Well, I know it's a little off-topic, but I just have to introduce you to George Carlin.

You American guys of course know him, but here in europe, he's not that wellknown. And now I want to do my part to change that.

George Carlin is one of the best stand-up comedian of all times. I first got in touch with this genius about 8 years ago, watched some of his shows and I am a huge fan since then.
Unfortunately he died last year, but the legend still lives on.

This show was recorded in 1992, during the time of the first war in the persian golf.It's called "Jammin' in New York".

Please guys, take a little bit of your time and watch these videos.

Ladies & Gentlemen, Mr. George Carlin!!!

A few days ago an old colleague called me up and asked me if I had time to do a quick animation and programing in flash for an interims-website. All he
sent me was this screenshot as a non-transparent PNG.

So, I looked at this and I thought, that there is just no way to do a goodlooking in-transition for this robot, that you can do quickly with Flash. I mean, you could cut the robot up  into his extremities and animate it piece by piece, but that is a lot of work to do and the result isn't that good.

So, I decided to give the marionette-tool in After Effects a try, and it turned out to be the best way to create a cool looking in-transition for the robot in a very short amount of time.

Here is how I did it:

First, I pinned all of the robot’s hinges to be able to animate his seperate movements. The Pins are the yellow circles on the robot.

Be careful here, there is just a small radius for each pin, in order to get the robot to move believable. When you go to far, this can happen very easily:

After I have set this up, there was nothing more to do, then just figuring out, how an anatomicly humanlike body would move, if it falls out of the sky and lands with a heavy impact onto the ground. and thats easy too.

When you jump from a wall onto the ground, your body is really stretched out in the air, you use your hands to keep your body stabil. When you land, your body gets squooshed a little bit, you are regulating the impact mostly with your knees, and after absorbing the impact you slowly stand up again into a normal position. So, that’s exactly what I did with my robot-marionette-setup.

Here is the result:

Click here to download:

1_SR_marionette-setup.mov (66 KB)

Well, so far so good. The only thing that bothered me, is that the point, where the feet hit the ground is moving too, and that is an obvious mistake. so, I thought, if the feet on the ground are moving, why not move the ground itself. A robot is not a feather, so his weight could cause a bit of an earthquake. that's why I added a little camera-shake.

Click here to download:

2_SR_camerashake-setup.mov (371 KB)

I did that with a little wiggle-expression, that is linked to an animated slider-control. This is the expression i used:

If you want to know more about camera-handling and wiggle-expression, visit www.videocopilot.net and go to the tutorial-section. Andrew Kramer has a few tuts, where he explains these topics bit by bit.

After that, i felt that the feet must do something with the ground at the time of the impact, so I decided to pick two explosion-elements of the "Action Essentiels"-package, a very nice product, also from videocopilot.

here is the explosion. It is pre-keyed, that means, all in the video that is black now is transprency.

Click here to download:

Explosion_01.mov (24 KB)

i made a new comp, put a few of them in, changed them to 3D-mode and aligned them to the feet. Here is the result:

Click here to download:

3_SR_dust.mov (399 KB)

The last step I had to do visually, was to stretch out the scene for more dynamic. the evolving shadow at the beginning is completely fake, it's just a grey solid with a very blurry-edged mask with an animated mask-expansion-value. For creating the shimmer at the and, i masked out all the green parts of the robot and i animated blurred stripes from left to right. and I put a little trapcode-shine effect onto his eyes.

Click here to download:

4_SR_visual-final.mov (132 KB)

And, of course, this piece must have a nice sounddesign behind it to really make it catchy. So I picked my headphones, crawled through the web (e.g. soundsnap.com) and found a few suitable sounds, arranged them properly to the video, and bam, here is the final shot:

FINAL SHOT

then i rendered out an FLV (1700 kb/s), loaded up flash, imported it and built the UI-components around the robot by using simple mask-shapes to fade them in nicely. and here is the final result:

FINAL SITE

Well, I hope you enjoyed this little breakdown. The whole thing, programming, testing and uploading included, took about 7 or 8 hours.

If you have any questions, please drop a comment below.

click here

Stay tuned, I will post a pretty detailed breakdown/making of about how I did it.

This is a little test I made for a concept-presentation for a new website.

- Clip shot with iPhone 3Gs
- Quick motion-tracking for reducing the handcamera-movement
- very quick colorgrade
- letter-animation, enhanced with some lens flares and some particle-effects
made with Trapcode Particular

Before and after.

Click here to download:

IMG_0120.MOV (867 KB)

Click here to download:

Sonny-Create_v1_kl.mov (861 KB)

Wie wird man Media-Millionär? Man entwickelt eine Gruppe frecher kleiner Papierfiguren, die Pritt Paper Gang und dreht eine Serie unterhaltsamer Stop-Motion-Videos für großformatige Video-Banner. Auf der zugehörigen Landing Page warten coole Basteltipps auf die jugendliche Zielgruppe und Anleitungen zum Drehen von Stop-Motion-Videos.

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