This is a fake job, but makes for a pretty cool demo. I spent a bit of time photographing and filming one of the Crystal head Vodka bottles and after some experminentation ended up with some good footage. We have been making this ad in class as an exercise while learning Final Cut Pro this year. The skull was set on a lava lamp light that eliminated the head. The Camera (Canon XA10) was set very close, set manual to a large aperture the the lens as wide as possible fixed to a camera slider rail for the moving shots. Music is Classics VI’s version of Spooky which gave the piece some charisma. There is also footage of a  lava lamp overlaid  on the final edit for a splash of colour.

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This is a time-lapse experiment of a heart shaped ice block melting that has been captured in real time on video and then sped up 1000% to give the final time-lapse effect. A heart shaped has been used as this is a client experiment for an MIC electronic music project which my students are preparing artwork and video. I used a hardware shop halogen light that pulses and fluctuates with the time lapse effect so next time I will try a different light source that is more constant and stable. The final movie does illustrate the effect so it serves its purpose as a demonstration file. This movie was shot with a Canon XA10 video camera as HD and prepared in apple motion.

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These graphics are experiments using photoshop clipping layers with simple shapes but lots of layers and effects, mainly half-tone pattern and distortion filters. My class has some design projects with music industry students producing electronica and these are some demo graphic and techniques to get them started. The heart shape is a theme for one of the groups.

I have been experimenting with time lapse photography for a while and decided to build a motorised slider for motion time lapse shots. The idea is that while you are doing a time lapse sequence of photos you are also slowly pulling the camera along a rail so that when the images are played back you have a time lapse view from a moving position. I bought and intervalometer for my SLR that just triggers the camera to shoot a set intervals and a Opteka camera slider rail. The camera needs to be pulled at a slow rate along the rail perhaps 1 or 2 RPM so I used two Tamiya Planetary Gearbox kits together to step this 9000 rpm motor down to 1 rpm with a huge amount of torque – powered by 2 AA batteries. The whole unit sits in a wooden frame I made to keep the tension between parts. The Camera is fixed to the slider with a ball head mount and the motor slowly pulls the camera down the slider with fishing line wound to a spool on the end of the drive shaft. Camera is used in full manual mode – with white balance NOT set to auto. When the collection of shots are played back as video at a normal frame rate you get the benefits of SLR lenses – particularly depth of field as video. I am using Apple Motion 5 to construct the videos at full 1080p.

Here is my first videos from the rig in the garden at home – day 01

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This link will take you to a time-lapse video of CIT Momentum 2011 – The final exhibition of students of CIT’s Centre for Creative Industries.

CIT Momentum 2011 – Exhibition Night – Time-Lapse

This link will take you to a time-lapse video of my students setting up for CIT Momentum 2011 – Their final exhibition.

CIT Momentum 2011 – Design Bump In – Time-Lapse 

This is a very short animation using 3d depth and camera panning in Apple Motion. I noticed this effect being used in some documentaries and advertising and created this animation as a demo for our students learning motion graphic design. The photo is of a Kookaburra I shot with a zoom lens some time ago, this has be bird has been carefully isolated and prepared with a new background on seperate layers for animation in motion. The layers are separated by z depth with the Kookaburah being closer to the camera in 3D space. Some subtile camera behaviours produce and effect than cannot be achieved via a single static image and is often used to get maximum milage from a photograph.

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These images are from a tutorial about hand rendered typography and how to digitise those graphics and use them in our designs. The first image is a rough draft developing the basic shape of the letterforms, I then map that out with more care on some grid paper, measure areas and develop the strong letterforms. Once complete I stick the artwork to my desk, stick some quality tracing parer over that and trace the design with care to produce a very clean master. This trace is then scanned, adjusted and finally traced using the auto trace feature in Illustrator. This process produces a very clean results providing your tracing work is thorough. Once the lettering is converted to  vectors they can be treated in many different ways.

Semi-Permanent is a 2 day design conference featuring 12 speakers from a range of creative professions including artists, designers, animators, illustrators, typographers & photographers who each speak for an hour and display their work and experiences in the design industry. We take a large group of students every year to the event which is always pretty inspiring and motivating for the groups. This year featured presentations by Moffitt Moffitt, Kelly Thompson, Corey Arnold, Supervixen, Reg Mombassa, Webuyyourkids, Alt group, Kayt Jones, Gemma O’Brian, Michael Leon & Fuel VFX. This year was a really strong line-up and most presentations were really interesting.

A previous student introduced me to these GoPro sports video cameras and I just had to get one. They shoot and amazing quality video on SD card and have a waterproof protective covering. I also managed to persuade CIT buy invest in one and we have been trying it out in various conditions. They also have a pretty cool time lapse mode and can shoot 720p up to 60 frames a second for smooth fluid slow motion. This photo was taken with my SLR and portrait lens in natural light. GoPro