SOMO: The making of - Part I

Ok, because of my lack of edits/pictures, I've decided to post about the making of the Mo-Graph in Montre Livingston's Section of Southern Motion.

So as always, any type of motion starts with Boarding, sketching and really anything that gets your creative juices flowing and geared in the proper direction. I always seem to forget how important this part of the process is, because when I sit down and really contemplate what it is I'm about to do, I can usually come up with some pretty interesting work. Here are a couple Boards/sketches that eventually wound up leading me to the final product.

From the get go, I always had the ideas of clouds on strings with vintage TVs. After I established that, I knew that I wanted things to be really textured and grungy to kind of give this raw, seasoned feeling.

After the Mo-boards and elements were decided on, it was time to actually design a canvas to be animated. After some thinking, I decided the best way to make this way design all the elements in a 2880x480 composition and get everything set up for after effects there. (Still below)

The "color swooshes" didn't really come into play until I got closer to the end of post production. I had always wanted to use elements like that in my motion work so getting to implement those was both challenging and fun. Initially, I was only going to use that look for Montre's section, but as the deadline neared, they (the color swooshes) became the consistent look in the video that I was needing.

I found the picture of Montre surfing through flickr on photographer Gene Steagall's page, and contacted him about letting me use this sweet flick that he took.

Its an awesome picture but there was just one problem, I needed to have the rest of his body in the shot, so with a little digital trickery, I recreated his arm/part of his shirt so it could be used in the intro. If you look closely you'll notice some weird sploches (and the beer bottle caps in his hair :P) but all in all it did exactly what I needed it to do, work. haha

When I made my first video, Hand Made!, one of two of my friends had gotten in touch with Tom Hyser about possibly helping me distribute it. Well when I went up to Boone for a Comp Thomas Martin was holding and actually had a chance to meet Tom and talk about the video.

He kind of gave it an "its ok but not great" rating, and understandably so, it was my first video and I admittedly over-edited Tim's section and a couple other things, so I wasn't that upset with his rating. The thing that got me thoug was after he finished telling me what he thought of it, he made a point to say:
"And man I HATE when kids roll through the grass after they land a trick, it just bothers me." (or something along those lines)
Now this I thought was hilarious, and, in my mind, open the door for running "grass landing jokes." So the whole animated concrete into Montre's, very deliberate, grass landing had to happen.

Original Frame:

Concrete Photoshopped in:

Apparently he saw the video during the Colorado Road Trip and thought it was funny so it was well received and wasn't taken as some t-dog takin' shots at an OG rollerblader, which isn't the case at all because Tom is definitely the man. But there's the story behind that.

Once I finished all the designing and creating of all the elements, I imported the PSD into After Effects, animated the individual elements, and then nested that Composition (the original 2880x480 comp) into another 720x480 composition and moved the Nested Comp along its x-axis to give it look as if a camera were following the action. Thus giving us the final outcome that I edited into Montre's section (below).

And that about sums that up. If you have any questions, or comments about the method, feel free to drop them in the comments below, I love talking about projects and learning new techniques.

I'm hoping to do a similar one of these for Smiley's Introduction in the future. But until then, stay tuned! That online video is slowly coming together and will definitely be dropping soon.