct.

Most useful day-to-day expressions include wiggle, time-based and linkage expressions, value expressions and pick whip expressions.  All relatively simple, straightforward time-savers when compared to the traditional keyframe approach.

The Expressions examples section in the After Effects Help helped me build upon the things I picked up in the MILG series.  Many useful resources also exist on the web to help take your expression writing skills further.  If like me you find this a little daunting, my advice would be to start using short expressions such as the wiggle expression them move to more complicated expressions as you feel more comfortable. Dip your foot in the water and you will be paddling around in no time.

20:20 hindsight

We all fall victim to hindsight, and how to do things better.  After all, After Effects is a rich application with numerous ways to do the same thing.  What has been a big help to you along the way?  With reflection can you look back at any key moments that helped make your life as a motionographer easier? Are their any things that you now look back on and think, if only I’d known that then, life would have been so much easier?  If there is, share them, we would love to know.

However, it forced me to do some other things that I had been putting off. So, I had 2 days to read, think, get inspired to make new creations, and do some of the  ”honey-do’s” my wife has been after me to do (“honey do this, honey do that”).

And that leads me to a question: My extraordinarily long render forced me to step away from the computer, and back into real life. What about you? What do you do when After Effects has tied up your computer with a long render?

Certainly JD has done boxing promos before, as you can see elsewhere on his site. I thought the last one he did was great, and then JD topped himself with this latest one.

The question I pose is this: how do you stay fresh, creatively while repetitively working on the same type of spots. As designers you may have worked on the same kind of spots many times before. But what things do you do to ‘see’ the spot differently from the way you did it before. Post your comments on how you keep the spark of creativity alive vs. repetition.

Do you prefer to do all of your 3D in a dedicated 3D application rather than use Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator or ProAnimator? Perhaps you think something is particularly cheesy and overused? Of course it all depends on ”how” an effect is used because even a great effect can look cheesy. Personally I tend to avoid using any of the “Transition” effects as actual transitions, but will often use something like “Linear Wipe” without keyframes to mask a section of another layer. If you have a link to something cheesy you may have done or seen, share it with us, we promise not to laugh (much)