DREAM Act Animation

I recently did the animation and compositing for a video in support of the DREAM Act, which aims to provide a path to permanent legal residency for foreign students currently in the country illegally that were brought to The U.S. before they were old enough to make the decision to immigrate on their own. This is a small piece of a large project directed by Davis Guggenheim (Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman) called The Dream is Now. It's a good cause (unless, I guess, if you're a racist) and I got to do some fun animation. Check it out:

New Music Video for Passion Pit (and Tiesto)!

Last summer I was tapped by director Carlos Lopez Estrada to head the visual effects for a new music video for a Tiesto remix of a Passion Pit song. And being on the super cheap, we all ended up starring in it. (I'm the one with the beard). Check it out!:


Passion Pit- "Carried Away" (Tiësto Remix) from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

FUN FACT: We were originally commissioned by Dan Deacon to create this video. But when we delivered it, even though it was exactly what Carlos had written into the treatment, Dan Deacon and/or his label deemed it "too drugged out." They were concerned about Dan Deacon's image. Which is hilarious because EVERYONE that listens to Dan Deacon loves drugs. Looooooves 'em.

But, so, we scrapped the video and Carlos's rep pulled the business savvy move of selling the footage to Passion Pit/Tiesto, which we recut and released the way you see it now. I'm a little disappointed because I absolutely adore Dan Deacon and would have loved to have had my name attached to one of his videos, but honestly, I think that the mood really does matches this song better. C'est la vie. Such is the music business....

And if that tickled you in the right way, check out the equally strange behind the scenes:



PEOPLE FALLING from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

Man, that's a lot of falling down. And a whoooooooole lot of rotoscoping....



If you want to learn even more about the production, check out this nice little interview with Carlos.

New Animation and Visual Effects Reel!

Animation and VFX Reel - January 2013 from Cameron Clark on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Pascal De Maria for his ninja cutting skills.

Stop Motion Title Sequence for Oprah and Rainn Wilson's new show SoulPancake!

Earlier this year, I was commissioned by Rainn Wilson's company, SoulPancake, to create the stop motion title sequence for the pilot of their new TV show of the same name to be aired on OWN. The sneak peak above has the intro in its entirety, but is played at the end. (The stop motion "Love" at the beginning was made by the talented Kristen Lapore)

The title sequence was shot over two days with about a weeks worth of prep and the help of a very talented group of young artists (full credits below). Other than the sky and the banner at the end, everything was done practically, with a stage that could rotate both rolling log and lazy susan-style, so that we could get both the moving world and rotating camera effects with a locked-off camera and set pieces. To keep our process economical and precise, we created in After Effects a pre-vis animation that would output exactly how much we needed to rotate the stage each frame, as well as what frame each of the paper cutout people would end up being on. To get a sense of that process, here's a little breakdown:

Full Credits:

Animation Director: Cameron Clark
Production Design: Tyler Jensen
Animator: Charles Pieper
Stage Design/Fab: Richard Hilgner
Set Fabricator: Michelle Mace
Photography: Moonie O'Moony
Live Action DP: Mishka Kornai
Art Department: Ntsikelelo McCall
                           Sarah Lawson
                           Dani Cong
                           Riley Gallagher
                           Nicole Case
                         
                         
                         

"Me Voy" by Jesse and Joy Latin Grammy Win!

(Me, Carlos Lopez Estrada, Christian Heuer, and Tyler Jensen being feeling like winners:)

The stop motion video I animated for Jesse and Joy directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada won a Latin Grammy for Best Shortform Music Video this year! Watch the video here:




And click through to HERE to see my original blog post about the project with breakdowns and behind the scenes...

VFX for St. Lucia's "Before the Dive"

Last month I did the VFX and animation for the new music video directed by Elliot Sellers for St. Lucia. Most all of the effects are were shot by Elliot and co-director, Carlos Lopez Estrada, and then given to me for tracking, compositing, and general bells and whistles. Stick around until the end, it gets pretty epic:


I don't have any real behind the scenes material for this one, but here's a quick breakdown of one of the shots to give a sense of what was done to the footage:



Thanks a lot to the wonderful people over at Vimeo for adding us to a staff pick and dropping us on Vimeo's front page!

Animated Spot for Televerde

Last month I designed and animated this little spot for Arizona-based B2B marketing agency, Televerde:

The script was written by producer/director Jack Hooker, who gave me quite a lot of creative freedom with the look and feel of the ad. To create it, I drew all the elements by hand with a pen on paper (with help from a lightboard) and scanned it all in to be animated with the Puppet Pin tool in After Effects. Then sound engineer Matt Schwartz designed the sound and voiced the narration.

Check out a quick look at the process of taking all the individually drawn elements and bringing them together for one character's series of movements:

Now, it's time for the holiday break. My vacation goal: making a new and improved silicone puppet for some personal stop motion fun! Check out the latest sculpt:

New Stop Motion Music Video! - Jesse & Joy's "Me Voy"

This video was a complete labor of love for all the people involved. We spent 30 days locked in a house together designing, printing, cutting out and animating thousands of little pieces of cardstock in a clear display of stop motion insanity.

Carlos Lopez Estrada, working with production designer Tyler Jensen, would start us out with a storyboard with notes on timing and a loose idea of what elements would be in each shot.

This would give Carlos a guide for what to shoot during the day we shot video of the band and extras...

I would then take that footage in, effect it out in After Effects so it looked all old and scratchy, rendered it out at 12 frames per second and wrote a couple Automator scripts that would take the files that After Effects spit out and resize and print them all for me.

While I was doing this, Tyler's art department team was busy designing in photoshop, printing on a large-format printer, and mounting all the set pieces so that they could be built in front of the camera for our DP Moonie to light and frame up the shot.

To be ready to shoot we had a pretty constant flow of wonderful friends and volunteers that helped us cut out all those individual frames and keep them organized in stacks.

While this was going on, I made some pre-animations in after effects that would tell lead animator, Charles Pieper, things like what numbered frame each character was supposed to be on and when characters should be entering or exiting to make sure everything lined up. With stop motion we dont really have time to make a mistake, so these pre animations assured that we'd get stuff right the first time.

We also didn't have the money to rent or make a stop motion dolly rig, so all the camera moves were actually us moving the entire set while the camera remained locked off. I wrote an expression in After Effects that would print out how much in millimeters we had to move the set each frame to get nice eases into and out of camera moves. That preanimation looked like this:

The really tricky part for this shot was timing the camera move so that she reached out and grabbed the ticket right as the ticket booth got to her. It took some pretty precise coordination, but we ended up getting it.

With all those elements ready to go, we then were able to shoot about ten seconds (120 individual photographs) a day. We captured with Dragon Stop Motion, which allowed us superimpose the preanimation that I made onto what we were doing live so we could be absolutely sure all the motion was smooth and clean.

I then took the footage we shot, cleaned up what needed cleaning, and strung it all together in After Effects. The final piece to be added was all the smoke and magic effects. For this, I took what we had already shot, used it as an overlay video, and shot cotton balls moving around on black cloth, which I used the luma value as an alpha channel in After Effects to put into the shot. Like this:

Now imagine doing this entire process for 30 days straight. We had to stagger all the work so that as we were shooting one scene, art department would be building the next scene and I'd be animating the scene after that. Each shot had a unique set-up to execute what was needed for the story, but for the most part this was how it all went:

And if pictures aren't really your thing, check out this silly behind-the-scenes video we made:

If you liked this video, check out the last stop motion video we did for Jesse & Joy HERE.

Making a Stop Motion Puppet (Part 2): De-molding and Casting

This is a follow-up post to THIS POST.

After rubbing a little Vaseline onto the finished half of the mold as a release agent, I built another clay wall and repeated the process.

In the morning, I peeled off the clay around the outside and put it back in the back in the bag to use it again later. (Recycle, Reduce, Reuse!)

Using a couple screwdrivers and some elbow grease, I pryed two halves apart. The back half came of all nice and clean, but the sculpt stuck really hard into the front half. I ended up having to go at the orginal sculpt with a hammer and chisel to get it out of the front. Here is what it looked like after like 10 minutes of chiseling:

I ended up not being careful enough in my chiseling and made a few pretty gnarly scratches on the mold. There were also a couple bubble spots. But otherwise it came out pretty nice for a first try:

I'm using Smooth-On's Dragon Skin silicone as a casting material, with an armature wire skeleton. Because the Dragon skin is pretty pricey, I wanted to do a quick test to try it out. So I filled just the hand with silicone and used the armature from the original sculpt that had been chiseled clean.

I was lazy and added the color once it was already in the hand, so I didn't mix it very well and it ended up looking like this:

But that was fine to do a little test animation with some Helping Hand parts using my webcam. It's pretty quick, so you might have to watch it a couple times:

Excited that it was so easy and fun to use, I went on to doing the whole puppet. First I applied a thin layer of colored silicone to the entire mold:

Then added another few layers...

Then made a new armature based on how the silicone fit in there. I went with thicker armature wire and used some coper tubing around the leg bones because I was worried he would be too heavy to stand on his own. Then I used some plumbers epoxy to stick it all in place:

Also, because I knew that his fat old stomach would be incredibly heavy if it was solid, I cut up some kitchen sponges and painted them with a layer of silicone to use as flexible filling:

I then put the armature in one half and did a quick pass of silicone over it to make sure it really stuck in there with no slipping.

Then I put the stomach sponges on, poured in way too much silicone and put the halves together. What came out was this:

And after a quick trim of the extra stuff, I had a little guy!

There are some pretty obvious problems with the quality of the mold. Mostly I was too rough getting the original sculpt out of the front half, but I also didn't put enough silicone into the feet, and one of the hands. I also need to work on minimizing the size of the seams, which a cleaner mold would probably help with. Overall, if I was using this guy for a short film, I'd want to start from scratch from all I learned on this first go. But for a first try, I'm pretty stoked. Now I'm going to give him some eyes, a moustache, and a little costume, and then I'll make some test animations. I'll post them as I've got 'em....

A New Animation & VFX Reel!

Check it out. I cut a new reel:



Thanks to Matt Schwartz for helping me out with the audio on the title card.