Webcommercial for the national Dutch iceskating union KNSB, announcing the new season.
Camera: Beslist.nl (Marco Meijer) and TVM
Direction and production: Dizain/Frank Groenwold, Erik Meijerink, Roel Tiemessen and Nienke Smit
Editing: BUSHOKrockvideos/Rob Bruijgoms
Visual FX: Mutant Worm/Frank Boxman
Sound design and voice over: Soundbase/Renger Koning
Mutant Worm worked on the 3D texts and getting rid of an unwanted ad. This was my first use of video copilot’s Element plugin. This plugin opens a lot of doors for 3D object integration in After Effects and I barely scratched the surface of it’s possibilities. I also used After Effects CS6′s 3D camera tracker and it’s 3D extrusion capabilities.
Meanwhile the TV commercial version has also come online.
The third explanimation for Overheidsfilm.nl. My task in this project was again to animate this clear and stylish animation showing the steps you need to take when you have to get an ID-card in Holland. It’s in Dutch so you’ll just have make do with watching it it for style and animation. There is even more repetition, some of which are very slight. Find the differences!
Script, storyboard and director: Rob Bruijgoms
Illustrations: Arthur van’t Hoog
Animation: Frank Boxman
Music: Renger Koning
Voice-over: Leonieke Toering
About the process
There is always new stuff to try but the process for this one was pretty much the same as the last. Just for the record: there is so much I could have done with the wonderful illustrations by Arthur, but there is a limit to the time you can spend on a project if you want to stay within budget. Maybe I’ll do an After Effects Rigit Script test with one of the puppets from these animations. I’ll probably post it.
For details about the technical aspect of After Effects animation check out the English versions of the related posts below.
Related post:
The second explanimation for Overheidsfilm.nl. My task in this project was again to animate this clear and stylish animation showing the steps you need to take when you have to get an ID-card in Holland. It’s in Dutch so you’ll just have make do with watching it it for style and animation. There is also some repetition of the previous Overheidsfilm.nl explanimation, some changes are very slight. Find the differences!
Script, storyboard and director: Rob Bruijgoms
Illustrations: Arthur van’t Hoog
Animation: Frank Boxman
Music: Renger Koning
Voice-over: Leonieke Toering
About the process
This is for the After Effects people, or the technically interested who don’t mind having to go on tangent searches to make sense of the jargon.
So: it’s an After Effects animation using illustrator vector files. While I used a camera in After Effects to zoom in and out in the previous one, Paspoort aanvragen, this time I chose to delete the camera and use scaling instead. The reason for this, plain and simple, was render time. It did however result in a new problem which I didn’t immediately find a good solution for.
The problem was the use of the Puppet tool in combination with scaling. Eventually I found out – from just the one mention pointing towards the most obvious source – that it simply cannot be done! Puppet tool and scaling do not work together in After Effects:
Note: Don’t animate the position or scale of a continuously rasterized layer with layer transformations if you are also animating the layer with the Puppet tools.
Source: Adobe help for the puppet tool. Duh.
In the previous one I had made the embedded compositions huge enough to zoom in on. This did demand continuous rasterization, and a lot of render power. So when I switched to scaling instead of a camera – although the above clearly says Don’t – all the puppet tooling went haywire. I resolved it by simple leaving the puppet tool out of zoom-ins and zoomed in shots, or if unavoidable, by deleting the puppet tool and resorting to more layer segmenting, rotation points and – ah yes – the duIK plugin! DuIk is an Inverse Kinetics tool for After Effects. I have yet to try the somewhat similar Rigit Script.
Just ask for more details if you have problems yourself.
Related post:
An explanimation for Overheidsfilm.nl. My task in this project was to animate. It is a clear and stylish animation showing the steps you need to take when you have to get a new passport in Holland.
The process for this one was especially interesting since it brought a whole new look to the animations simply by having Arthur van ‘t Hoog as illustrator. Another interesting part was the collaboration in general.
Rob Bruijgoms from Overheidsfilm.nl (Government films) provided the script, storyboard, direction and he did the final edit. The illustrations were created by Arthur van ‘t Hoog. Sound was added by Renger Koning from Soundbase. It has four voice overs to choose from; this one is by Leonieke Toering.
About the process
I work in After Effects using illustrator files. Once I import these .ai files as compositions all it’s layers translate to layers in After effects. It is very important to decide beforehand which layers need to be separated in order to animate.
For instance, if the only movement in a shot is a waving arm, you should be sure to have a separate layer for the rest of the body, the upper arm, the lower arm, the hand, perhaps the thumb. I usually also use separate layers for the face: mouth (sometimes in layers ranging from sad to neutral to big smile), eyebrows (none in this animation), eyes (open and closed), nose.
This layering can become pretty elaborate. In short, everything that needs to be animated needs a different layer. I also add several extra empty layers to the .ai before importing. This way, if I need to add an animated part to the illustrator file lateron, I can use one or more of those empty layers and simply update the source in After Effects without causing too much trouble to the animation already in place.
Related post:
Right after doing my explanimation for Simple Story Videos — actually during finishing touches — I was plunged into an animated fair presentation for Hoza Logistic Solutions. Commissioned by advertisement agency Dizain, produced and directed by Bushok Rockvideos.
It’s actually not very different from an explanimation. It’s not spoken but has to be read, it has no sound, it has less humor. Other than that it’s still an explanimation since the text is build the same way, it’s an animation (even has some subtle character animation), and the purpose is to present and explain what Hoza stands for in a clear and visual manner.
This project almost got the best of my 12 core Mac Pro and it was a tough render-heavy experience. As a result I’ve added to my RAM and hard drives. A valuable free video course dealing with performance— covering many tips I found elsewhere — is this one at Video2Brain by Todd Kopriva: After Effects & Premiere Pro Performance Workshop. Running 1 hr 20 min it is well worth your while.
In the end this project did yield a 4.5 minute awesome soundless video that is somewhat different from my earlier work … and yet the same. The sky isn’t the limit. Maybe it’ll have sound design at some point in the future, if the client wants it. That’d be cool.
A thank you goes out to videocopilot.
