Here's yet another College Humor project that our VFX gurus at Gloo worked on.  It's a spoof of the new commercial for FaceTime on the iPhone 4, the new miracle gadget  that I want someone to magically just give to me out of the blue for no reason whatsoever.

We did work on at least 20 shots in this one.  We had to recreate all the icons and windows of FaceTime and tracked the video images onto the screens using AfterEffects and Mocha.

This one is actually kind of sad and makes me a little misty at the end.  I'm going to listen to some Harry Chapin and hopefully it'll take my mind off of absentee fathers.

Hmmm...July 4th probably would have been a better day to post this one.  Meh...

Anyhoo, here's a great sketch from College Humor that pokes fun at the movie "Independence Day".  Our graphics department really went overboard on the visual effects on this one.  They added the gunshot, muzzle flash, and the bullet contact.

Okay, maybe one gunshot isn't exactly the time consuming special effects tour-de-force I had implied earlier, but we really wanted to post this one because:

A)  It's super funny.

B)  This is the second time in two months that Mike has had to shoot Josh in the face.  That's just a fun little fact.

Enjoy!

This video was released quite a few weeks ago, so I'm a little late posting it here.  It's not that I don't like this video.  I do.  I think it's funny and I love the production design.  But we've had so many releases lately that I end up tossing this one to the backburner in order to feature something more recent.  So, enough of this senseless procrastination.  To take you into this beautiful weekend, please sit back and enjoy 'Peter Pan's Ladies' on GlooStudios.com!

We did the wire removal for when Peter comes flying in through the window, and then pulled off some fancy FX work to make Peter and the girls appear to fly back out the window.  College Humor used a simple flashlight cast upon the wall to create the placement of Tinkerbell, so we just tracked that point and added in some particles to act as Tinkerbell.  And in a couple of shots we recreated Peter's shadow on the wall.  All of this was done with After Effetcs... no pixie dust required.  That guy down the alley charges FAR too much for it!

College Humor asked us to put together a representation of what Wii Fit would be like on super easy mode and the result is within the video below.  We recreated the menu based on photos snapped of the TV screen while Mike got in his regular 3 minutes of cardio per day. The Mii character and a replica Hulu Hoop location were both created using Maya, and to give it the perfect Nintendo look we rendered it out with low-antialiasing. This produced a pixilated hardware rendered effect. Voila!

Though we didn't create any of the other super easy modes in this video, my personal favorite is actually Punch Out!  Take that King Hippo!

The project came to us as 22 shots each requiring Keying, Roto, Motion Tracking and Color Correction - and it all had to be done by the next day.  It's a good thing we're wizards at this type of stuff! You see, we got the job done by noon, had a big lunch, and then played air guitar for the rest of the day.  Yeah! We love our jobs. I'm sure you can tell that.

Here's something fun!  There were no tracking markers for any of this.  Fun, right!?  That meant we tracked most of it by hand and used little fragments of lint on his T-shirt as reference points.

Sobe (you know, the fruit beverage we all love) has recently gone into producing short videos online under the name Sobe Studios.  And you probably already know that because we showcased the Animated Logo and branding we did for Sobe Studios a month or so back.  Well, now there's even more to show off today!

Mr. Vicarious: Street Pranks.  This new vid featuring Nick Kroll and Paul Scheer from, "The League" opens with the logo you've all seen (and hopefully loved), and closes with a brand new rebranding animation we made for the launch of Sobe's new bottle design.

The bottle was completely recreated in Maya by Gloo's Paul Desilva (who made it look like a breeze, mind you).  Don't get me wrong though! A LOT of work went into making this look ABSOLUTELY perfect.  I mean, you think it's easy to make glass 'drop down' like a common pair of pants.  When I asked Desilva how he got it to look just right he said, "I spent tons of time standing in front of the mirror with my pants around my ankles. Finally someone came and pulled them up for me so I could finally leave the bathroom and get to work."

Old Spice's online marketing campaign needed an intro.  And whadaya know? We're really good at that.

When CollegeHumor landed their very own show on MTV they came straight to Gloo Studios to get the perfect animated intro.

FRIDAY MEGA VIDEO MOVIES MADNESS!!!

It's Friday again, and time to bring another one out of the vault.  This was a fun little short that I did for Todd Strauss-Schulson and Dan Levy shortly after finishing up the "I Have To Go In A Minute Show" series in 2008.  The film was a bit of an experiment to try out a bit of action shooting and visual FX, and to see what we could get away with if we scrambled some eggs into the mix.  The eggs were created and animated In Maya and composited in After Effects with the help of Trapcode Particular for a couple of shots. 

I'm trying to spare you the really cheesy egg jokes on this one (mmm, cheesy eggs).  As tempting as it is to try and turn my regular words into words that contain "egg", I'll just leave it in the title for now and wrap this up.

So hit play, lean back and enjoy the um... eggcitement.