The Motion Bender

27/02/2023

This my own version of an exercise I had my students at film school work on. The whole point of the exercise was to film, edit and create a sequence around a shuttle launch with green images on the computer screens. They goal was not only to learn compositing techniques, sourcing and creating the screens but also to create a story and a mood without dialogs. The students did a decent job, but I wanted to show them how further you could push the idea and I also thought that while they undersood the assignment well enough, they could have gone a little further in terms of the quality of their composite, tracking and so on.
The final shot was kind of improvised on the spot and was quite complex to roto as it was not using green screen. I think I pushed it as far as I could using many different techniques.

04/02/2023

This video is a rather old video as it shows. I had this idea of creating a mathematically accurate Pop-up Book animations. I spent a lot of time researching how the elements inside the book would unfold as it opens. I ended up trying to figure out trigonometry in 3 dimensions. At some point I was even stuck and asked for the help of people in a mathematics forum where I explained my problem and they gave me a formula that, once translated to JavaScript (as I was using expressions in After Effects to link all the moving parts) worked perfectly.

I also created a tutorial published on the now defunct AETuts+ (which has been bought out by Envato I think? I wonder if it's still out there).

As for the title. I had this footage I wanted to incorporate in the animation from an unrelated video. I just added a picture of Optimus Prime's head to anonymize the guy and thought about the idea of Optimus Prime moving from hunting Decepticons to being the CEO of a company and doing TED Talks.

I never said I was funny.

Another time marker, the use of glitches and lens flare, which I find quite a bit over the top today.

But, to be honest, with a lot of my older videos, while not flawless, I find them charming, rough around the edges, but quite unique and surprising and with a bit of personality.

I remastered and upscaled the video from 720p to 1440p using Topaz Video, without a doubt one of the best investment you can make as a content creator.

10/01/2023

NOTE: Instagram doesn't let you upload multiple videos with a custom thumbnail, so I'm uploading the two videos separately. Why does it have to make our life harder all the time?
So here's the alternative. The original video for the client is in a separate post.

Last year, I was asked by to create an animated GIF for their new year's greetings. It was a fun project and I loved it so much, that I immediately wanted to expand on it, unbound by time and budgetary constraints to create an alternative version where I could use ideas that were discarded, not feasible in the time that I had or simple improvements.

I kept the loop, the overall set up and animation and I introduced a more miniature model look, a slightly higher camera angle (which I feel I should have used in the original video, it makes the text easier to read), an actual text reveal animation (which I thought was missing, but I clearly didn't have the time to create one for the original video. I finished it on January 1st) and seagulls for a sense of scale.

All in all, a perfect project to close the year off. Something with a little bit of creative freedom. The kind of project you thrive for.

10/01/2023

NOTE: Instagram doesn't let you upload multiple videos with a custom thumbnail, so I'm uploading the two videos separately. Why does it have to make our life harder all the time?
So here's the original video I did for the client. The alternative video is in a separate post.

Last year, I was asked by to create an animated GIF for their new year's greetings. It was a fun project and I loved it so much, that I immediately wanted to expand on it, unbound by time and budgetary constraints to create an alternative version where I could use ideas that were discarded, not feasible in the time that I had or simple improvements.

I kept the loop, the overall set up and animation and I introduced a more miniature model look, a slightly higher camera angle (which I feel I should have used in the original video, it makes the text easier to read), an actual text reveal animation (which I thought was missing, but I clearly didn't have the time to create one for the original video. I finished it on January 1st) and seagulls for a sense of scale.

All in all, a perfect project to close the year off. Something with a little bit of creative freedom. The kind of project you thrive for.

01/12/2022

A cutesy little animation about what happens when you have two toasters at tome. And they do that on a loop. Music by

13/11/2022

I'm starting to repost older posts so that my profile page looks more consistent. Here's what I've writtin in the original post:
"Another exercice I did with my students from Montpellier. I was inspired by the Limitless title sequence. I tasked the students to shoot various sequences around the campus with focal length. Always from the same spot, locked off on a tripod. I also asked them to think of a simple action that they could do exactly the same over and over. Obviously it's a difficult task and if I do the same exercise next year, I'll have to adjust a little. I was thinking maybe shooting with more than one camera (and trying to figure out the change of perspective).
Then in post, all you have to do is stitch the shots together, link them and animate the scale.
But here's the result, I've done most of the sequences the students shots and combined them together. Most of the work was on trying to get the different takes to match. I tried my best with time remapping, some warping, masking, roto. I clearly could have done more, but I think it wouldn't have changed much of the kinetic energy this piece has."

27/10/2022

As school was about to start again, I began rethinking my approach to my motion design class that I've started teaching the previous year. The first week was meant to introduce the students now at a design masters level, to the basics of motion design. So I started to work on a somewhat basic 2D animation with a few tricks and ideas to build upon, all with shape layers, importing som Illustrator elements, bouncing animation, timing and so on.
But as I was figuring out this stuff, I got the call from the higher ups that they were merging two classes into one due to the lack of students enrollment. Something that everybody knew was happening since the end of the previous school year. And they gave the assignment to the other teacher who had seniority over me (and maybe because I'm a lousy teacher, who knows).
Anyway, since I liked the animation, I decided to finish it and publish it here nonetheless. So enjoy! There's nothing crazy as it was intended for students who just started motion design and only know about graphic design.

23/10/2022

This upload has been a long time in the making. I've been working to redesign my Instagram page for some time and when it was finished I had to fight the way Instagram formats thumbnails to get them just right. And it wasn't an easy fight. So hopefully this time around, it'll work.
I think I'll reupload the previous videos in the same fashion along with new posts.

For the video itself, I've been wnating to do those shape layer animation for some time. It also showed me that there was a lot of potential improvements to be made to the Shape Layers. I've been looking into Cavalry recently and it looks like it can do what After Effects cannot. I'd love to experiment more in this style but with more advanced tools.

05/05/2022