I just wrapped up an intense, 6-week animation course built by School of Motion. We studied the animation principles (squash & stretch, overshoot, anticipation, etc.) that make animations look great. In this final project, Be The Ice Sculptor, we were asked to build a 60-second animation using all of those principles. They gave us some beautiful 2D boards and professional voice-over to get started.
Earlier this year, I also completed a course on Cinema 4D also offered by the same company. I’m obsessed with 3D now and couldn’t help myself with this project. I used their 2D boards for reference, while introducing a little bit of the fun that comes when you play in the third dimension.
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In my previous post, I mentioned how important modeling was to producing 3D animations. While I still believe this to be true, there is a close second to modeling I’ve been learning about. In this post, I want to explore the techniques I used for lighting my scenes in Cinema 4D.
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After finishing School of Motion’s course on Cinema 4D, I picked up a license from Maxon. I’m hooked. I learned quickly after navigating through their course-load on modeling, animation, lighting, texturing, rendering and compositing…modeling is everything. If you don’t have a model, what do you have?
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I just wrapped up my first course on 3-D graphic design and animation through a Florida-based company named School of Motion. These people are incredible for several reasons. The tactics they use can be used by anybody in the business of change management (whatever that means), corporate communications or corporate training. I want to walk through them here.
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I’ve been noticing a trend in people at work asking for the “drawing hand” videos. Everybody loves those videos that take really great speeches and add visuals to them. In an effort to cut through the noise generated inside a large corporation, people are flocking to image libraries and new-age clip art to help them sprinkle in powerful analogies, similes and metaphors to their presentations.
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A friend and co-worker of mine introduced me to this wonderful quote from Theodore Roosevelt. After hearing it enough, I had this scene come to mind. I’ve been experimenting with animation, a medium I think more “knowledge workers” will have to embrace if they want to actually disseminate their knowledge.
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I’ve started a number of projects at work. They usually start the same way. I get an a-ha moment, tell some people about it, and then I try to get some people together to build on the insight until we can get someone to fund us. Every once and a while we get a buyer interested enough to buy. The usual pattern is a bunch of excitement builds. People are asking to be included on meetings. Everyone wants to share their opinion. People gather for “offsites” so they can discuss their opinions even further. Then, when it’s time to get to work you can just watch the crowd of “supporters” thin one-by-one until only a handful of people remain. I used to be so discouraged by this. I used to think people lost faith in me or I said or did something wrong. It wasn’t until I took my first swing at starting my own company that I found out how wrong I was.
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Just a quick post today, but something I hope you find especially helpful. It’s actually a follow-up to a post I wrote last week on corporate “customer” relationship management. A colleague of mine read my entry and promptly and generously introduced me to a technology I wish I would’ve known about sooner.
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Bread dates back to the Neolithic era. Sliced bread hasn’t even celebrated its 100th anniversary yet. It took man thousands of years to finally invent the greatest thing since…ever. Whether we like it or not, the things we want to happen - no matter how revolutionary, inspiring or helpful - don’t always happen on our schedule.
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What do you feel when you look at the image below? What does it make you think about? How do you think people looked at Henry Ford when he talked about the assembly line? What did they think when he planned for the average household to afford a car? What did people say when Ford started to pay his employees ten times more than anyone else? After his success, every aspiring auto manufacturer had to industrially “transform” their business if they wanted to move forward.
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I promise I’m not trying to sell a product. Honestly, I wish I was because this would be incredible if I had one of these. Without a doubt the hardest thing about documenting a huge company’s digital transformation is uncovering the things you don’t even know you don’t know. A good friend and business partner of mine says we are simultaneously starving for and drowning in information. How can that be? How can a global organization with hundreds of thousands of employees, partners and customers not get the right information to the people who need it?
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As our team grows, so do the number of opinions. We all think differently. We prefer working with certain tools or approaches. Our priorities will vary. At times, it will feel like we just aren’t going to be able to get along. A diverse team will encounter all sorts of disagreements. When these happen, don’t shy away from them. The worst argument is the one that never happens.
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Our brains are incredibly powerful organs. Just think of the millions of stimuli you encounter each day. You see countless numbers of photons and turn those into images and scenes. You listen to sound after sound and filter that noise to language or music. However, for all its power the brain is also terrible at dealing with these abstractions.
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