I recently had the opportunity to animate some titles and on-air graphics for a new branded entertainment show Along the Way for Under Armour. Working from designs by Second World Design out of Boston, Massachusetts I was able to quickly turn out some simple, clean and effective motion graphics. The show is due to launch later this month and I will update with clips once they’re released.

My first opportunity to shoot on the RED camera, this was conceived as a single shot that with it’s stark simplicity would feel unique and grab some attention. Of course it was far more complicated to execute than it appears. Shot off speed first full of stuff with the door closing, then multiple takes with the beach ball that was eventually slowed to 80% full speed, then much later in the day shot with the garage empty.

Creatively, once I was brought into the project as the director I realized in order to really sell this as being one moment we had to have some element carry over from the full garage to the empty. We shot a few different elements but ended up using a rubber ball.

Karl, the copywriter on the project, and myself shot a behind the scenes video walking through some of the complicated compositing we pulled off.

For the second year in a row at Coates Kokes put together a web-based Holiday Card for the Port of Vancouver. This time it was Art Directed by Alicia Mickes, Copy by Karl Schroeder, a bit of motion graphics prep work by Ryan O’Reilly, leaving me responsible for animation, editing and sound design.

It was actually a really fun project to work on – got to use some of the newer animation features of Adobe After Effects and really had the opportunity to do some character animation for basically the first time.

I had a bit of a different aesthetic in mind for the project – I wanted to make it a bit more atmospheric – but the clean lines of the animation were the consensus in the group. I might go back just for fun and throw in a bit of my own sort of style.

This is a video I did in 2006 for a one week project in Collaborative Process at Oregon State. We spent a class period writing sentences to each other regarding our thoughts on process and then the project was to put some sort of design to that to illustrate the point. I used imagery to compliment the quotes and tried to keep it moving as much as possible.

The style of the video I shot – desaturated, slow motion – influenced a few other projects I did that year. I’ve sense moved away from it some although I’ve always found that DV and HDV video looks more beautiful in black and white.