Visual Effects and Media Creation
May 31st, 2009
Using After Effects, I created a new promotional video for comedian Tom Crowl. I had a blast producing this video for several reasons.
The first was the creative way I was able to use the 3D camera moves and create some virtual sets for the testimonials. The duck race was also fun to create, entirely in After Effects.
Categories: Portfolio | 2 Comments
May 5th, 2009
We’ve just redesigned our sister site. Digital Blacksmiths is a site dedicated to live digital caricatures and other digital entertainment aimed at tradeshows, company events, and conferences.
Digital Blacksmiths also has a large section of tutorials, articles, and reviews on the latest technology as it relates to digital artists, written by an international group of artists.
One of the main things we did was clean up the design and add a few extra sections, plus we made the navigation a bit easier to find some of the popular articles people have been reading.
Check it out. And if you are a digital artist and would like to contribute, we’ll be accepting applications.
Categories: News | Tags: articles, caricatures, company, corporate, digital, entertainment, events, live, tradeshows, tutorials | No Comments
April 21st, 2009
We’re very excited about all the news over the past few weeks and especially this week, with NAB going on in Las Vegas.
We purchased an Intuos4 digital tablet for our digital artwork, including the 3D effects we create in modo and After Effects. We got it the day it came out to compare it against the older Intuos2 tablet we had laying around and our two Cintiq tablets (one 12″ and one 21″ tablet).
The in-depth review is posted on the Digital Blacksmiths site. We cover how it works with Luxology’s modo, Adobe’s Photoshop and After Effects, and Corel’s Painter.
Also, we covered an exciting service called Animoto. Our workload often prevents us from doing many ’slideshow’ type projects where several photos are supplied and clients ask us to animated them to music. We love doing them, but just don’t have the time with the larger projects filling most of our time.
That’s where Animoto comes in. They make the entire process automated, and for a pretty good price, too! It won’t compare to a custom animation in After Effects, but for what they charge, its really good.
Our review for Animoto with sample videos that we created is located on the Digital Blacksmiths site as well.
Categories: News | Tags: after effects, animoto, cintiq, intuos, modo, nab, photoshop, wacom | No Comments
February 2nd, 2009
Angie Jordan is a professional digital artist who does something unique: live digital caricatures. So we wanted to explain to clients what this new type of entertainment was and why it would make their event special.
We were able to have a lot of fun with this video, playing off the digital theme. At one point, several of her caricatures draw themselves on a screen within a screen. The color tone and the growing vines both match her fun personality and sophisticated entertainment.
This video was created entirely in After Effects CS4 in about one week. All the artwork was provided by Angie, and Reels in Motion filmed the video segments that were included, showing her live digital caricatures.
Categories: Portfolio | No Comments
January 23rd, 2009
Our studio has a state of the art audio mixing studio, capable of multiple audio track recording. It is a well known secret in the media creation world that audio is 75% of the picture. If you have great
audio, your media will look much better!
We have invested in high quality studio monitors so you can hear exactly how your media will sound without the distortion in lower quality speakers. We can also mix your audio tracks in 5.1 surround sound to totally immerse your audience.
And if you are focusing on audio podcasts, we have the ability to do remote recording, in studio recording with one or more hosts. We have also tweaked our encoding pipeline to provide you with the best file for your audience, whether you need mp3 or AAC enhanced files.
Our pipeline is centered around Apple’s Final Cut Studio. As Wayne Gretzky says, you don’t skate to where the puck is, you skate to where the puck will be. And that’s precisely what we’ve done.
We’ve built our editing suite’s capabilities around handling high definition from start to finish. We believe that HD isn’t something that will be here someday. We believe it is here NOW.
HD allows us to do better greenscreen shoots and gives a much flexibility for color grading. By shooting on Panasonic cameras that shoot directly to high end memory cards, we can also turn around your projects
faster by eliminating the “digitizing” process most other facilities must do.
Your footage is loaded into our high speed storage array to speed up the editing process.
When dealing with High Definition footage (and even hours of standard definition footage) there is a LOT of data that must be pushed around to tell a compelling story.
We have gone exclusively with G-Technology high speed drives for our pipeline. They are pricey, but they drives are more reliable and faster than the cheaper compitition. When dealing with your footage, data integrity is very important, so we only trust to use the best to protect your footage.
Not to get too technical, but the G-Technology drives are what are known as “RAID” drives, which operate much faster than standard drives, and our average G-RAID drives are 1.5 Terabytes EACH. This way all your footage is right at our fingertips to make the editing process faster.
Categories: Facility | No Comments
January 23rd, 2009
Since After Effects CS4 has been released, I’ve worked quite a bit in it (we upgraded to it the week it came out!).
Here’s another promotional video I just completed using After Effects. It is for magician Matt Tomasko (goes by Matt Wayne) and is based in New York City.
Since he’s got the “New York City” persona, I wanted to go a bit more like a city nightclub backstage feel with the gritty, old painted, brick wall. Also, various other elements like the steam from the pipes and posters keep with the feel.Also, much of his routine is “personality” based and his clients also request unedited video of one or two routines, so we decided to include more of his signature routines in this piece to accommodate this requirement.
Categories: Portfolio | No Comments
January 23rd, 2009
Hypnotist, Brian Eslick, chose Reels in Motion to produce his promotional video. Eslick didn’t want the cliche spirals and eyes associated with hypnotists, so we collaborated on different concepts.
We decided to create a video that is very “neuro” heavy, as if the video took place inside a person’s brain. In addition to this ‘cerebral’ feel, it also has a very modern, reality tv feel to add to his attitude onstage.
Categories: Portfolio | No Comments
January 21st, 2009
Reels in Motion Visual Effects Suite creates stunning graphics for the new media. Reels in Motion specializes in creating the impossible through the magic of visual effects and high end graphic productions.
We can add VFX with stage of the art, photorealistic 3D graphics, from something simple like animating your logo to full set extensions. We’ve got it!
Categories: News | No Comments
Syndicate this site using RSS