It’s been a while since I wrote on this blog, but here are some updates. I did some ecommerce design for Fizz Autosports. Also the owner of Junack USA contacted me. He wanted the site to be more elegant and also reflect what his business was about. Please note the sites since they are trying update their products and information on the site. Make sure to view the designs on my project page.
I finally decided to make a short video of the Nex5 camera I modeled a couple of months ago. It fairly simple. The focus on this video was to show the camera. Didn’t want to detract from the great model of the camera with unnessary effects. It’s simple and straight forward. Post was done in After effects. The music is by Grace Valhalla, who makes some great ambient music, which is great for this kind of stuff.
Put my new camera to use. Someone asked if I could film their cars and make it look good. Shot at a parking garage around midnight in the nice super hot humid weather. Parking garage and hot temps aren’t a good mix, but what can you do. With this project, I didn’t want to do too much on color grading (ala Magic Bullet Looks). I wanted something subtle, but still looks like it came out of a studio.
The process for this was I edited in Premiere first so that I could get timing with the song. Then I did a very small amount of color grading. The footage that came out of the camera (Panasonic GH2) was already good, but it was a bit overly saturated in certain areas. I used After Effects for the titles.
So had to do some old fashion print design. This piece was created for a place I’m freelancing on and off. It’s a flyer for a gathering at their shop. Nothing too out there, but I was limited in time. It was a good challenge though. Working with a typography can be blessing or curse. Your call. Basically this piece was to keep it simple, get the message across, and get it done as soon as possible. (click the image above for full view)
Finally got this rendered. Took quite a while to boot. I’m not sure how I’m going to render this in video form though. I’m might have to resort to not using Mental Ray since the render above took a couple of hours to finish. As far as the image above, all in all I’m pretty happy how it turned out. Probably my only gripe with it is the shadows should have been more softer and darker towards the objects. Tried using different lights, but it gave me really grainy shadows that always upped the render times even further (higher samples resulted in less grain). So I guess you have your trade-offs.
Always hate distractions, which kept me away from the camera project. I’ve finally jumped back in. I got most of the texturing done and I’m just going to tweak little things like texture file sizes, colors, lighting, and render efficiency. Hopefully, I can reduce the rendering times in Mental Ray to a reasonable amount because I will be creating a short spiffy “product video” of this. You think it’s possible to render something like that at 720p with reflections, refractions, displacement, bump and raytraced shadows? I’ll find out soon enough. Also, don’t forget to click on the image above to see the full image.
