Sounds Loud 2011 Teaser Trailer by Michael Wentworth-Bell. You can view the full video in HD at vimeo.com.

Presenting my first ever freelance 3D animation! This job was completed in around 100 hours outside of my day job and studies over a 5 week period. Because of the extremely tight deadline I had to cut a lot of corners.

I saved a lot of time by importing my Maya cameras into After Effects and completing many visual effects in ’2.5D.’ I also used the very powerful (and Free!) Maya Voxeliser script found at creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/polygon/c/voxelizer

Many thanks to Peter Richardson for the fantastic script!

This animation is currently being used at soundsloudfestival.com to gain sponsorship. In a few months I will be making a version of this animation for actual advertising. With the extra time up my sleeve, I want to refine this animation to the best it can be!

I’m hoping to receive some comments on suggestions on where best I can improve it.

Playing Times for this weekend's Sounds Loud Festival

These designs are also in this week’s issue of Beat Magazine, as 2 A3 sized adverts!

I’m still to hunt down a copy!

The designs were both created completely in Adobe Illustrator, with the exception of the tables for the playing times, they were made in MS Word, and then copied into Illustrator (I didn’t realise you could do that ’til now!)

The Sitemap design used a heap of illustrator’s filters and effects; So many that it was actually not possible for illustrator to export this image at high dpi or resolution (for A0). This is actually a really annoying limitation of the program, as I tried exporting it on many different high spec computers.

The actual Sounds Loud Logo, Speakers image, and the gradient used for the background were originally created by Kon Mrnjaus, another local designer who was responsible for the Sounds Loud Festival poster design. Thanks Kon for supplying me with these Vector originals to composite into my design!

During these 4 days running the place on my own, I completed a project Alf had started before he left. He had rendered out some 3d Visualisations of a new cosmetics range of products, and I had to composite the render passes in photoshop. These took a while, mainly because the renders where extremely high-res for print, and the computer I was on grinded a bit.

During this time my focus was primarily on a project that I have had the main control of, which has been really fun! The project was to create a 6 second animation of a new sporting product range. The animation showed the product, and had titles, and logos for the stores that will be selling it. It sounds pretty basic, but Alf gave me full creative control on the project and so I decided to something different. I created a ’3D’ environment in After Effects, and used a technique called ‘Camera Projection’ to make the images of the product that I had been supplied with look 3D. The images were taken at 20 mega-pixels, and so the clarity helped sell the technique.

I have now spent about 2 weeks working on the project and right now the final frames are being uploaded to the client. Once the Ad begins airing on TV I will be able to upload a preview of the animation!

So far my experiences at Reel Pictures have continued to be great, and I have finally been able to balance out this new full time position with my uni work, freelance, and free time.

This friday marks the end of the current projects, and next week I look forward to starting 2 more new projects, one which I hope to elaborate more on as I approach it during the week.

The placement has been arranged through my Uni, and as a course requirement I must complete a journal that chronicles my time spent working at Reel Pictures. I have decided to complete this journal through fortnightly entries here on my MICKFX blog.

Right now I am halfway through my 7th Week here, and already I have learnt a great deal about this industry and how it operates here in Melbourne. Over the last few weeks I have been working in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio MAX and a whole lot of After Effects on a range of different jobs. I have helped composite 3D renders of Women’s Makeup products for Print applications, re-created the Mt. Beauty Mountain Range of the Alpine National Park in 3D (accurate to 1 metre!) and assisted in logo Design.

Right now we are on the back end of a job for ANZ bank which involves creating a number of animations that will play across 3 HD screens in a large walk-in installation.
With these entries I hope to focus on jobs I am currently working on in Reel Pictures, my involvement with them, the methods I use to reach the end products, and the things (good and bad!) I learn along the way!

Moonee Valley Youth Voice - Side A

Side B of the printed flyer

The Moonee Valley Youth Voice committee is starting up soon. They are seeking 12 young people aged between 14 and 24 to join and represent the community, allocate funding towards youth projects and manage community events and matters.

The digital version of this project can be seen in the ‘Digital Art’ Section of my flash based folio site.

These clips are generally worth $299 each if you purchase them on a day they are not offered for free. Today’s clip is a fireball explosion, and you can choose to download it in one of 3 versions: HD, NTSC or PAL. Obviously you would want to get it in HD!

So this is an incredible deal! If you were to download each daily clip you would have gotten $8,000 USD worth of stock footage in a month! Even if it doesn’t come in handy now, or you are not even interested in Film/Motion Graphics/compositing etc, these clips may come in handy one day….and they’re free!!

You must be a registered user of Artbeats to download a free clip each day.

The link to the Daily Free Clip is put up on their homepage each day.

At the moment I am working on some banner ads to be placed on various websites, and I am about to start work on material for the event programme, including a site map and setlist with event rundown. These items will also be appearing in a full page poster for Beat magazine over the next few weeks.

It has been exciting working on this project to date, as I have had to produce interactive content, web graphics and print work, which has been a great break from 3D work of late!

One of the banner ads is currently up at syn.org.au and a version of the interactive ‘Sponsor Call’ Applet i made for the festival can be viewed at my online folio, in the ‘Interactive’ Section.

The Sounds Loud Festival is an All Age, Free Entry Event happening on Sunday April 11th, 2010 at Queens Park, Moonee Ponds.

The all-day event features a tonne of bands and live acts over 3 Stages. For more info including full setlist, check out the link below!

Motion Blur In Adobe After Effects – All you need to know from Michael Wentworth-Bell on Vimeo.

Follow the Link to watch the video in HD 720p at vimeo.com!

If you don’t already know Gogol Bordello, now is the best time to discover their awesome sound!

So, I invite you to subscribe to this blog if you are interested in keeping in touch with me, and what I am up to!

This blog is powered by software called ‘WordPress’ and i am blown away by what it is capable of, and also quite overwhelmed by all the options it offers. This blog is very exciting for me and I hope it can continue to improve!

Thanks for reading!