After over a year of work, I'm finally done--and just in time, too, as my new college semester starts soon! This is by far my most ambitious video project to date, with both my After Effects and my Blender skills used to a much farther extent than anything I'd done before.  Aside from its technical aspects, there was a lot of acting, scripting, and even voiceover dialogue to an extent that my family's never tried before.  This took quite a bit of doing, and I can't wait to post about how it was made!  For now, let it be said that there was a lot of masking.  That said, there will be making of videos, and I'm hoping for a sequel!  I already have several ideas for new technical improvements... Ignore the Lights.  

As of now, all the special effects and video editing is finished on ABYDOS!  All that's left are some voiceovers, which are more than halfway done, but after that the project is essentially finished!  I should be able to have a trailer out by the end of the month.  In the meantime, here's an official poster! 

I've been mostly doing the editing and general After Effects work, hoping to add CGI elements later on.  The main challenge with the CGI seems to be lining it up with the footage (as, rather than using a not-so-free plugin or something else to put actual 3D into After Effects, I'm rendering the footage in Blender and then compositing it on top of the AE work).  One neat trick around this is that Blender does allow background images (including videos), so that'll be an excellent tool for matching up the camera and the video.  Hoping to get a lot of work done on it soon! 

I'm proud to announce that principal filming for ABYDOS has finished!  After the college semester, we'd officially resumed filming on May 14th and have finished on June 8th!  No idea when all the post-processing will be done, but I've done some of the effects work and it's shaping up pretty well so far!  Here are some behind the scenes photos with some filming locations and the ABYDOS crew: Ignore the Lights. 

So, earlier I posted on doing some splash pictures (which help discourage piracy and retail via translation credits) for TV-Nihon , a major fansubbing group.  Since then, I've done two more, which I consider even better!  One of these was used for the 10th anniversary series of A Gold Wolf Knight Thing (disclaimer: neither is this the actual name, nor am I actually seeing the show this was used for). It isn't perfect (despite being the latest splash of the four I've done so far, as I was mostly on my laptop with this one I didn't have access to my full range of tools), but I think it still ended up pretty well.  As this was an anniversary series, I decided to use the main armor in its three different major forms throughout the different seasons. This second one was also used for Kamen Rider, although a much darker series (which, unfortunately for me, means several BoBs and GoGs*): Kamen Rider Amazons.  But hey, the main riders looked cool, and the subbers requ...

For my final project, I was supposed to choose an issue I felt strongly about, use a pantone color for the background, and make a text and image illustration to convey the message.  My choice was police brutality.  Interestingly enough, the challenge seemed not technical but intellectual; the class was teaching me to think differently as a designer, rather than just how to use Illustrator.  It was when my professor mentioned to me that a handcuff silhouette looked like eyes that I seemed to get it more. (Note: the website mentioned is completely fictitious; as of this writing it does not exist.) Apparently one point in this course is a bit of minimalism; there's just enough of the officer to see him, but there isn't any clutter or anything fancy.  I still think detail has its place (I very much prefer the Windows XP/7 visual style over 8 or 10, for instance), but I can certainly see the strength of minimalism here. 

One was fun: I had to write words in a way that demonstrated the definitions of the words themselves. Another assignment was to take a bad poster and redesign it.  I mean really, really bad.  As in, one that lacks any sense of coherence whatsoever.  I decided this one would do nicely. The only trouble was, I had no idea what a Geo-Filter was.  After reading it through I had less of an idea what it was (as opposed to being confused, I'd gotten completely the wrong idea about it).  After a bit of research, a choice from a selection of templates and a few thumbnails on pencil-and-paper (as, in Graphic Design, that was apparently especially important as we think differently that way than how we would with Illustrator), I ended up creating this: Much better!  Apparently, less is more in terms of being eye-catching; my professor asked me to reduce the word count several times, and there's a lot less random junk (such as the emoji and tons of logos) t...