The Blog of Glen Moyes

I just barely finished my first video for The Guerrilla CG Project on Subdivision Surfaces. Guerrilla CG: Subdivision Surfaces from Glen Moyes on Vimeo . This video was quite unlike any other project I've done before. All but one animated sequence in this video was rendered by playblasting in Blender. I had to do some tricks like forcing Blender to use anti-aliasing in my graphics driver settings, and using chroma key to remove the background from each render so I could composite other elements together, which is something I usually never have to worry about. Anyway, the results turned out very well. I used After Effects for compositing and editing. It took me about 3 days to put the video together. The next video I'll be doing do will be on topology.

I've waited for a while to talk about this on my blog; I finished this project four months ago, and if you've looked at my Vimeo page within the past two months you may have noticed a new video on there called Aesop's Fables. That video only showed the completed animation with the background overlay and not actual footage of the gallery installation in action. Well, today I finally uploaded a video that does this project justice, and I went ahead and updated the older video by adding the same music by Kevin MacLeod that I included in today's video. >> Watch Aesop's Fables streamed in HD (720p) >> Watch Aesop's Fables: Complete Animation streamed in HD (720p) Aesop's Fables is my first 2D animated project. And by "2D animated" I don't mean animated with After Effects or Flash, I mean actually animating a character frame by frame. I loved it. It was a lot of work, but I loved it. This project was an experimental motion desi...

I never intended on revisited any of my school work, but since Vimeo's HD service is so good I was strongly compelled to re-render my motion design work in 720p. It also helped that I have a trial version of After Effects installed, so this will be the only chance I'll have to do this for a while, now that I'm away from school and don't have access to the Mac Lab. So here it is: all three projects from my motion design class, including one which you haven't seen before, in HD. Wonder This is the first project that I revisited earlier this week. I had to determine what version of Blender I used to make it because it wouldn't render properly with the newest version. Instead of rendering at the original 1024x576 resolution with no anti-aliasing , I re-rendered it at 1280x720 with 8x anti-aliasing. It took 2 days, but it's oh so pretty! Of course only after rendering did I noticed a couple of mistakes with the petals in the background. One would snap to a differ...

You might have noticed that I started using a different service to host my videos on this blog. I've been looking for something better than Google Video and YouTube to host my videos. So I did some research, compared the services, and found a service that I really like. I uploaded the same video to test each of these services, and here are the results. Google Video YouTube quality. This is what I've been using previously. The bitrate is low and the frame size is small. Blip.tv I've heard that these are the best guys to go through for high-quality video hosting. And they are not bad. The quality per frame is the highest out of any of these services that I've tested, and they also change the aspect ratio of the movie player so there's no letter boxing for my widescreen videos. The big problem is they dropped the frame rate to reduce bandwidth. That's a big bummer, and is why I decided not to use their service. You can enable advertising (which is off be default), ...

This was the final assignment for my motion design class (the same class that I did Wonder for). The assignment was to create a title sequence for a movie, preferably one that didn't already have an elaborate title sequence. So I chose one of my favorite movies: Sneakers . >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) I wanted the first part of the title sequence to look like the good old days of the BBS and ANSI art . The only way to do that was to animate the text frame by frame. In After Effects you can change the content of a text layer at any time, so it was just a matter of filling a text box full of white space (using a mono space font), and then edit the text for each frame as if you were using a text editor. The funny thing is that this crude bit of animation is the strongest part of the motion piece. I used to be an ANSI artist, so animating text in this way felt pretty comfortable to me even after all these years. It was a nice departure from all the key-framed anima...

Here's an a assignment from my motion design class. The goal was to take an emotion and create a motion piece that included text from the dictionary definition. Blender was used for animation while After Effects where used for compositing and bloom effects. The song used is Illusion of Love (bipolar remix) by Darkhalo. >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) The main purpose of this motion design assignment was to create and use style boards. The process of creating a motion piece--after the design brief and writing is done--is to create the storyboards, key art, style boards, and then go into production. The storyboards are rough sketches showing the action of the animation, the approved concept art is refined into key art, and from there you create what are called style boards. These are still images that show what the final shot should look like. Style boards don't need as many panels as storyboarding does, but in the case of this assignment we did to get practic...

This gives me an excuse to try out uploading videos to the blog. Here's the ads in their squint-o-vision glory (links to HD video and soundtrack downloads are in the previous post ). Edit: I started using Vimeo, so now you can click on the links below the ad to watch it streamed in HD from their web site. Enjoy! >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p) >> Watch this video streamed in HD (720p)

Here are the links to the Computer Medical Center Ad we just finished. CMC Ad 1 : 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 23.8 MB CMC Ad 2 : 720p, MP4/H264/AAC, 24.3 MB Music Track : MP3, 192kbit Music Track : OGG, 192kbit All content is copyrighted by Computer Medical Center. Credits Studio: Lumaglyph Creative Director and Designer: Glen Moyes Storyboard Artist: Shaun Williams Animation: Adam Weber, Glen Moyes Photography: Meggan Hayes Music: Glen Moyes (composition and engineering), Aaron Pike (composition), Shane Hunt (guitar) Design Process The goal for the TV spot was to create an ad on a tight budget that didn't look local. The ad is going to be shown in movie theaters locally and on cable TV, so we wanted to create an ad that is entertaining, communicates what Computer Medical Center does and sets it apart from the competition. The game piece concept worked very well to achieve this, and all within budget. For the second half of the ad, we decided to use photography in motion as opposed to vide...