21) Mike Gundy Interview for AggieReport.com

20) Water Ripple

19) Blood Bursts

I remade another clip from Die Hard and added more blood splattering effects. Meh. They don't show up so well on youtube because of the converted frame-rate, so a lot of the frames got cut out. At least the smoke coming out of the gun turned out really well.

18) Headshot in 3...2...1...

Here I added a blood burst effect to a shot from our Die Hard movie. Don't blink or you'll miss it.

17) Matrix Font

The hard parts with this one were:
A) Finding that damn matrix font, which is here if you want it,
B) Figuring out how to randomize the text over time. For future reference, it's Animate> Character Value.
C) I know there has to be a way to create multiple lines of text without having to create each layer by hand, just haven't figured it out yet.

16) Muzzle Fire

I took a clip from our Die Hard movie that we made and added muzzle fire to the guns. Too bad it's so short. Maybe I'll make a gif of this.

15) Warp

14) Moar Particlez

More fun with particle effects. Giggity.

13) Particle Man, Particle Man...

12) Buggin' Out

Ma-att Daa-mon.

Now I didn't plan on using Matt Damon for this test. I went to youtube to look for footage of someone's face, preferably a celebrity, and this clip of Matt Damon was on the youtube main page and here we are. If you want to see the whole clip, it's right nyah. He's ripping Sarah Palin and is very pleased with himself as he does so.

Anyway, I learned this "bug under skin" effect from a tutorial on this site I found yesterday called VideoCopilot.net.

Maaa-att Daaa-mon!

11) Making it Rain

I make it rain (I make it rain)
I make it rain on them hoes I make it rain,(I make It rain)
I make it rain on them hoes I make it rain,(I make it rain)
I make it rain on them hoes I make it rain(I make it rain)
I make it rain on them hoes

10) TeeVee

Here I took an old video I shot on my digital camera and used AE to look like an old tv. Most of the effects and techniques are the same as the ones I used to make Sith Lord McCain.

Here's the original:


I used a grid to make the horizontal lines, and large falling white blur is just a mask that's been feathered. I also like the white blur in the upper left corner. I think it's effective.

9) ...

No words...

Should...have sent...a poet...

8) Moar Purty Lites

Here is yet another logo I made for Mascot Wedding.

I love the way it turned out. It looks like something they would come across in Star Trek.

This would not have been possible without the 3D Stroke, and CC Glow plug-ins.

7) Tiger Woods = Predator

Here is another green screen video I made using a vid of Tiger Woods I got off of youtube. I did the Predator-effect by following this tute, and I fine-tuned my green screen removal techniques by using this tute on creating junk mattes. Totes tutes.

6) Purty Lites

Here I made another logo for Mascot Wedding using this tute. This one took a while to make. A ton of effects are involved and even some (gasp!) expressions!

loopOut(type="cycle")

The hell does that mean?? Ugh, I hate programming languages. But I guess they are...useful. Sigh.

I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially with the glow on the ground. And yes, this is intended to look like those Sprint commercials.

I'd like to do this again in the future, but over video instead of a still image. Or maybe a series of still images.

5) Smoky McSmokerson

Here are two videos I made using smoky text thanks to this tutorial. It's a really cool effect, but too bad there wasn't enough smoke in the one above to show all of the text. I should've moved the text over or zoomed in on the smoke itself. Oh, and by the way, the text is the name of our production group, Mascot Wedding. Feel free to check out all of our short films.



This one is better and it isn't. Sure, the text is visible, but the effect is more hazy because I zoomed in on the smoke video. Plus, I think I went overboard with the Fast Blur effect.

But that's one of the challenging things about doing these short animations: finding usable stock footage. Youtube works ok sometimes, but the quality is shit. Plus I have to convert everything from .flv to .avi files so I can import them into AE. I'll keep digging.

At any rate, I'm still not quite sure of how to go about doing all these effects without following the tutorial step-by-step. It uses a lot of effects that I'm still getting used to (displacement maps, alpha channels, etc.).

But then again, I've only been using AE for less than a week.

4) Teh Force...I haz it

This was my first project in AE. I took out the green screen using the same color and chroma keys in AE, then I followed the Hologram Tutorial by Creative Cow to turn our next president (god help us) into the evil Sith lord that he is. Now if we can only get Sarah Palin into the slave Leia bikini...or not.

Anyway, the result isn't as clean as I'd like it. I've since found better export settings, and I've also added a bunch of plug-ins that would have made this video look better and easier to make.

3) Pug McCain

This is the one that really got the ball rolling for me.

I was talking to a friend on g-chat, and he mentioned that he was making a video using the video of McCain in front of the green screen. You can see his here. I decided to do one too, and I instantly knew what I was going to put in the green screen. THIS!

Pugs rule.

Anyway, I downloaded the McCain footage from colbertnation.com and delved into it. I would find out that trying to take out a green screen in Premiere is pretty frustrating. I used the Color Key and Chroma Key effects, and it took a lot of tweaking before I got a result I was happy with. Later I would learn that in AE I could get a better result in about 5% of the time. Oh well. I think it turned out ok.

2) Strippers and Cartoons

This is the music video I made for Awesome Cool Dudes. The song is called "French Canadian Valentine" and will be on their next album which is tentatively called "Black Titty." Best. Title. Evar.

For this I solely used Premiere, and I tried to incorporate as many of the effects as I could get a grasp of. I found all of the footage at archive.org. Truly a great site.

It took about 4-5 days to finish it, and I really want to do another one soon.

1) Introdukshun...ur doin it wrong

Alright, here we go.

So I recently acquired Adobe Premiere and After Effects, and I've been making the most of it. I started by making a music video for a friend's band solely using Premiere. I hadn't even really tried playing around with AE yet. Well, I got a lot of positive feedback on the video, and I realized I wanted to do more, a lot more. Premiere was easy to get into because I had borrowed the instruction manual from a friend, but I had no idea how to operate AE. So I started googling AE tutorials when I came across the brilliant site creativecow.net. The tutorials there are super easy to follow, and the stuff those guys make is incredibly impressive. Makes me wish I had gotten into this sooner.

Ever since I've been designing new graphics every day, so much so that they started to pile up, and I wanted to be able to share them with people without having to send out an email every time. So I decided to start this blog. And here we are.