Quba HQ

January 23, 2010
In Brainstorm, Featured
2 comments

Money for Masking and the Pics for Free

The image used for the header of this article is not a CAD rendering. Neither is it a fragment of a 3D model wireframe. It is a detail from the image mask I had to produce today in order to adapt a stock image into usable element for a motion graphics project I am currently working on.

Masking, matting, rotoscoping, keying… you name it – not exactly the favorite task for most designers, yet a necessary one. But does it have to be? In this article I would like to propose a solution that could potentially free the artists from the labor of building alpha channels for their images, earn freelancers some money and help the big stock providers expand their offering.

Rain

Ever since we produced “Snow Valentines” back in 2005, we’ve been wondering about creating other atmospheric effects in our pieces. With the set of Autumn fillers for S’NEK, the opportunity finally presented itself.

We generated rain maps (for both distant rain and the drops on the glass) using particle systems and then fed the information to a variety of distortion plugins to create a realistic drops of water on the window.

Wood Theatre

This piece is a part of several fillers commissioned by S’NEK channel for their Autumn line-up.

S’NEK’s programming director was quite fond of one of our older pieces, “Nonesensuality” and asked us to develop an animation similar to the scene with wooden planks featured there.

Tünel Invasion

Istanbul, where we are located, is a crazy place. Over 16 Million people (excluding ever-present tourists) live, work and party in this enormous city. Crowded streets and insane road traffic are everywhere.

For this video, created as a Spring filler for S’NEK, we decided to virtually empty one of the most congested areas of the city. We took photos of Tünel district, cleaned the crowds out of them and re-created the environment giving is a slow, lazy, summer mood.

Everyday People

This 15-second Spring filler created for S’NEK channel is one of most well-known pieces of we made. It has been featured on several motion graphics festivals and magazines around the world. It also opens the 2006-2007 edition of Adobe’s Customer Reel DVD.

The concept behind the piece was to show how diverse are the people who tune into and watch S’NEK.

S’NEK: Channel ID

The re-design of channel identity for S’NEK was one of the largest projects imago undertook. S’NEK (Turkish for “Fly”) is a youth-oriented digital satellite channel owned and produced by Digiturk – Turkey’s largest satellite TV operator. Since its launch, the channel’s image suffered from poor identity package, bad logo, and inconsistent on-air graphics, created in-house on minimal budget.

In a quest for better ratings and overall improvement of the channel, imago was commissioned to completely re-design the look and feel of S’NEK and to give it a new identity.