Victoria Nece

Peeling Gold Leaf Effect

Thursday, 03. 4. 2010  –  Category: Graphics

So I’ve been experimenting with BCC Reptilian. It’s normally used to make lizard skin-style textures, but I discovered some other interesting things to do with it, and this was the most realistic effect I managed:

It’s a nice look if you need to create some peeling gilded text on the base of an old statue. It’s also great for a faux antique gravestone or building ruin. And the type is still fully editable so, I dunno, evil posessed statues can come to life and write things? Some archaeologist could unearth something demonic? Okay, I admit it. I actually have utterly no idea what to use this for, but it’s pretty cool looking so I thought I’d post it anyway. And all you have to do is change the typeface and it looks like an artifact from a completely different era, so it might actually have some practical application after all.

The basic setup is a mix of BCC Reptilian, Fractal Noise, Bevel Alpha, two instances of Roughen Edges and a lot of hue-sat tweaking. There’s also a Gaussian Blur adjustment layer with a Fractal Noise solid as its luma matte. And then there’s a vignette. Because there’s always a vignette.

If anyone’s interested it I can make this into a preset or upload the project file.

How to Talk to a Graphic Designer in Six Easy Steps: Part One

Monday, 11. 16. 2009  –  Category: Graphics

All design projects have different needs, and individual clients and designers are very different people and have different ways of working, thinking and talking about their work. But having a general framework for interaction can help prevent people coming across as, say, a “nightmare client” or a stubborn artist unwilling to stray from their “vision.” With permission, I’m going to use a small design project I did recently for a workshop performance of Kevin Clark’s opera Summer’s Twilight as an example. This is a long piece, and it may sound like a complicated process, but it is far less scary and involved that it seems — the example project only took a few hours over a couple of days.

STEP ONE: INITIAL CONCEPT

One thing I’ve learned from working in documentary is how important it is to have all the facts BEFORE you begin, and getting everyone on the same page early on will save time, tears, and money. First, and most important rule for both sides: be honest. I used to think that the hardest clients to work for are people with absolutely no idea what they want. In fact, the most difficult clients are the ones who either claim to have no idea what they want, but secretly have something very specific in mind, or the ones who demand something with great specificity, but actually have no clue what they’re asking for and afraid to show it. If you really don’t know what you want from a designer, SAY SO. We won’t judge you! If you don’t know anything about graphic design and have never hired a pro before, SAY SO. We’re happy to walk you through the process. And if you don’t understand technical jargon we use, don’t be scared to ask what we mean. And that goes …

Jazz Up Your Footage With ‘Leave Color’

Thursday, 01. 8. 2009  –  Category: Graphics

I’m working on a set of short films to accompany a jazz concert later this month (more info when I can share it), and I’d like to show off a cool looking — yet very easy — effect we’re using. All the video is treated to give it that soft, silvery nighttime ‘jazz club’ look, with a bit stronger contrast for the performance clips. We didn’t want just straight black and white, though, so instead I’m using an oft-forgotten After Effects filter that’s been around for ages: Leave Color.

Here’s a still from the raw footage (DVCPROHD 1080i60):

And here’s the after shot, with only four very basic After Effects filters applied (click to embiggen):

I used Leave Color to keep just the blues and desaturate the rest of the image, then boosted the saturation a bit to make the remaining color really pop. After that it was just your basic Levels and a high-contrast instance of Curves.

Oh, and one extra layer on top as a vignette — a black solid with a rounded rectangle mask (double-click the mask tool to get one that fills the layer) set to subtract and heavily feathered. That’s all!

Leave Color has simple parameters but dramatic results, and is especially good as a quick trick if you need to draw a viewer’s eye to a key element of a scene. All you have to do is decide which color you want to keep. For example, say you have a shot of a bunch of people at a party, with one woman in a bright red dress. Choose that red with the eyedropper, …

Proposal Design: Setting the Right Tone For the Film

Tuesday, 11. 11. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

A big part of my job is designing proposals for films my company hopes to produce. They might be aimed at potential investors, production partners or networks that might want to air an already completed documentary, but the goal is always the same: proposals should be more than just basic reading material. Their design should give a sense of the overall look and feel of the project, draw attention to the elements that their audience will find most interesting, as well as simply convey the idea that we’re professionals and know what we’re doing.

Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get it right.

We have a fairly substantial library of short educational films that we’d like to repurpose into a television series. They’re a bit unconventional, as civics films go — informative, but with an edge — and I think they’re actually entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. But before we recut for TV, we have to convince someone to air them.

Wall decals are awesome.

Monday, 07. 28. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I have a solid white wall in my bedroom that’s more than eighteen feet long, and I had the hardest time figuring out how to decorate it. (The fact that most of the walls in my apartment are solid concrete and won’t accept nails definitely doesn’t help.) But I put up some wall decals this weekend and am really pleased with the results:

Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

Shrinkery

Sunday, 07. 13. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I’ve spent much of today playing with a fun technique called “tilt shift” — you can do it with lenses or Photoshop, but either way you get the same effect: normal size objects appear to be miniature models of themselves.

It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950’s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.

This technique works best with photos shot from a high-ish angle, and will give particularly good results with fairly regular subject matter such as buildings and careful landscaping. Also, England. I think it’s the combination of UK architecture and the very green grass there, but the country just seems to lend itself to being converted into tiny model villages.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed, shot from the train from York to Edinburgh:

York, sans scaffold-covered Minster:

A very mini Mini:

And, last but not least, something from the other side of the pond: the lovely Jersey City parking lot.

Bite-Size Jurors

Monday, 06. 16. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

I’m working on a series of films about juries at the moment. They should be pretty fun to do (I get to animate trial by ordeal, for one), but there’s a lot of character work and not a lot of time. Thus, digital puppetry.

I was hoping to work with After Effects’ extremely fun Puppet Tool, but the results I got while experimenting were just a little too squishy for this project. (Anyone know some tricks for getting convincing, not-too-exaggerated motion out of it? Even liberal use of the starch tool seemed unhelpful, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out a way to make elbows and knees bend properly.) So for the moment it’s back to IK rigging — and a lot of carefully placed anchor points.

I’m much more satisfied with the results, particularly now that I have a keyframable checkbox parameter that switches the bend direction of the joints. In plain English, I can make someone’s elbows bend both ways — e.g. a character can go from having their hands on their hips to picking something up off the table next to them with very little trouble.

Creating the jurors themselves was a lot of fun — the characters need to function more as archetypes than individuals. The result: a wide range of ages and races and a complete lack of faces.

I now present… my little jury guys (and girls!):

Warning: Do Not Eat.

Meet Hector.

Saturday, 05. 31. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

Hector is a cube-frog from IKEA. He is the best!

He’s sort of my large, square mascot. Expect him to make the occasional appearance in future tutorials.

This particular graphic came about while experimenting with mosaic effects. Aside from the photo of Hector, everything’s Photoshop-generated, and this file’s rapidly approaching 30 layers. I even managed to use several filters that normally fall well within the “Tacky Awful Effects” category: Patchwork, Clouds and Motion Blur. Lesson of the day: all in moderation, all in moderation.

It’s Photoshop Phriday!

Saturday, 04. 5. 2008  –  Category: Graphics, News

This week’s Photoshop Phriday feature on Something Awful was “Reverse Magazines” — take a magazine, find the reverse of the title (i.e. Bad Housekeeping or Illiterate’s Digest), and make a cover for it.

So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:

My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.

Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.

No Schoolhouse Rock Here

Thursday, 04. 3. 2008  –  Category: Graphics

People keep asking what exactly it is I *do* at my job.

Well, I’m our animator/graphic designer, so pretty much any visuals — print or motion — that need to be created go through me. I don’t really do character animation; my work is more titles and graphics to explain things — elements to add to the overall ‘look’ of a live-action film rather than the films themselves. I also design most of our project proposals, which is cool because I get to find out what’s in the pipeline.

One of the main things I’ve been working on lately is a set of videos for the Annenberg Foundation’s Constitution Project, a series of educational films designed to make US politics and history relevant to high school civics students. (You can watch them free online at annenbergclassroom.org, but you’ll need to register.) They’re pretty fun viewing and I’ve had a lot of creative freedom with my sequences for them.

Here are some stills from The Making of a Law, coming soon to a school near you! The graphics scheme for this one was based on vintage pop-up books (it begins with a mock fairy tale of the legislative process), so everything has a flat papery look to it. Thanks to my snazzy new blog plugin you can scroll through them image-gallery-style.

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