I’ve decided to hold off on the Blender stuff for a sec and try some other experiments regarding another passion of mine – animation. Ever since I was a kid I always dreamed of being an animator, and ever since I can remember I have been finding new ways to try and animate things from drawing in thick textbooks, stop motion with lego and eventually animating on a computer!

This is my latest experiment, learning how to do more action packed stuff like running and jumping.

Based on an old school genre of gaming that is long gone called “Adventure gaming” where you type in text to get your characters to do things. Does anyone remember Kings Quest?

Hope you enjoy it. Hoping to post about the animation side of things soon!

So as a completely serendipitous turn of events, what started out as an animation experiment suddenly turned out to be an unexpected hit amongst the vimeo community.

You can watch the video here:

What was fun about this project was that it was personal. No deadlines. No direction.
The only restrictions I had imposed on myself was

• It had to be completely done using the After Effects Shapes tool
• I had to use Duik ( a script allowing you to do IK rigs in After Effects. Frecklin Awesome)

I finished it at midnight a few days ago and thought it would be kind of fun to upload to the web and see if I could get a few giggles from my friends and showcase some of the new animation techniques. Within a few minutes of uploading I got some of the giggles I needed from some good friends and then went to bed.

Next morning I woke up to half a dozen emails notifying me of my film being added to various groups. One of which was the vimeo staff picks. For a second I was scratching my head. Was this THE Vimeo Staff picks? Or was there some other group with the same name. Sure enough I checked the staff picks group and mine had suddenly gotten to the top of the list! Surely this was a mistake…

Needless to say I was flippin out! What the frick!?! This video isn’t good enough to get on staff picks!!!

Anyways, I am humbled (humble bragging!) that anyone found this funny or at least shared in my sense of humour. And to everyone to enjoyed the vid, thanks for sharing the laughs with me.

Now for a sequel…

Check out the Duik site on how to do IK rigging in After Effects:

http://ik.duduf.com/

And this awesome tutorial on how to use it:

3D is very time consuming. I can see why people say spend as little time in the 3D app as you can and the rest in the compositor. But that being said, after a lot of weeks of experimentation, posting on forums and learning things, I came up with this little animation for all the fruits of my labour.

30 hours

for 30 seconds of animation…*groan*

30 hours of rendering in 30 secs from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

I have definitely been exploring a lot of new ways to do things in the last few months. Especially in regards to incorporating more 3D into my existing toolset. This one is no exception:



Oh and if you haven’t already bought the Magic Bullet Suite, maybe this video will convince you too:

When I started out doing videos for youth ministry 16 years ago, it was mostly motivated by how bad they were and in a lot of ways I was very embarrassed that our youth ministry even produced such terribly made videos. But as the video team grew and the technology became more accessible and affordable, talent also started to emerge.

So I just wanted to take some time to highlight some amazing work that is happening around the world that in my opinion is lifting the bar of what is possible in church media.

This first video is from Jono Shaw. His Sin city/Film Noir take on a mens conference promo has some amazing moodiness and some killer compositing!

Check out the making of it here too:

The Rock by Chris Loope – very nice design work with a nice track to boot

Silent Transitions by Salomon – Setting the bar pretty high, Salomon also designed the music and filmed this masterpiece.

God of the Broken by Dan Stevers – Beautiful integration and imagery. I always get a bit teary watching this…

Hillsong conference News 2010 by Yun Khang Lai – A nice little piece that makes a fairly boring idea a little bit more interesting for the audience

The I Heart revolution – Jackie Pullinger by Glenn Stewart – Glenn always does amazing work and in a lot of ways has the set the bar high for me personally. I owe a lot to this guy (but I would never admit it

Hillsong NYC by Paul Nevison (graded by Glenn Stewart) – A bit of an unsung hero, Paul’s documentary style is to be reckoned with. If there is an awesome doco to be cut, he is definitely the man.

C3 Screen Visuals Montage by Matt Fezz – Some amazing visual work for C3. Some of the best visual work for church I have seen

Anyways, hopefully something here has inspired you. Just always remember to keep honing your craft, and finding new and better ways to do things. The bar may look high, but it’s definitely not out of reach

Just so you understand, I used to be rubbish, and to prove it, here is a video video I made 10 years ago:

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In canvasing for a new job, It dawned on me that it made squat all difference if you had a nice polished resume but couldn’t back it up with any work you have done. I mean who cares if you worked for Danny Yount if you don’t even know what blending modes are?

Ok well, I am not saying I have a killer reel, but I know how to edit my stuff so it looks way better than it actually is.
In any case, I have read time and time again from various industry professionals – if you want to get a job in this industry, you need to have a good reel.

What constitutes a good reel?

Well I have narrowed it down to a few things:

1. Keep it short (less than 2 mins) – you want to keep your audience interested. Chances are there are at least 20 other people going for the same job and to watch through large amounts of video can be tiresome. Keep it short and snappy.

2. Only edit in your good bits – Don’t just throw any bollocks in, make sure you use the good bits. Stuff with clean movement that matches the tempo of the track you are using are always good. Remember, think about what you are putting together. Take pride in putting your work together. I mean you could put in the part where you forgot to matte paint out to the edges or where the track in your shot went bad, only if you want your future employee to think – “this foo is a chump! I wouldn’t let this foo put text on my timeline…”

3. Pick an appropriate music track – music always enhances the mood, but just keep in mind not everyone has the same taste as you. Pick something you know the end user will enjoy and we’ll all have a good time. I mean maybe the interviewee does like “Cradle of filth” but just in case they don’t maybe pick something a little more hip like the trolololo guy

4. Put in relevant stuff – if you are going for a DOP position then obviously don’t put in stuff that showcases your motion graphic skills. And likewise if you are going for a mograph position, don’t put in your shots of a wide sweeping plane. Keep it relevant.

5. Don’t advertise yourself – By that I mean, don’t show a chunk of animation and have a lower thirds saying “animation”. It’s pretty obvious you do animation. That’s why it’s there in your reel! Your contact details at the end are fine , but it’s more during the video. It looks tacky and it makes you look like you think the person you’re showing this too doesn’t know jack all about the work you do. And if they don’t, still don’t do it. Just wow the crap out of them and they will definitely ask for more

6. Only put stuff you have done – I mean you could put in someone else’s work, but good luck trying to replicate it if they ask you to do something similar

All clear? Then get out there and impress the crap out of people!

Ok, so it’s no secret I am a little obsessed with Tron, but what better excuse than to make something that looks incredibly fun to model (and relatively simple to boot!)

It was a little tricky trying to get it to look right, but in the end I fudged it a little in After Effects. Would have done a little more animation, but I ran out of time (mostly cause I fight crime at night, and the criminals wait for no one!)

I am hoping to document this whole process so that you, the viewer, will be benefit from my vast knowledge and experience! ha!

anyways, erm.. check it!

So if you head over to Greyscalegorilla.com, he has this blog about 5 second projects. Essentially it’s all about encouraging you to get creative but giving you some restrictions to play with.

So I thought I’d give it a crack by making some 3D in blender and then finishing it off in After Effects.

This is my fourth experiment using the shape keys and parenting using verticies:

This is my third experiment using the physics engine:

This is my second experiment using the explosion modifier:

Here is what I made!

And here is the breakdown of what I did compositionally in After effects and Blender:

Whether you like or not isn’t so much the point, but just to try something I’d never done before. And so I did!

Anyways, I’ll be making a tutorial about something 3d in the future But the next one will probably be on final cut …

Happy Australia Day everyone!

So I am dabbling a lot more in 3D and at the moment my weapon of choice is Blender (mostly cause it is free). But the fun thing is I am finding a lot of cool things I can do with Blender that I never thought an open source could ever achieve!

if you don’t believe me have a look at the link below!

5 second experiment primitives from Nick Khoo on Vimeo.

This was inspired by another video I saw on greyscalegorilla.com

Here is the original blog here where I got the inspiration from here!

Hey guys,

I have a new youtube channel – FIX IT IN POST.

The channel will be dedicated to the production process from start to finish and cover all those little things you may want to know about doing better video work! Some of it will be simple and other stuff will be a little more challenging.

Check it out here!
FIX IT IN POST CHANNEL

Oh and check out the Tron legacy tutorials here:

PART 1:

PART 2: