Quba Michalski

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.

Ever since my first Commodore 64, I have been an avid follower of the demoscene. For many years groups like Fairlight, Kewlers, The Black Lotus, Orange, Farbrausch and more recently ASD (Andromeda Software Development) have been pushing the art of realtime graphics into new extremes.

While entertaining to watch however, demos usually had a tendency to lack in the art direction department. The would excel in cool visual effects, pumping more and more graphics at better framerates and higher resolutions - but being primarily created by coders, not artists, the majority were more of a technical showcase rather than an artistic pursuit. In the recent years, the new breed of demos started emerging - one where art and code truly go hand in hand. One that can easily rival the amazing vfx and motion design pieces from the world renown motion design directors.

Hello everyone! Just another update on the state of things regarding new QubaHQ tutorials. As you can guess I have good news and bad news for you (and double good news for myself). Let's start with the good ones.

New tutorials are on the way. This weekend I am planning to release a new text animator based preset, once again using After Effects' built-in tools in an unexpected way. Originally I planned to release this preset as a part of larger, paid content, but after careful deliberation decided to throw you all another cool freebie. Follow my twitter for the updates on recording and release. Hopefully this time Camtasia will behave better than on the last recording session.

If you are a frequent QubaHQ visitor, you are probably already familiar with the Vimeo channel containing all the tutorials from this site. I have been using Vimeo as my primary video host for two reasons: first being their great video encoding quality, and the second - the fact that I was not allowed to upload content longer than 15 minutes to YouTube.

Today I realized that my account has actually been approved for longer uploads for quite some time, and I am currently in the process of uploading all of the tutorials to my channel. Vimeo will still remain my primary host, but with the content available on both of these major video sites, you now have an option of where and how you want to watch my tutorials... and I have a chance of reaching a wider audience.

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: A ZX Spectrum microcomputer, an Italian analogue sound mixer and a National TV set. Only TV still works.