The Crystals

This week I tried out some more 'experimental' 3D animations with morphing sharp-edged objects. I came across this effect by 'mistake' when I was trying out another animation idea I had in mind - some experimental mistakes do turn out right after all :P I played around with some morph effects in After Effects too and applied them to circles to create a sound-wave effect.

This week I'll be finalising my storyboards for my final animation and get working on some more graphics for my flash game.

The Crystal I from Andrea Meli on Vimeo.

The Crystal II from Andrea Meli on Vimeo.

- Andrea

Flynn Lives

After Effects has become pretty addicting now. Even though I'm still getting the hang of animating characters in AE, I took a break from working on the animation I mentioned in my previous post. I decided to make another compositing experiment and animated Tron-stylized text in Cinema 4D and move to aftereffects to add glows, 3d layers, bokeh, etc, with the sound and final export done in Premiere. I worked on this project for about two afternoons and I'm quite pleased with the final result.

I'd like to get some blue/green scree footage and try and blend video with some 3d next, till then I'll keep experimenting.

Bomblu: Revolution from Andrea Meli on Vimeo.

- Andrea

Taking the BP Oil Monster to the next dimension

Now that I'm getting more confident with using After Effects, I decided to produce a short semi-animated short using none other than my Deepwater Horizon illustration. 3D Layers are brilliant for 2.5D (next step, turning a Flash short into a 2.5D animatic) and enabling Motion Blur multiplies the render time by quite a bit (though it was worth the wait, it look way smoother now.) I also tried my hand at using Premiere Pro to add the audio, since After Effects added small pop's to the song in random places.

I also started a very short, slightly abstract animation yesterday evening; I illustrated the scenes in Flash and started to animate it in After Effects, I'll be working on it this weekend.

Deepwater Horizon from Andrea Meli on Vimeo.

- Andrea

The history of Animation

Some small updates; I re-designed this blog to feel more personal and look better than it was before - I'm not a big fan of using stock-backgrounds :P

Here are some samples from something I worked on a few weeks ago for one of my school assignments. You can find the full infographic here.

- Andrea

It's about time

It's been three and a half months since I posted my first post, it's high time that I post some updates, even though I dont have much to say at the moment.

Animation keeps getting better as time goes by; one of my school assignments required me to create a short stop motion animation. I made my first claymation back in 2008 which you can watch here. I wanted to get a little more abstract this time round and decided to use my sister as a model and I'm quite pleased with the result - hopefully i'll have time to make a longer stop motion video using the same style.

Aegrotus from Andrea Meli on Vimeo.

- Andrea