I love the puppet tool

So this guy in the America hot air balloon is totally going to die...  

This was a fun little project.  I got several hot air balloons, a few of which I did not use.  Used a mask to cut them out, and smoothed to refine the shape.  Then I got a picture of Austrian Alp background, and put a lens blur on it.  

I originally wanted to do a hot air balloon race, but didn't think that it would make use of some of the more advanced animation features.  

I think the temporal idea behind this is that balloons are constantly changing in speed depending on the wind.  

I did all of the movement with scale and position.  I pushed the anchor point out of the composition to make it huge in the ground and chug its way across the screen.  Once I had all of the key frames set, I got in the graph editor and started playing with the curves to make it decelerate as it got further away from the camera. 

Then came the puppet tool.  When I saw it for the first time, I knew it would work perfectly on a balloon. So i set 10 pins in the balloon and went to the end of my timeline and scrunched it up to blow up this guys balloon.  All that is missing is a crash, scream, explosion.  

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Pac Man folly

So I wanted to make a video game for my simple animation, and I felt like with the tools we learned the best option was Pac Man. There isn't that much to this one. I found this picture on google and threw it into photoshop. In there I made a mask over the whole thing. Lassoed the characters and made a new layer via copy. Then I cut out the path I wanted them to take and filled in where the characters were with black. You can see that its a little messy around the bottom where the blue ghost starts. Then I saved that background and used it as my background in after effects. I also cut Pac Man in half, so that I could do the "chomp" rotation.

So in After Effects.

I threw my background in, and then my characters. I animated the ghosts movements first and just used the position tool to get them where I wanted them, and checked to make sure they stayed in the lines. I watched it a couple of times and adjusted the speeds. Then came pac man. I used the rotation on both layers of pacman and had to checkerboard my copy pastes or else the timing wouldn't match up. Then I would drop the opacity out of the dots pac man was moving over as I animated him.

The end.

I wish I had the music.

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

North by Star Wars

This was a really strange experiment. When we first got the assignment I brought 3 completely different pictures in, not sure what I wanted to do. Then when we started masking, I decided I definitely wanted this recreation of the famous NXNW scene with Seth Rogen. It's RIDICULOUS! So from there I started thinking what things I could do. I originally wanted to get like a flying saucer U.F.O. and put it behind him. Then have it shooting a barn or something. However I just really didn't like that brown tented background. So then I thought why not in space, and from there Star Wars...

So I started by masking out Seth, which was really difficult because the original desaturated brown exterior matched his suit. So Magic wand was out. Magnetic lasso was just ruining the wrinkles in his suit, so I got out the lasso and went piece by piece. Once I got a rough version of that, I went ahead and threw the moonscape on. I took a short cut and just lassoed a line about halfway across it to make a horizon and knew I would blur it later so it wouldn't look too bad. Then got that space skyline and plopped it on. Then I created a duplicate and placed it atop, did a quick mask and used the gradient tool to make a nice lens blur. I made it kind of light, and changed the shape to 7 sidedp; i also added some monochrome noise, to try and make it a little more 70s Star Wars. Then I dropped the opacity just to keep it from being too harsh. Then I added the Tie Fighter and blurred it a little separately . Followed by 2 layers of lasers that I drew with the line, and set one to screen and one to color sponge. Then I wanted more, so I added the death star. But then, I realized it was in focus so I had to go back and redo the gradient lens blur, which really was much easier the 2nd and 3rd time around (thanks Ben).

I couldn't stop there, so finally came the explosion. I masked that out, then added white dots and dirt that I clonestamped the rock pattern on. From there it was a trying series of radial blurs and now it joins you on my blog. I hope you enjoy the absurdness of this cacophony. I really wish I could've added Seth Rogen's eyes popping like Arnold in Total Recall. Ha!