travis van hoff cd covers

these are the final designs for the cd cover for my buddy travis - i tried to make something that would catch your attention but be simple enough to not distract you from actually listening to the cd... when i heard the title 'summer diaries' it made me think of painting the colors of summer. i guess subconsciously i incorporated my favorite quote "music is color painted on a background of silence' or i suppose white in this case... weird how i didn't even think of that the entire time i worked on it until just now. my inner id. tender.

magic

i have been trying to figure out a couple of cool commercials that i saw on mtv and kinda stumbled upon a crude patronus spell from harry potter

(they used soft body animation in maya and exported those into houdini for the ribbon trails and then exported that into rex... with various ripple/displacement maps) - i used after effects.

van hoff guitar painting

this is an idea for a cd cover that i was working on for a little for travis

eric's big bite

i was watching the food network admiring all of the after effects ever so present in all of their shows. seriously. every. single. show. i felt inspired to make myself a little logo that would appear in the corner of the screen to let the viewer know that yes, the local listings are what they say they are. i especially like all the fun luma mattes in guy's big bite - but thought the show would be cooler if it was eric's big bite... catchy, no es cierto?

el eric

i heretofore dub the windstorm in the local provo,ut area at and around 2:00am on the 21st of may as 'el eric'

lip sync

for awhile i have been wondering how to animated actual dialogue... i sat down and with what i knew and what i knew i wanted to do came up with this little number - i just found a tutorial on how to do it (most likely more effectively, but i like to try and solve the problem myself to push my limits - and then consult after) the way i did it was a pain in the butt. i drew all the different phonemes and then just animated the opacity on each one to the song... i assume their is an easier way. i'll figure it out.

NOW WITH ACTUAL SOUND! thanks anfrony

controlling the ghost

i have been trying to figure out how to actually have a little bit of control of the ghost and how to make it turn it's head and appear to have a somewhat 3d element to it... i could spend some more time on cleaning this one up - but once again, i'm just trying to figure out the nuts and bolts before i waste time polishing up lame stuff... like the other ghost - this too is just a 2d photograph that i pulled up on a google image (i know these are a crappy quality video - but it looks so clean wide screen)

scary ghost!

i wanted to try something a little scarier than usual - i wanted to take a 2d image and make it into some sort of phantom type thing... i sat at mcdonald's and tried to plan out how i would do it in my head - i tried a couple different combinations of effects but finally came up with this one... next i am going to try and figure out how to get a face inside of water/smoke/sand or something like that - water would be cool. it kinda bites though because i don't have any footage nor do i have the money to buy a video camera (or stock footage for that matter) to actually create movie compositions so i stick with free images and whatnot to get the process down and i suppose later on i can apply the same things that i'm learning with images over to movies - seriously though, how cool would this ghost dude look if it was actually a full body kinda walking through the air with a screwed up frame rate so it looked all choppy? cool. that's how it would look.

back from california!

this is a little comp that i did right before i went to california but didn't have time to post... i wanted a practical use of my explosion and so i whipped up this little piece just for kicks - if i had more time, i would have made the dust cloud stick around longer and then slowly dissipate as opposed to a solid opacity drop - now that i know, i'll do it for the next one

explosion

so i sat around playing with after effects all day today trying to get a better grasp on trapcode's particular plug-in... i came up with this little explosion - there are things that i would go back and fix if i really cared enough, but really i just did it for kicks

it looks super crisp full screen but i am assuming that blogger will dumb it down for all of us.

painted up sketch

i had some free time and wanted to add some paint (i originally typed color but figured someone would be racist about it ((i suppose i typed it anyway, but at least i acknowledged that i purposely attempted not to be accused)))

cd cover

this is a cd cover that i am working on for a friend: we sat down together the other day to combine our ideas and get'er done - there are a couple things here and there that still need some work, but once he gets closer to releasing his EP/LP (or whatever consonant followed by a 'P') then i'll finish it up

EP = extended play: when a cd doesn't have a full amount of tracks but is more than an LP

LP = limited play: a cd with less tracks than an EP

owls

dirty larry, taylor, and i are working on a project right now about an endangered owl (possibly one with OCD) that is born in captivity where it receives training to be released into the wild... but before his training is over some activists break into the facility and let all of the animals go - and all of the training that the owl had received was completely useless and leads to comical situations out in the wild

that's about as far as we've gotten - but we've copyrighted it (nobody get any bright ideas.)

cool roomie

my roomie is cool. and a logo.

more storyboards

here are some more storyboards that i didn't get around to photoshopping

sketch dump jan -april 2008

i finished another sketchbook and got all the images scanned in: here are a couple that i like... this sketchbook probably has the most drawings in it that i actually like by the time i complete the book. go me.