A lot of animation tests that I made during the run of the popular Gangbusters! Comedy Enjoyment Program turned into show IDs that we projected while the audience took their seats. It gave the show character, and every now and then one of them would catch the right eye and turn into a gig of some kind.
Since there’s no more show to showcase them, here are a few favorites:
2017 - MTV was often the finale / walk out graphic. It’s made of alpha blobbing applied to Particular, and has a high enjoyable-to-difficulty ratio.
My favorite thing about 2018 - Laser is when someone starts looking around the room for a laser projector, even though there was a video in the same spot just a minute ago.
The secret to 2016 - Pac Man was just a meticulous afternoon. I rigged up expression controls to change the orientation of the crab.
2015 - Ice is a simple 3D spin, but no less popular for it.
Crabby.gif is lifted from the Pac Man video, and makes a good facebook comment.
2019 - Brand is another kind of Trim Paths like laser, but it had more to do with the working with camera settings. I think it had a lot of CC Composite and minmax as well.
Several ‘holiday sweater’ presets came out the same year I did 2016 - Winter Walk-In, so something about the look must have been in the zeitgeist, but I didn’t use any of them for this. It’s mostly CC Ball Action.
The video version of 2018 - 60's Illo is too long, and I think it gets boring in the preshow reel.
2015 - Ray Traced features horribly inefficient 3D lighting. It took like 20 minutes per frame to render.
As sometimes happens around Christmas time, my pal Becky made a music video. I helped out a little. The poster frame reminds me of a Super Nintendo game.
Muphry's Law, McKean's Law, Hartman's Law: You're totally going to have a spelling or grammar mistake in that thing you wrote attacking someone for their grammar or spelling.
It's true facts, and I think it's great. I say, why not put your own error in their somewhere so at least you know where it is? Like being the first person to scratch the paint on your new car.
It happens to Seth Myers in a bigger-than-usual way in this clip around 0:56. Enjoy!
I saw a post online where someone was all confused about how to make something like this clip here, so I told him all you need is three layers:
- Top layer: someone shot on green screen, keyed, with posterize time.
- Middle layer: foreground art, using top layer as an alpha matte.
- Bottom layer: background art!
And then that guy was all like, "Isn't there a youtube tutorial that takes 45 minutes to give me that same information? Preferably one full of self-promotional nonsense at the beginning and end?" So...
I made one! Except it's only 96 seconds long. I'm sure I'll learn to pad them out as I go.
Remember the beginning of Batman movie, Mask of the Phantasm, with the choir singing... something ?
I think this is one of those movies my cousins watched a lot, and we'd make jokes about trying to figure it out. Is it even in English? "He's him who sees her"? Okay, that would be a weird sentence, but maybe it kind of makes sense with the movie?
I just learned about the choir. They're singing the names of the music staff, phonetically reversed. 'Eetzim ooze eet hap' was Patti Zimitti, whose job was hiring musicians.
Another childhood mystery solved!
