After Effects

Come join me on Thursday, February 18at 7PM – 9PM at Adobe Systems Inc in Seattle for a talk about some cool toys I’ve been building inside After Effects. Organized by After Effects Seattle, in this three-part presentation I will demonstrate how to push After Effects to do things it was not designed to do – building your own unique rigs and effects.

Yesterday, Mettle released a brand new plugin named SkyBox VR Player. The plugin integrates with Adobe After Effects, Premiere and SpeedGrade and allows you to view your 360 content directly in Oculus Rift - without rendering! It will even let you work on your software without taking the HMD off, and automatically recognizes mono and stereo 360 compositions. Best of all: It's free!

Topographix is a cool new tech I have been developing for the past few days. It will most likely eventually make its way to the QubaHQ tutorials, but not before we make something new using it with my team. The tool is still in early alpha, but already kicks some major ass and se should start doing some testing early next week.

Color grading using Curves, Levels and other RGB tools always felt quite counter-intuitive to me. That's why I decided to create QHQ Channel Splitter - an After Effects script and Photoshop action for automatic splitting of the image/footage into discrete RGB or CMY channels. Channel Splitter can change the way you experiment with color correction as well as open a brand new way of color grading through changing the "inks" rather than the channel values.

This month's meditative, repeating and almost zen-like song called for something slower and relaxing. Paint drying and grass growing felt too cliche, so we settled on having a mountain range erect over the course of the song. This was also the first Bowerbirds clip where I decided to take my hands off the keyboard and let my very talented team do some work.

For the 2012 launch of the new Nexus family of devices, we imagined a playful world of Google services interacting around a stack of devices. Following the success of the first Nexus Playground video, we were then asked to create a series of sequels, each talking about a particular type of experience Nexus can provide to its users. The films below were originally published inside rich media banners, as a part of Google's 2012/2013 Nexus: The Playground is Open campaign.

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.

In this tutorial I will teach you how to create your own UFO troll video using After Effects and Mocha - a process that should take you no longer than 30 minutes from the moment you grab a camera, to the time you are ready for upload.