TwentyFortyOne Blog

I know this is really short and simple, but 3 seconds in I was staring an awe and continued to the whole way through it. What’s it like to be so talented? …I’ll tell you some day..

Going back to my roots, I thought I’d post some work of a somewhat local artist. I’m always surprised to see all the great work that comes out of Portland, and from rather unsuspecting fellows too. Take the two guys I used to work with at Nike for example (Marshall and Russell you know who you are). Meet them on the street: what’s up, regular ass dudes with no tats and who wear normal fitting jeans and t-shirts. Meet them in the lab and they’re turning out some of the sickest motion graphics and 3D work I’ve ever seen. Anyway, back to this guy…

This piece was just too good to pass up. I personally have never used Lightwave, but this is about as good as I’ve even seen. And forget the tech mumbo jumbo, this is a pretty bad ass Porsche commercial too! It’s ads like this that I watch and think, “This is real sick, probably cost a fortune, but where does it end up?..”

I’ve kinda been all over the place with this post, so I’ll go ahead and shut it down. Check out Stephen Fitzgerald’s Vimeo page and keep checking back for more blogs on motion graphics, video production and editing.

I know I post a lot of 3D and motion graphics videos that I find to be visually compelling, but this trailer takes the cake! Combine Japanese warrior rabbits (I don’t know a lick of the language but no matter who or what is speaking Japanese, they always sound raw!) with top notch 3D animation and you’ve got the Cat Shit One movie trailer. From what I’ve read there will be 12 episodes that are each 23 minutes log. The US release is called “Apocalypse Meow”, so be looking for it!

Virtually everyone in the post production/motion graphics industry had heard of MK12, and virtually every one in the real world (green pill) has seen their work. Opening title sequence for James Bond: Quantum of Solace, that was them.

A few years back when I was working at Nike I was turned on to a short film they did called, “MK12’s, History of America”. At the time I was more into it for entertainment value, but after I got more and more involved with motion graphics and 3D etc., I really gained an appreciation for their work. Their mixture of live action and motion graphics really compliment each other! “History of America” is pretty much a clinic on how to execute a ridiculously complicated short ‘film’ perfectly. The video is a little long, but trust me it’s worth it!

This is a great example of how someone took a played out idea and executed it perfectly. The two things that work for this piece are the lighting on the car (hard to match the scene without HDRI probes) and the motion capture they did for the movement of the “robot”.



I believe this ad was created by the same company, but for a different car. The studio that created the spot is a Canadian-based firm called The Embassy Visual Effects, Inc. There is a great write-up on how they accomplished the task HERE.

You can’t animate 3D objects that well, so you have to put a guy in a wetsuit-looking thing with about 150 infrared reflectors on it whilst being recorded by special infrared cameras… NERD ALERT!

I can’t tell you how good I think this piece is! The whole time I was watching it I couldn’t stop asking myself if it was stop-motion or 3D? I think it’s probably a mixture of both, but damn did they do it well.

After poking around for about 20 minutes, I found this great article on the making of “Asics Oragami: In Pursuit of Perfection“. Turns out much of the 3D work was done using the same software that I’m getting into called Cinema 4D. It’s always nice to know that something this polished was made using software that I have chillin on my laptop!

Mix short films with motion graphics and 3D, and you’ve got (you guessed it) “animated shorts”. This is a genre that doesn’t really have much outlet other than the internet and DVD featurettes, so not many people get a chance to see all the talent out there. With animated shorts being one of my favorite creative mediums, I’m going to try and post as many as I can throughout the life of this blog. Long live the unknown talent!

Both of these shorts were created by Crew 972 and directed by Alex Orrelle (he’s ex-pixar so you know he’s packin’).