You wait ages for a blog post to come along and wehey, another one ... Here's a low-fi motion graphics video I just made for Virna Lindt's new track "Avant Garde".
For this track I was asked to make a simpler kind of music video with a tighter production schedule. I only had the vinyl record and a couple of still photos of the artist Virna Lindt to work with. The track has a certain pulsing shuffle to it, so I used lots of 'dust' and 'noise' in the graphics to keep the imagery buzzing and alive throughout the track.
Well it's been bloomin' ages since my last blogfession; over a year it seems! I've been pretty busy in the meantime, scrabbling around making a living and not always making things I can write much about.
However...
Here's a music video I just made for musician, gallerist and novelist Tot Taylor. The track 'Featurette' is a somewhat autobiographical number, in which Tot addresses his teenage self circa 1973.
When I first met Tot a few months ago, he told me a story from his teenage years. Like me, (as it happens) he grew-up in Cambridge. As an aspiring pop star, Tot bunked-off school one day with his teenage bandmates and took the train down to London. Armed only with a demo cassette and an AtoZ street map, Tot's band tracked down all of the record companies they could and proceeded to 'knock on doors'. After many rejections Tot's crew ended-up at the offices of Island Records where miraculously they found a sympathetic ear... Amazingly, Tot and his band of schoolmates recorded a session for the legendary Island Records label. But then and there, the dream kind of hit the buffers. Cut to the present day and Tot decided to revive his song 'Featurette' and rework it as a wry 'message to his naive but ambitous teenage self'.
For such a story of retro pop ambition, I decided to make a film in the style of a naive 1970s era teenage film-maker. The animation is rough and wobbly and the live action footage is mostly shot on 8mm and 16mm cine film. Not such a leap as it turned out ;).
Here's a promo video Kaspersky Labs are using online to launch and promote their 'Secur'IT' competition for students. This link shows the movie as it is now published over on the Kaspersky YouTube channel.
I delivered this video a couple of weeks back working for agency 90Seconds. I helped the client to helped edit their script, then created this cut using stock images/footage.
Well a couple of posts ago, I showed some still frames from a new motion graphics video I delivered for Vanderpump & Sykes Solicitors.
I've now added some stock music (from Tunefruit.com) and got this down to a snappier two minutes in this new edit.
The video is designed to play on a loop and run silently on a large screen at the firm's head office.
The video is mostly animated type with some simple 3D elements too.
I completed the project using Cinema4D and After Effects.
These days I'm making a lot of short promos and web videos directly for all kinds of clients. Please see www.chrisgavin.com to find out more.
Here are a few stills from the video too...
Here's a new app demo / promo video I have just delivered for Phonebook.club. The video is now being used online to promote the new smartphone app and raise awareness for a crowd-funding campaign now taking place on Indiegogo here.
The video is quite a mixed media piece, combining footage, photography and a little stop-motion and CG work too. I wrote the script and completed all of the video production work on this one. The video was delivered in around a four week turnaround from initial briefing.
For anyone interested in how I create this kind of work, the client has also uploaded my rough animatic to Vimeo. This is a very crude version of the video I made early on in the development process. So in the interests of 'showing the workings' here is my animatic (rough version) of the same video.
Here's the latest video I made for Simon's Cat Ltd. It was uploaded to the Simon's Cat YouTube channel just before Christmas and has clocked-up over 500,000 views already.
In this video we follow Simon Tofield on a reserch visit to the UK headquarters of the Cats Protection charity in Sussex.
Here's the fourth episode of the 'Cat Fans Do' series I've been editing for Simon's Cat Ltd. Artwork by the fans of Simon's Cat, narration by Simon Tofield, music by Russell Pay of shrooty.com
I was out shooting some tests with the new Canon 600D DSLR camera this weekend. I'm pitching on a project with an idea to use both the stills and HD movies functions of this camera combined.
I shot the movie tests using the recently-announced Technicolor CineStyle colour profile.
CineStyle is available as a free download for the Canon DSLR users. You install the software to your camera using the Canon Photo Professional software as one of your preference profiles, then shoot your movies using this setting. The results are dull-looking and initially unimpressive; but the theory is that with this setting, there will be much-increased dynamic range retained in the images. The idea here is to shoot the best most versatile footage, then use the increased range to grade it later in post to achieve the desired look.
Here's one of my early test shots. This clip shows (with lots of YouTube compression of course) a clip shot with the Technicolor CineStyle profile... dull and grey looking. The clip was then brought into Adobe After Effects CS3 for some saturation and curves.
Initial tests are positive, I'll hopefully be able to post some further examples and more findings here soon. I've only had this camera since Friday, but I'm hugely impressed with what it can do already.
