From vector to 3D - Eden Soto
4/2/2008 3:00:41 AM
A lot of people have asked us about our video introduction animation. We put a mention of the artists behind it in our toolbox section, but thought we'd share a bit of an e-terview with the main man, Eden Soto. When The Code Trip was in early planning stages and after we had worked with Terralever for an initial brand and design strategy, we turned to Eden based on referrals and proven work with some of the shows on Revision3.
As developers, we rely on designers (visual and motion) to ensure the technology and user experience work together. In the world of rich media solutions and rich internet applications, this is becoming increasingly important to work hand-in-hand with designers and user experience experts in our application development. For our intro video (sure, it's not an 'application') we wanted something that 'popped' and kept the attitude of the overall design elements for The Code Trip...and animated stick figures wasn't going to cut it.
We virtually sat down with Eden recently to talk to him about how he took a vector file of The Code Trip logo and created the 13 second intro animation that you see at the beginning of the videos. Here's what he had to say...
Code Trip (CT): What is your background?
Eden Soto (ES): I started out in print design back before digital video had really come of age. I started dabbling with After Effects way back at version 3 I believe it was...it always fascinated me, so I kept playing around in my spare time until finally digital video (and more importantly video on the Internet) really started to explode.
CT: When you were presented with the vector art for The Code Trip, what was your inspiration?
ES: Right when I saw the Code Trip logo, I knew it was going to be a fun project. One of the early logo comps had a bus in the art, and I really liked that and knew that would animate well with the final logo, so it was really just melding the two and coming up with a neat little way to have the animation play out.
CT: What tools do you use?
ES: My daily apps I use are the Adobe CS3 Production Premium Bundle (with After Effects CS3 at its core)...then I use Cinema 4d R10.5 a lot, which is primarily what the Code Trip bumber was created in. Other than that I use a great suite of 3rd party plug-ins for AE by GenArts called Sapphire. Oh, and some of the Trapcode plug-ins too like Particular and 3D Stroke.
CT: How long does it take from inception to final?
ES: Really depends on my workload at the time. The Code Trip bumper took about 16 hours from start to finish. A lot of that is waiting on renders...ambient occlusion renders take a long time :-P
CT: When providing audio, what determines the attitude of the audio track in your animations?
ES: Audio I leave to the master...Lawrence Scaduto. He is the pinball wizard when it comes to all things audio.
CT: Is this your passion (doing visual design and animation)?
ES: Absolutely. I still feel like I'm just getting started ;-). I don't envision doing anything else other than motion design now.
CT: Other than The Code Trip, obviously :-), what is your proudest piece of work?
ES: Proudest piece of work was probably the Diggnation open...it's really the piece that really pushed me over the edge and made me want to go full time with motion design, it's what most people know me for. Other than that, being a HUGE gamer, I recently had the opportunity to do some motion graphics for some SXSW content produced by Microsoft that got published on the XBOX Live Marketplace (Bringing it Home SxSW), so that was a huge thing for me, as I frequent the Marketplace so often, knowing something I made is on there is really cool...I'm REALLY hoping I get to do more for the XBOX Marketplace in the future :-D.
Thanks to Eden and Lawrence for their participation in making The Code Trip bumper for our videos. We are very impressed with their work and can definitely say when you need some motion design, look no further than Eden.