reason808

HAHAHAHA! :-) That's awesome! I wish I could whip together an animation that quickly, but I'm getting there. I may have to send some of my design friends this thread! Watchout, they might defend that lowly Helvetica typeface. -mr

Thanks. :-) Here's my two cents on some of your comments. Hope its useful. You are likely to be falling into a trap with this line of thinking. You're not designing a poster or an ad that has to stand out from clutter or competing designs. If somebody is actually looking at your card, it means you've won their attention. By trying too much razzle-dazzle, particularly if you don't have a lot of design experience to draw from, you are likely to create glitzy designs that give a wrong impression. Keep it simple and elegant, like a coolheaded pro. Personally, I hate bevels, glows, drop shadows and other easy photoshop tricks. So much bad design has been done on them that they instantly give off the whiff of bad design. In the last few years, my knees have stopped jerking, especially since I saw how beautifully mac OSX used these effects. But my knees haven't completely stopped jerking, I'm a cranky old designer. Us cranky old guys tend to the hiring. :-) A big rule in design is to make sure that peoples eye's never point in a direction off the page. Yes, rules are meant to be broken, but fair or unfair, the direction of eyes creates an strong invisible "line" in your composition, make sure its aimed where you want. Probably your name in this case. Typography is a complex and incredibly wonderful art. Unfortunately, bad and/or inexperienced designers go for "razzle dazzle" and throw out a typographic hodgepodge. Here's a quick and dirty trick that may help you out: pick a clean, elegant typeface that has a lot of weights from ultra thin to ultra black. Use only 3 weights to create a scheme of emphasis for information (i.e., your name has one weight, contact data has another, signifiers of data like "cell phone" "home phone" have another, etc). Work in black and white and make it look really good, simple and elegant. I've done this "dirty trick" with a lot of my websites, in particular for Microsoft story pages and menu pages This minimalist approach to type is also how I've always approached design in general. I always tried to pare things down to their essence, in black and white, and make sure it works and looks strong and punchy. Only then do I start adding in other elelments, and always along the same lines. When picking colors I start with 2 or 3 (dark, mid, and light) and make sure they're the stongest ones. Even though my final color pallete may have 9-12 colors, they are usually based around a core set which I make sure is really strong from the outset. This same approach can be applied to all sorts of effects. When you decided add razzle-dazzle effects they have a much more powerful effect coming from a strong core. Its also a LOT easier to decide amongst an infinite amount options when you've established a strong core. Too often people try to work from the opposite direction. I can see that you're getting a lot of feedback and its hard to make choices. I'd suggest that you focus on the core elements and build out from there. Its really a philisophical approach, but its helped me out considerably. Glad to see you're cool to this typeface. One of my pet peeves is the overuse of Helvetica. It still seems like every other designer with nerd-chic glasses uses this typeface in pale, lifeless colors. So much pretentiousness over a typeface used on bathroom signs. Some dutch guy even wrote a book "Helvetica: A Tribute" Good lord!! However, most of my design colleagues still love it, and always tease me about disliking it so much. :-) Okay, I'm ranting and I've written a tome. Enough. Hope this is helpful and not pretentious.

Hmmm, some of my critiques are in reference to earlier designs because my page didn't load correctly. I was looking at #5. Sorry. I guess some of my comments are irrrelevant. I'll have to ammend my comments after I've done some work. -mr

Hmmm, I'm jumping into this a bit late. I was perusing the AM forums while taking a break from an MTV design job. Since I'm too newb to give AM tips, and I want to return the help I've gotten in these forums, I hope my design crit will be helpful: I think your card designs are well done overall. Two first impressions: 1) The line patterns in the background aren't fine enough. Instead of looking like a pattern, they visually compete with the lines of text. 2) I'd focus less on the subtleties of colors and line thickness and more on typography. I'd avoid making a card too flashy - it runs the risky of looking unprofessionally glitzy. Focus on the "dull" stuff like the kerning on the "Po" in "hodgepodgestudios" Something simple, elegant, and restrained may be the way to go. You have avenir as your typeface - good choice, I've made it the main font for my portfolio site :-) Personally, I think designing business cards are a bit overrated. When I was younger, I spent $400 on a reallly elaborate card with custom black paper and yellow type. But over the years, I feel that a card that tries too hard doesn't help its creator. 90% of the time you're handing your card to a person you've met, so the business card is a really a follow-up impression. In that vein, I'd also make sure that your business card and your website match up visually. If you can only afford simple printing, choose black and a color that's from your site. Oh yeah, I prefer cards with a white or light background. Yeah its dull, but I always find myself writing on the biz cards of the people I've contacted. Its annoying on the ocassions when I can't do that, and annnoyance isn't a good impression. For what its worth, I have a lot of design experience. See my portfolio site: www.michaelrobinson.com Hope this is constructive. I'll admit a bit of a minimalist, so my crit shows a bias towards that. Okay, I better get back to work.

awwww. thanks, particularly about the 'emotional bits' - one suprising thing I learned from making this was how much expression you can get out of a pose. I didn't have enough tech skills to animate the faces, so I had to rely on the angle of the head & neck, and body. I was pleasantly suprised that I could get some emotion with just poses.

Thanks for the additional comments. The quality shift in the interior spaceship scene, isn't that noticeable to me, but I'm too close to it, so that's why these forums are so helpful. At that point I was using a lot of slo-mo in Final Cut to strecth out the scenes. I also animated most of those shots with only a day or two left. Does that mean I should always animate with a deadline gun at my head? Yeesh, that doesn't sound like fun. I suppose that's the biz. You're right, when I was building the desinegrating house scene/model there were some pretty cool camera angles, I may try and find a way to work them in the final version. I wanted to keep the camera moves pretty conservative so the focus would be on the character's reactions. I'll eventually start posting my experiments for the "real" version of return to earth in the WIP section. I'm looking forward to learning the advanced aspects of modelling to make the joints smoother, the clothes better, and the faces come alive.

Thanks guys!! Good catch!! I pretty much shot in sequence. I made the spaceship scenes in the intro first, and then spent a lot of time rigging the entire house so the whole set could break apart. Then I went back to my frantic animating. I did the titles at the very end and ovelaid them in Final Cut Pro. I was unhappy with the intro animations. It was one of those things I thought would be easy since it was 'mechanical' spaceship motion, but it turned out to be very tricky, so I had to cut my losses and move on to other shots. I'll add fly-by animations to my list. Man I remember those days, I tried to do a 3D cover image for my business plan in 1993 on a Mac IIci and after 2 days of rendering it still wasn't done!! Unfortunately, it discourged me from exploring 3D, and then the internet boom and bust distracted me further. I wish I would've had your patience, your ad was great, esp. given the tech at the time. Oh yeah!! Although learning with a gun to your head isn't the healthiest way in the long run, it sure helped here. I've been taking it a little too easy AM-wise since then. It'd be great to hear from an outside prespective. Yeah there's some obvious stuff to improve, but I'm a little too close to the project, so you might notice some less obvious things that I didn't. It would help with my 'skoolin. -mr

Here is the link to the film I made for my grad shool application for MFA animation programs. I found out that I got into CalArts, still waiting on UCLA and USC. http://www.michaelrobinson.com/returntoearth/ I've been hoping I'd be able to make this post for two months. I didn't want to post until the results were in, and good!! Some of you may have seen this thread This is a pretty rough animation. I put myself through a 6 week AM bootcamp (with all sorts of great help from the forums). The Caveats are on the link - and man, there are a lot! Since I won't start school for several months, I'd like to make a full fledged version of the movie to teach myself all the things I didn't have time to figure out. Like pose silders, IK chains, and especiallly better character animation. Love to hear your thoughts.

I hope I'm not jumping on to this thread too late, but . . . I totally agree and am impressed by this. Can you elaborate on how you got this nice "warm" facial look? I'm striving to have this in my own models. Where can I find out about these "Ubereyes"?

Wow!! These are really cool models. Here's my suggestion/wish list, hope it's not off topic: I think there's a big gap of "general purpose" models that people can easily put in to their scenes, like the Sims. It would help people starting out (like poor 'ol me) build animatics, basic animations, and sets without having to learn a ton of custom model building. I'm working on a short film that has a man and a woman talking in a room, and I had a hard time finding straightforward models. I mainly saw muscle-heavy superheros and babes with giant knockers. I wound up using the headless spaceguy and spacegirl, and had to modify them quite a bit. In the early stages, even a basic male and female stick figures with faces would've been great. The furniture for my room was also hard to find. There are free and commercial hash models, but the styles are a real hodgepodge: from 50s cartoon to 90s realistic. My living room looked like Sanford and Son's, so I wound up building my own. Yes, I realize the commercial appeal of babes. :-) Strong personalities and fantasy subjects are also a 3D staple, and your models are incredible. But I'd love to see a well built suite of models toned down enough stylistically so I could bring it into my own production. If they're rigged correctly, I could always swap them out with a custom model later. I think a basic construction kit would be a great adddition to A:M, maybe you could work on a bundling deal with Hash . . . hint, hint, hint. Just my 2 cents.

Thanks tunesy. Glad you like my work - I'm planning to switch gears and move into animation. Enjoying the ride so far. Looks like I'm a different MR. Curious who my twin at squidlink is, though.

I definitely think 3D is stronger stylistic choice for the moody/horror style you're trying to convey. The shadows are stronger and more intense. Even though you could probably adjust the cel shading for deeper shadows, the line drawn style evokes cartoons. And cartoons connote kids shows and cutesyness more than horror. Maybe you're trying to satirize kids shows through horror but the traditional cartoon association would strongly affect the overall mood - while the 3D look wouldn't do it as much. My two cents.

For me, the problem is primarily psychological. When you're working on the compluter and trying lots of different options, interrupting your train of thought to save and name what you're doing breaks up the creative flow. My defense against this is to think "How pissed will I be if I lost everything since the last change?" Then I hit the save key. However, after 20 years of professional experience making art on the computer, its still pretty hard to step out of the flow and remind myself to do this. So I also use my other defense plan: name all my different creative tangents numerically, so I didn't have to worry about naming schemes too much. If I'm playing with color, I just name all versions: Model_ColorPlay_1a Model_ColorPlay_1b Model_ColorPlay_1c ColorPlay_1 could all be shades of orange, ColorPlay_2 purple, etc. I sort them out later when I've stopped brainstorming and started editing. Yes, this creates a file mess on the computer, but it doesn't have to make sense to anybody else at this point. Hard disk space is cheap, losing work is expensive. Even when you're in a group situation, the habit of making separate files for each milestone, no matter how small, translates well for a more formal naming system - the type found in the real world where other people are working with your files. I still lose work - I still get lost in the creative flow of things. But I've found these two approaches have made my losses much smaller. -mr P.S: Since I can't offer A:M technical advice on this forum - yet - I can at least chime in on this issue. Hope it helps save the work of some people starting out!!