(8 votes)
Loading ...
This was a two minute animation that I worked on at Blur Studio. Over the course of two weeks, a team of 4 of us cranked out the design, illustration and animation for this piece. Myself and freelancer Andrew Hildebrand of subpixel.tv brought the various hand drawn animations to life via After Effects and Cinema 4D.
Graymachine Products
November 9th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Harry Frank, Satya Meka. Satya Meka said: Beautiful Small project for Firefox. http://bit.ly/194vpu by @graymachine [...]
November 9th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Nice Job Harry, i can’t imagine how many times you watched the animation to check every little detail.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Is 5.2 bajillion a real number? Actually, that really was more of the Art Directors burden, catching all my stupid mistakes.
Thanks Joel!!
November 9th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by graymachine: Small project I worked on at Blur for Firefox. http://bit.ly/194vpu 2 minutes in 2 weeks!…
November 9th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Wow, that’s an intense amount of work to do in 2 weeks. Blur really likes to push the OT, eh?
November 9th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Nice !!
November 9th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Actually, I must say of any place I’ve been, Blur has been the best place about hours. I think we only really had one late night, and maybe a few extra hours here and there. Mostly, it was just working with a good workflow and talented people!
November 10th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Awesome job, the video gave me a warm feeling about how far internet technology has come and how my favorite browser helped do it. Stunning work!!
November 11th, 2009 at 10:35 am
I have one question about the wiggling lines and some fills, that effect was done using masks and stroke, shape layers with path and fill wiggler, or are just different draw layers sequenced in a precomp?Thanks in advance.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:27 am
The illustrations were a mix of cel animation loops, sequences and still scenes/characters drawn on paper and scanned. The process of filling elements consisted of luma keying the white, and then using the Paint Bucket effect, and manually adjusting the fill point to match when things moved. Sometimes the elements didn’t quite fill all the way, so we had to do some manual retouching in After Effects using the Paint tool to completely enclose the drawings.
To get things to draw on and wiggle (this was a process that was developed before I showed up to the job by motion design guru Chris Kelley) we used Auto-Trace to draw mask shapes on the illustrations, then revealed them with the Stroke effect, and used Turbulent Displace to get things to wiggle around.
Some of the animation was simply Puppeted in AE, like the crowd of waving people.
In terms of the comp structure, as you can see the story does a lot of jumping around and zooming, so the precomps and sizes were all over the place to follow the “camera zooms into computer – becomes a cell phone – zooms out to reveal landscape” type of progression.
Hope that helps!
November 11th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Hi Harry, thanks for the explanation, it helped a lot, i’m always curious about others artists workflow, thanks man.
November 11th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Excellent work Harry (and the team). honestly, this is the kind of project or technique I would love to see a tutorial or in depth break down on, even if it is just one small scene. This is the kind of real world scenario where a client comes to you with a pre-formed idea, and many of the cool techniques and tutorials online simply arent applicable. Like, how was C4D used in this and how did it fit into the pipeline, how much was pre-rendered, etc.
Cheers, always great stuff on Graymachine
November 12th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Hey Harry – what part of the animation did you use Cinema 4D for? I’m wondering because wherever you used it, it seems like a cool thing to use 3d oriented software to get such a cool 2d effect. Thanks!
November 12th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Hey Adam and Neal…
Cinema 4D was used in the section where the Firefox was flying around the globe. I tried various warp tools in AE to get the fox to bend and curve in a path, and I just didn’t find anything that I was happy with. CC Bend It almost worked, but I opted to map the animated loop to a 2D plane in Cinema, and use a Spline Wrap to distort it and move it along the path. Then I brought the camera data over to AE to add the globe and hand drawn elements.
As far as I recall, that’s the only scene that was 3D.
Thanks for the interest and discussion! I thought this would be a small post of a job that people wouldn’t be too interested in.
November 21st, 2009 at 2:16 am
Wow, that’s amazing! I’d love to do that stuff, however I’m just starting out and I know next to nothing about motion graphics and visual effects.
Nice job Harry! It was these sort of videos that made me want to get into using After Effects. The only problem is that it’s taking a heck of a lot longer than I expected to learn. I’m probably just a slow learner.
November 28th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Yeah this is great.
Many tutorials on the web are all about visual movie style FX, it would be great to see a tutorial of how this more clean friendly style is done. I can imagine that breaking ALL of this down to a tutorial would be a daunting task – however if you could just do a tutorial on how to do the wiggeling and or some more tricks that would be awesome.
Thanks for a great site.
/Ola
November 28th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Ola… can you name some examples of this “clean friendly” style? Really, the tutorials come from the ideas that I get while working on various jobs.
Also, I am a bit hesitant to a lot of tutorials that directly show how to do the work of a job that I’ve done for a client. I don’t think it’s fair for me to go into a studio like Blur, do a bunch of work, charge them for it, then do a tutorial that shows how to do what I did. It gets a little tricky.
But, I can take apart other styles, ideas, etc.. I am curious if you have samples of the style you are thinking about.
So, I try to break down concepts and ideas that I can re-apply to another fabricated project. I’d certainly like to cover other styles
November 29th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Thanks, I see your concern. I think you are very generous
.
Friendly style – good question. In all I would say clean friendly style is more about vector graphics and less about lens flare, shine and particles. More about analog than digital. More animation than rendering. More about typography then effects on gradients. Two exemples:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E55OcGB0L8o&feature=fvsr
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G-LXlQKLQI&feature=related
Effects include wiggly coloring and fonts and camera. How do you as a pro do all this – while still keeping organized?
Some of this stuff might seem basic to you
. I am myself a designer though not focused on motion design however I see it as an interesting means for putting ideas into flesh.
November 30th, 2009 at 5:19 am
Harry, good job man, everyday you have a new something making me proud of you, i was shocked when i saw these video on your web, i saw it before on firefox facebook page couple days ago, you are amazing man, by the way congrats for themotionexchange nice job too!!!!