Sunday, April 18, 2010

Boston: From My Roof

Boston: From My Roof from ben russell on Vimeo.



This is something really simple I did a few weekends ago. The photo was taken from my roof. I duped it, put some distance between the two, added some fractal noise in between the two. Aside from that there's the burns and the film scratches, but not a lot to it really. Quick and easy.

Here's the photo I took and used below:

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Reflective and Refractive Blocks Tutorial

Reflective and Refractive Glass Blocks Tutorial from ben russell on Vimeo.



I found this tutorial at Grey Scale Gorilla's tutorial site and made one today. The playback on this is kinda choppy, might have to look into that.

http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2010/04/reflective-and-refractive-glass-block-tutorial-part-1-cinema-4d/

SLICED premieres this thursday at 10pm on the History Channel. I didn't do any of the graphics for that first episode, my contributions will begin on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th i think- there's 20 altogether, and I've been working on about 5 in the last month.

I should probably look into getting the History Channel...

Saturday, April 03, 2010

Playskool: More Than Play Webisodes


This post is to finally acknowledge something that I started the end of last September, and finished sometime in January. Initially it was pitched by the executive producer as a pop-up book style, so my first 2 weeks on the project was working to R&D the look they wanted for the pop-up book, and the result was the above still image- part of an animation that's roughly 20 seconds long for an intro. Worked on that with another graphics guy, that I also happen to do a lot of snowboarding with, named Matt Armstrong. After the R&D period he left it up to me, and the meetings that followed turned into an ordeal/training of sorts to really figure out the best way to convey the message Playskool wanted. The project morphed into something else entirely- they wanted it faster paced, so we met those demands. I got with an editor named Kevin Brewster, and he went through the process of finding the absolute best pieces of footage, and worked it all into the moving frames look it has now. My role in this was now the intro/outro graphics, and all the medical animations.

A lot of the work I do I forget to post, because when it finally goes on air, or online, it's been awhile, and I'm always on to the next one by that point. Maybe I'm posting this for historical purposes then, just to have it down here as something I worked on. What it comes down to is that these vignettes were a bear to get right, but they were very informative in both how to convey things in a simplistic fashion without going too in detail, because truth be told I am not a medical animator, and didn't have time to do this as scientifically accurate as some of the animations definitely called for.

Still on my list of stuff to post when it becomes available- some School Scrabble videos (4 of them) I did with the same editor as the Playskool Webisodes (Kevin) and the project I'm working on now- SLICED for the History Channel.
Here's the link to the Playskool though,

http://www.hasbro.com/playskool/en_US/discover/more-than-play/vignette-videos.cfm>stuff