Quba HQ

Quba Michalski: Creative Free Agent

It is my pleasure to publicly announce that as of today I have changed my official status into Creative Free Agent and I am available for work with all interested parties. For all business inquiries you may contact me directly – the details can be found on the About page of this site.

It took me a while to figure out how to properly title myself and my services. Freelance Director? Motion Design Artist for Hire? Unassociated Writer/Art/Creative/Director? Truth be told, looking back at the past decade, it is much easier to list the things I did not do than all the roles I assumed on all the projects.

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Cinemagraph: Remember ZX

Not too long ago, these were referred to as simply “cool animated gifs”. These days they go by much more artsy name of Cinemagraphs.

In the picture: ZX Spectrum microcomputer, an Italian analogue sound mixer and a National TV set. Only TV still works. Image brought to life in After Effects.

PS. Yea, I just realized these are called Cinemagraphs, not Cinegraphs. Corrected the spelling throughout the post.

Ulker: Dankek

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).

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Art out of Trash out of Design out of Art

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.

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gnctrkcll / Cornetto: text+talk

If we were to say just one thing about the making of this ad, we’d describe it as an extreme exercise in hardcore project management.

We were approached by Leo Burnett with two frames of a character design art, a concept for an ad with an animated t-shirt and 6 days to air time. We took the bait. Now, less than a week later, we are happy to present to you the latest ad for a joint promotion of Turkcell’s gnctrkcll and Algida’s Cornetto.

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Romantically Apocalyptic

Romantically Apocalyptic is a webcomic like no other. Produced and illustrated by Toronto-based Russian artist Vitaly S Alexius, each panel is rendered in stunning photo-realistic fashion and based on photographic and stock references.

This (at the moment 22-episode long) comic follows adventures of the captain, pilot, sniper and engineer in the wasteland ruin of post-apocalyptic tomorrow. The humor ranges from black to surreal, bringing to mind works of Banksy or Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.

If you have a little time to waste, make sure to give it a read – it’s really worth it.

Romantically Apocalyptic website:
http://www.romanticallyapocalyptic.com/

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.

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Geolines

This abstract background is a combination of swimming pool caustics and elevation lines used in topographical maps. It was created using “vanilla” After Effects, without any 3rd party plugins.

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Witchcraft: RTFM

I completed this experimental piece over the period of three days in April 2009. I have been experimenting with Cinema 4D, and in the course of messing with various animation settings, came up with a cool morphing crystal. I built a simple scene around the crystal with an inexperienced girl magician blowing herself to pieces by activating its powers. You can see the full-size video at the project’s page on imago site, or a smaller version with a little extra, right here, after the break.

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Snow Celebration

This is a test shot for a holiday piece I was planning in the Winter of 2008. It was created from a single summertime photo of Taj Mahal (original picture had well over 30 people in it), with color correction, icy water, snow and 2.5D added in After Effects.

In the end, the project did not come to life – we did a piece titled 0708 instead. You can see what’s left of Snow Celebration, below.

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