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After two years of freelancing, I’ve managed to land a nice, stable 9 – 5 gig which starts in less than a week. Knowing your free time is about to become a very precious commodity is great motivation to finish up the odd project you might have sitting around.
Result? I cleaned up, finished, and edited together this reel of miscellaneous Cinema 4D projects from the last few months. Everything that was cool but didn’t warrant uploading to Vimeo on it’s own. We’ve got 300 fps flying Legos, a few idents for imaginary movie studios, a spot for an SF Weekly column, and lots of neon lights. Fun, random stuff.
Tools used :
Cinema 4D, Realflow, Grey Scale Gorilla HDR Light Kit Pro, After Effects, Premiere, & Boris FX.
Music : Washed Out — Feel It All Around
Type-F is a Tyra Banks branded beauty and fashion site featuring, among other things, video “tips for camping, sporting events, and more style situations”. Branded their “Survival Guide”, it’s an ongoing series of videos that went live today, and that I was was an editor on.
What is typeF’s Survival Guide? — powered by typef.com
After getting over the fact that my boyfriend and I got each other the *exact same thing* this year for Christmas, we got to putting them together and playing around with them. Which was awesome because they were Meeblip DIY Synthesizer kits. This little 16bit digital synth kit is super easy to put together, and really fun to play. Here’s a short video I put together documenting the build and some of the sounds it’s capable of :
What is the Meeblip good at doing? I would say it excels at certain kinds of bass sounds (like the two-tone electro bass in the video above), noise runs, and even can pull off a decent wubwub. The LFO is great to play with when routed to the filter.
That said, I wish it had a little more range. The filter can be hard to dial in, it wont self-oscillate, and the envelope is really tricky to get *just* right. It’s hard to get a good distorted Acid bassline out of this thing, for instance.
That said, for 100 bucks and a little hard work, the Meeblip is a wonderful little piece of kit. I had as much fun building it as I have playing it, and I’m not really one to get off on soldering. It’s opened the door to other possibilities in terms of DIY synth building (808 clones and PAIA Fatman, watch out), which in itself is a great gift.
More info here : meeblip.noisepages.com
I needed a little project to refresh my C4D skills up to this point before jumping into some more advanced stuff, and this is what I came up with. It’s a pretty simple exploitation of the Explode and Bend deformers and a series of simple camera moves to go from particles to the logo. It was rendered with no real textures, and a few lights to, including a spot attached to a target camera to make sure the subject stayed lit throughout the sequence.
The sound design was actually almost more fun to work out. After watching the animation a couple times, I realized it would work with that famous THX sound effect you hear at the beginning of theater movies. You know the one.
Of course, I couldn’t just drop it in there unmolested. It had to follow the animation on the screen somehow, so I dropped both animation and sound into Ableton live and started tweaking. I ended up using a couple different chopped-up versions of the sound, most of them heavily time-stretched with different warping modes. A flanger, auto-pan, filter, and redux were used with automation to achieve the slippery wobbly stuff during the intense transformation section.
Finally, the whole thing got a sheen of video post-fx in Final Cut Pro using Magic Bullet Looks and a few stock filters, all automated to help give the piece vibe.
Definitely a fun little project to clear the cobwebs out and make way for something more ambitious.
When Michael McDonald mentioned he wanted to record him and Boz preforming “You Never Can Tell” for Chuck Berry’s 80th birthday, I was understandably excited. I was also, like, ok… how do we pull this off with what we have?
The answer is : round up every digital camera that shoots video in the venue, regardless of make, model, or capabilities. Stick two on-stage in front of the artists, clamp one to the drum set, tripod one on the B3, and use the last to catch shots from down in the pit. Run on-stage right before the encore, push record, and hope that it all comes out in post.
The result, as you’ll see, isn’t horrible, but it’s definitely not as pretty as it could have been. I’m still learning how to expose for stage lighting, and many of the cameras had very little control over exposure, let alone aperture. Add to that 5 different codecs and 4 different resolutions (ranging from full HD to 640 x 480) and you’ve got yourself a recipe for some extra work when it comes to post.
I used Magic Bullet Instant HD to upsample to 1280 x 720, and Colorista II to grade and recover some of the blown-out highlights (oh, why can’t every camera shoot video in RAW!). Some of the footage was still having issues in terms of color matching, highlights, and black, so I crushed it through Quick Looks and Mojo to give it a uniform, if unnatural, look.
The result is a quick and dirty capture of a great performance by a great band, and a loving tribute from two greats musicians to another. I’ve learned a lot about what I would do if faced with this again, so in that respect, it’s win-win!
Check out the full story over at the CBS St. Louis website.
