design for motion

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Battle of the Boards! Part I

March 9, 2013 in design, motion media | Permalink

Battle of the Boards Participants!

For the past five years SCAD has organized an event called Inspire for the Motion Media department. For the 2012-2013 year, however, the department has decided to try something a little different.

Rather than holding a singular, 2-day event (as a bookend to the Career Fair), they decided it might be more beneficial to give students the chance to actually put their skills into practice. They decided to invite some professional designers to come and lead 2 or 3-day workshops over the course of the year.

The Carlo Vega workshop I wrote about a few months ago was the first of these workshops, and it was an amazing success. All of us MOME students were begging for them to do it more often, and we were very excited when we heard the next one would be a design workshop with director/designer Greg Herman.

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Prometheus in the Garden of Eden

February 16, 2013 in Design for Motion, illustration, motion media | Permalink

At long last, I got to flex some illustrative muscles in Design for Motion class. Even though for each project I kept telling myself keep it simple Caresse, do not go HAM on the photocompositing and obsessive compulsive detail painting, I would never listen. I still ended up pulling all nighters and delivering unfinished process books and less than the required amount of frames.

Well, I still pulled an all-nighter on this one. But it wasn’t my fault. Instead of Saturday, I got back late last Monday from the Style Frames New York conference (more on that later) and had only Tuesday/Tuesday night to whip this thing together. While compositing is something I still labor slowly over, luckily I can draw relatively fast. With my tablet, I can draw even faster. Speaking of which…

<< This is my tablet pen tip right now. I bought this thing less than a month ago, and as you can see the once proud nib has been reduced to an ever-dwindling wedge.  I asked some of my MOME peers about nib replacements and their tablet habits, and they were nonplussed. “Replace nib? Who does that?”… “You might be working too much…” (After doing some research, I now see that the nib I have is a “flex nib,” which is made out of a more pliable plastic than the standard nib.).

The brief for this project was to create a series of boards inspired by the Greek Titan Prometheus. If you thought Prometheus was just the last Alien movie, you suck. If you thought Prometheus was just a character from Kablam!, marry me.

We were instructed to convey the story of Prometheus with either a Modernist or “Naive” design aesthetic. Please visit my web site for a breakdown of the process for this assignment. Here are my final boards:

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Knoll Where You’re Going

February 2, 2013 in design, Design for Motion, motion media, painting, photography | Permalink

 

Our last assignment in design for motion was to create a series of design boards off the concept of “knolling.” Our concepts also had to be a self-portrait of sorts, but within those constraints we could devise any narrative or context we pleased.

Interestingly, a lot of my classmates focused on travel as a means of self-portraiture. So did I. But instead of knolling the places I’ve been or the things I’ve collected, I decided to knoll places I’d like to go. Aside from being born in Germany, I’ve never been out of the country. Traveling abroad has been my biggest desire for as long as I can remember.

These boards represent my dreams of places I’d like to go and things I’d like to see. And yes, I do have a knollingly organized list of future destinations and sights :) . Read the rest of this entry »

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Matte Painting

January 29, 2013 in Design for Motion, motion media, painting | Permalink

My latest adventure in Design for Motion class: matte painting! Matte painting is not something I would have normally associated with motion media, but it can be a huge part of developing styleframes and storyboards. Typically when one thinks of matte paintings, they think of visual effects and movies. But mattes are used in tv shows and video games too.  Our professor mentioned Dylan Cole as a point of reference. Cole is a matte painter who’s done work for The Lord of the Rings series, Avatar, TRON: Legacy, Halo, Assassin’s Creed… just to name a few.

I almost died doing this assignment. Having put it off over the weekend, I worked around the clock for 48 straight hours to get it done. I really enjoyed it though – I wouldn’t have been able to focus so hard on it if I didn’t like it. My original concept was to depict the netherworld from Aztec creation mythology, but I ended up with a Happyland Pyramid more than a dark jungle with blood sacrifice -___- How did that happen? If this is nothing but an exercise in matte painting and compositing techniques, I’m happy.

Process images below! Read the rest of this entry »

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Compositing

January 16, 2013 in design, Design for Motion, motion media, photography | Permalink

In digital media, compositing is the practice of combining multiple source images into one cohesive image.  It is a technique used in matte painting, concept art, styleframes, and storyboards.  We had to create six animal composites as our first assignment in Design for Motion – a class focusing on the development of boards, frames and other design elements for motion media.  Styleframes and storyboards are the preliminary steps taken before animation begins.  Being able to create realistic composites allows the designer to give their client (and the production team) a better idea of what the final animation will look like.

All too often I skimp on the preproduction process when tackling my animation assignments, so with this class it’s really nice to get back to basics and practice my Photoshop skills. Click through to see the rest of my composites and some of the source images.

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