Does "Made With Motion 5" Count?

Start and end animation for a promo. High rez logo was separated out into layers with Pixelmator. Everything else is pure Motion. It's not that sophisticated, very basic actually, but, there you have it.

www.bbalser.com/video/LAE2012Animation.mov

Nice work Ben. Any reason you used Pixelmator instead of PhotoShop? The layers look fantastic. The purple & green spotlights are striking. If one wanted to, is there a way to further separate the layers over time with animation?

Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate that.

I have an old copy if CS3, the upgrade prices are way too steep, and I've had major problems with Adobe fixing their licensing issues. I found Pixelmator, learned it, and it does everything I need for much less money, and a much nicer user interface.

Yes, the logo is just layers. Motion supports layered PSD files. Each letter, the white background, and the line of red text are all separate layers and can be manipulated individually. Trick is if you use the "Import" button in the preview area, it comes in flattened. You have to drag-and-drop it into a Group, hold it for a moment there, and a menu pops up. You can import it as flattened, all layers in tact, or pick an individual layer to import. With all layers in tact, it makes a Group that each original graphic layer gets assigned it's own Motion object layer.

One trick, I found letting the various lights cast shadows made it way too busy. Technically cool, but aesthetically not good. So I made the logo's white background reflect the letters, turned down the opacity and blurred it a tad to fake a single shadow.

I originally did an explosion, but just cause I like things blowing up and space debris. They wanted something more "stage" theatrical, so I came up with this. All of the techniques used are really very basic, too. Nothing too fancy.

I only get this when clicking on link:

Sorry, had an update and didn't realize I changed the name. Try again, should be fixed now.

Bonus:
www.bbalser.com/video/mPVBigBang.mov
Sound makes a universe of difference.

I like this new one, very dramatic. There are 2 very small concerns for me. First, there is a moment of hangtime, when all the little logos are revolving in space - beautiful, but the anticipation is replaced by predictability because they are all revolving a the same speed & direction. Familiarity breeds contempt they say. Hehe.. no contempt here, but I can see the outcome coming. This replaces the journey of discovery a tiny ho-hum moment when I know where this is going. Not sure how difficult it would be to have all those particles revolving randomly... The other thing, is when we finally do lock on to our final logo & zoom in, I'm not sure I like the blur as we approach it. If we are really moving towards it in space, shouldn't it become clearer & sharper? Perhaps there is motion blur from accelerating thru it at the end, but maybe we could have a moment of sharpness then that kind of stretched space warp-drive type blur to get thru it.

Just a couple of ideas...

Great work, as always, Ben.

It's not a dramatic film, it's a coffee break goof off we slapped together in about 15 minutes. There's no story to analyze, it's a simple goof-off. If I had been getting paid to do that for a client, it'd be VERY different for sure. So just take it for what it is.

No, everything is not moving at the same speed, nor in the same direction. A camera is moving through space, but all the logos and stars move at varying speeds and in all directions. Again, if this were actually for a client, it'd look VERY different for sure.

When things move faster, they blur. When things that are large get too close, yes, they can blur. Depth of field. But we tested the final zoom without blur, and it was horrible. The blur, though not perfect, was better. And if this were for a paying client, it would look...

Again, it's only a goofing off over a coffee break to have fun project. It's far from polished, never will be, never was meant to be.

Although 4 companies so far I've never heard of have given me work from seeing that big bang clip alone, so there's a coffee break that actually paid off.

The original clip I posted a link too was for a client, a non-paying client on a super short deadline. But that was done in about an hour, so there's way more polishing I could have done with that one, also.

So the first was needed in a couple of hours for a non-paying client. The second was during a 15 minute coffee break to kill time and avoid boredom.

Yeah I myself was trying to figure out to but if its to demonstrate common use in Motion 5 why not, thats cool.

BenB wrote: But we tested the final zoom without blur, and it was horrible. The blur, though not perfect, was better.

Give After Effects a try.

AE would give me the same blur. It wasn't the quality of the blur, it was the overall effect. What would AE do any different? The zoom with crystal clear logo just looked super fake. I though later of using an echo type motion blur, but by then we were back to real world work. It's just what it is, and will never be touched again. You can only do so much in 15 minutes.