After effects old "film-look"

This is something myself and Rob did to flesh out Boulders "Commercial" showreel a little. The music is from The Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack. All achieved with AE CS3 Professional, it was fun drawing those film pops and burns. got great reference from the opening sequence for Sky Ones amazing, envelope pushing, hard hitting, gritty real life drama show "Dream Team"...of all places



Aged motion graphics from Paddy macfisto on Vimeo.

Christmas Homebrew

Some lucky members of the Smith clan, along with a few VERY lucky chums are getting a few bottles of my Mexican homebrew. While not quite ready to drink yet (I tasted it last night at 1:30 in the morning when I was labeling it up...makes your mouth slightly uncomfortable) I thought I'd blog the genius label. Kudos to Dave O' Sullivan for knowing 2 weeks ago the tag line I'd use, although Jamie told me it's was pretty predictable..I guess it is. Thanks to the new Cartoon effect in AE CS4 too. Merry Christmas After Effects...and to Adobe a good night

JumboTron Logo

Well today I completed my section of the Swedish feature we're working on at the moment. It's for a company called ATMO and the movie is called "Metropia". Starring such stars as Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis... It's a fairly interesting film, not least for it's INTENSIVE use of After Effects. All the films animation is being done through After Affects. It's been a while since I actually animated anything so it took a while to get into it but I'm pretty happy with the stuff that me and the team have been coming out with. the file sizes are massive though and a real pain in the arse to work with. It's all HD and the character rigs are enormous so that you can zoom right into their eyeball and still have HD resolution. So as you can imagine the going can be pretty slow, but today...FINALLY i've finished. New babies and feature films make Eddie a really really tired boy. And just so I'm not posting a big chunk of text (cos who the hell wants to read what i've got to say except people who have to) here's a logo I was messing around with before we started on this ATMO project.

I was going for a real Game-show type feel, cheesey gold everywhere and I really wanted to work in some explosions to really give it that "Roy Walker Factor". It's all done in AE CS3, no plugins or anything!! the 3D text is done in the "Shatter" effect and I used the previously posted "Shine Cheat" on the lights. That new CC Light Sweep is pretty handy too. And even if it could be created in 3DSMAX in under 10 minutes I'm still proud of it...so ha :P


Boulder are Pure Gold! from Paddy macfisto on Vimeo.

Trapcode "Shine" Cheat and other news

Well it's been a while. Things have been a bit topsy turvy in Boulder lately so haven't felt much like posting. Add to that the fact that I have had absolutely nothing to post and you get an almost year long break in posting.

Getting close to "New Baby O'Clock" now, only a week or 2 really til D-Day. Still don't know whether it's a boy or a girl. Lately I've been reading a few other blogs written by people who have kids or about having kids and their experiences.

Daddytypes is a good site for gadgets and gizmos and general parenting news.


Sweet Juniper is a very well written blog, not always about parenting but nonetheless a great one to keep going back to.

Reference Library is just a site where there are some great photos of things that I'd love to buy for myself and my kids.

Recently in Boulder we've been trying to broaden our horizons and experimenting with a few different techniques, so there should be a new showreel fairly soon that will showcase those new clips. Some of them are very "Motion-Graphy" so it was great to work on them. Fran posted one that we worked on together here

AND...since we've been doing lots of "logo-y" type thingys I've basically come to the conclusion that Boulder seriously need to buy a license for the Trapcode plugin "Shine" for After Effects. It's used on EVERYTHING!! I've come up with a cheat that kind of emulates Shine but obviously it's not as good and not as versatile. I've only really applied it to text thus far although if I get a chance I'll apply it to some imagery, but I fear that that will necessitate a few layer duplicates and transfer modes so it mightn't be the simplest solution. Suffice it to say if you've got $100 and you need to do some mo-graph then buy it. However if you want to mess around on the cheap you can download my "workaround"
here

Here's an example of what I achieved with it:



I've included the font that I used in the zipfile. it might come in handy for someone. If anythings unclear in the file send me a mail and I can probably confuse you even more.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this is for AE CS3 as it uses the CC Radial Fast Blur

New Logo, El Tigre cancelled

Well I haven't been doing much creative stuff lately. Haven't had the time what with the new house and all. Life is good in Maynooth though. I did manage to get a new logo done for my brother who's just set up a digital label, Ambig Records. Here's the pics, plus a little light rays thanks to AE CS3.














In other news El Tigre was canceled, which is unfortunate but there's not alot little ol' me can do about it. I did enjoy working on it when the deadlines didn't get in the way of my sanity but alas it is no more. We've a few more episodes to finish up early in the new year but after that ...kaput. Apparently the ratings weren't so hot and it's too expensive to make, I have my own opinions on where the expense was coming from but I suppose now mightn't be the time to be airing my views. It's a shame they only paid any attention to the US ratings as I'm sure it'll be huge in South America and I would imagine it doing OK in Europe and Asia. Anyway...onwards and...onwards. No news of any new projects that are coming up quite yet but we'll all be hoping we get one of our own off the ground. That's it for now, be good and remember...Keep it country!

Cow Girl

This is my latest submission for the current Boulder Media Art Challenge theme which is "Cows". I did everything in Photoshop (including the initial sketch) and then put in some lighting in After Effects. I had been trying to paint some decent hair using the excellent Furiaes Photoshop tutorials. I was happy with the head because I had some reference for hair direction etc... but I kind of stumbled with the hair in the body. It looks fuzzy but not exactly like the kind of thing I was trying to achieve. Still though, I was pretty happy with it, I particularly enjoyed doing the lighting in After Effects, mainly because it only took 10 minutes and I'm much better acquainted with After effects than with Photoshop. Anyway here she is.

New Puppet Tool in After Effects CS3

Me and Sam were messing around with the new Puppet Tool in After Effects CS3 (Yay! we finally upgraded!) and these are the results of my fooling. A great feature in this new tool is the ability to record, in realtime, the animation you want to achieve. You just hold down control and select a pin point and move it around. When you release AE automatically generates all of the keyframes in the timeline. LEGEND!! Doesn't look like we'll be sacking all the animators just yet though...the tool is still a little counter-intuitive but still...great fun.