Here’s a long-delayed new imago studios reel for 2012. It includes commercial and independent pieces completed both in-house and as a collaboration with various production companies.

This video can also be watched on YouTube and in imago site.

Similarly to my 2005 piece entitled Demographix, AE64 is a tribute to the demoscene and to the legacy of world’s most popular microcomputer: Commodore 64.

While this video was created using the typical contemporary arsenal of tools (mainly After Effects and Cinema 4D), it conforms to most of the basic graphical limitations of the C64 such as a limited 16-color palette, low resolution, use of the overscan area etc. To maintain the spirit of the demo, I also created most of the effects using various scripts and code snippets, procedurally automating many of the tasks typically animated using keyframes.

The idea for this video (or, if you prefer, a “wild demo”) came to me a few weeks ago, during the 7DX demoparty. Seeing how this nearly 30 year old system still has people coding for it, developing new tools and techniques as well as actively participating in various demo competitions – really stroke a note of nostalgia in me. I remembered my first C64, countless hours of games, graphic programs, chip tunes… I even recall creating some zine with my friends and printing it on a noisy dot matrix printer. (To be technically correct, my first computer was an Atari 65XE, but for the sake of the story, let’s ignore it.)

For the soundtrack of this piece I chose “Katana Blaster (Constantly Playing Mix)” from the album “Impostor Nostalgia” by Big Giant Circles. The piece was composed by Mick Gordon and since I pretty much had it playing on a loop for several weeks now, I simply had to use it. The song manages to beautifully mix the classic chip tune sounds with contemporary electronic vibes and dubstep rhythm – and Mick was kind enough to give me the rights to use it for this video.

To learn more about Mick Gordon and his music, visit his site at: mick-gordon.com.

If you ever owned a C64, I am sure you will enjoy this piece. Happy new year!

Concept, Design, Animation & Scripting: Quba Michalski
Music: Mick Gordon
Tools: After Effects, Cinema 4D

This video can also be viewed on YouTube

I remember the first time John from Motionworks shown me a beta version of MovieType. Pretty cool – I remember saying – I’m sure it will be useful to the people who do lots of 3D text, but not really something I would use in my projects.

While I was certainly impressed with both the idea and the implementation of MovieType, I really did not think I’d ever have any need for it. My motion pieces rarely, if ever, use 3D typography. I may throw an After Effects 3D text layer here and there, but that’s pretty much it.

And then came the Morhipo.com gig.

The deadline was tight, the advertisement’s content was not fully finalized. Changes to the timing, featured products and celebrity photos were delivered several times a day, as the agency struggled to get the finalized content locked down and approved by the client. To make things even more interesting, I had two more projects in the final stages of development at the very same time.

I could have said: Screw it, I’ll drop in the text in AE, throw some gradients on it and call it a day. Unfortunately, that’s not how I roll.

Now let me be very clear about something: I am no expert in 3D. I know what the software is capable of and how to get there, but I am terribly slow with execution. Typically, I prefer to work with a 3D artist or operator, guiding the development of the project, rather than a full hands-on experience. This time however, I did not have a choice. It was early evening, my 3D guy went AWOL, there was no time to find a new one, and I had to have all typography ready by the morning.

Getting the base geometry was as easy as loading up a path from Illustrator, dropping it inside MovieType Extrude object and tweaking the values till I got the desired thickness and bevel size. Camera was even easier – a simple preset, tweaked a tiny bit to look and time just right.

Next came the shaders. Gold and silver are always a pain to set up and render properly – too many reflections and they start looking like plastic. Too much saturation – and gold turns into orange. Too little gloss and everything becomes dull and rubbery. With the help of MovieType though, I was able to load up library shaders and within just a few minutes tweak them to look exactly how I wanted.

After that all I had to do is drop some light presets, adjust them and add a few extra ones for a good measure. I also used the MovieType Reflective Sky object with some noise shaders to make sure the reflections on the surface of the text are exciting enough.

Not only was I able to finish the project on time – I even got a few solid hours of sleep that night!

Don’t get me wrong here. The final ad is no piece of art – it will not win any awards or be featured in motion design festivals. It is however, a solid piece of advertising, created on an impossible deadline while matching and even exceeding client’s expectations. I call that a success.

On an extra note: MovieType was also used to create the little black plexiglass boxes I placed the products on. It’s truly a very versatile product and after having it save me from delays I felt I owe it to the Motionworks team to do this little write-up and recommend it to all motion designers. You truly never know when it may come in handy – take it from a non-believer :)

For more info about MovieType, check http://www.motionworks.com.au/2011/08/movietype/.

Here is my personal reel for June 2011, featuring commercial and independent pieces I have directed, edited, animated and designed in the recent years.

Music composed by Joel Nielsen.

This video can also be watched on YouTube.

I’ve been working on quite a few projects in the past months, all of which are in various stages of production and pre-production. Meanwhile, here are two short ads I made for Dankek.

The agency brief asked for a stop-motion aesthetic. We decided to shoot all of the elements live, but do the animation itself in After Effects. In fact I developed a pretty cool expression for creating random imperfections and errors in the object movement, especially for this project. (I am hoping to share it with you soon).

The on-air version of this ad went through quite a few changes, but I would like to present you with the original director’s cut, featuring the timing, elements and colors as originally intended by me.

Client: Ulker
Agency: Manajans JWT
Production company: Telesine
Directed by: Quba Michalski
Animation & Compositing: Quba Michalski
Photography: Bora Sübakan
Assistant Director: E. Mert Kökver
Tools: Photoshop, After Effects

These videos can also be watched on YouTube: 15 sec and 5 sec .

Now, that’s some recycling! Recently, with the introduction of helloimago.com we have designed some new business cards for the studio. While the front of the cards is always the same, we designed over 40 different variations of the reverse, using the letter “o” from our logo and Cigdem’s paintings to create a series of colorful, abstract visuals.

As usual, we used Moo.com to do the prints. Unfortunately we were not aware that they have recently changed they paper stock and ended up with a large box full of cards we did not want to use. (Just to make things clear, we ordered another batch, printed on another paper and these turned out fantastic!)

While the prints were useless as business cards, it would be the shame to simply throw them away – using a spray mount, some cardboard and an old IKEA frame I decided to put them together as a collage. You can see the result after the break.

I apologize for a poor quality of photographs – I did not have time to set up the lights properly and shot it from a simple Coolpix pocket camera right off the wall :)

Here’s a little video we cooked up at imago for this holiday season. May the new year bring you tons of inspiration, creative work, satisfied clients and just enough off time in between.

The video has been created entirely in After Effects, with just the tree shape drawn and imported from Illustrator. It has been designed and animated using exclusively AE’s shape layers and ended up as a mere 700K file (as opposed to typical project taking up dozens of gigabytes of data).

It also was a speedrun – it took just under 8 hours to create (thank you TV for the boring re-runs forcing us to get off the couch).

Credits:
Concept & Design: Cigdem Keresteci
Design & Animation: Quba Michalski
Music: Doctor Octoroc

The video is also available for download in 720p MP4 format. You can also view it at imago site, Vimeo and YouTube.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s address change, I am happy to present you with the latest reel of imago studios, closing down year 2010. Not much to talk about here – press play, sit back and enjoy.

imago is:
Quba Michalski: Director, Motion Designer
Cigdem Keresteci: Art Director, Graphic Artist

The reel is also available for download in either 720p MP4 or iPhone format. You can also view it at imago site and YouTube.

Visit imago studios at http://helloimago.com/.

Although it’s been over half a decade since we last designed a commercial website at imago, the original domain name imagonewmedia hasn’t changed. That is, until today.

Out with the old, in with the new. It is my pleasure to introduce all of you to a new home for our studio: helloimago.com. Pay it a visit if you haven’t yet and enjoy your stay.

New reel coming really soon. It is all cut, ready and even uploaded, but we’re still waiting for one of our new commercials to clear for air before we can put it out. Should be any day now…

This is a spot I prepared for Turkish Airlines (THY) under imago. It was not a typical job we’d take, since it did not really contain any challenging motion design elements, but instead was a pure editing and compositing project.

The ad is edited from 12 (if I recall correctly) stock scenes, where my task was to replace the original balls with red, THY ones. The new ones were not to contain any characteristics of the real sports equipment (hairy tennis ball, ridges and patches on the football, etc.).

The process was quite typical for this kind of job. I started with the edit, matching the length and speed of the clips to synchronize with the music. After that came the tracking, removal of the original ball, compositing the new one in. Whole thing was rounded up by color correction and grain matching.

Client: Turkish Airlines
Agency: Alametifarika
Directed by: Quba Michalski
Animation & Compositing: Quba Michalski
Tools: Photoshop, After Effects

This video is also available in HD on Vimeo and YouTube.