How to Color Correction Stop Motion Sequences in Final Cut Pro

A friend of mine is practicing with stop motion sequences in Final Cut Pro and he asked me about using Final Cut Pro's effects on his sequences. You could apply an effect to each image but the amount of needless work would put anyone off. So I made a short graphic for him detailing how to use Final Cut's nested sequence feature to streamline the process. I thought I would share it with you.



I hope this was useful for you. Did you make a cool stop motion animation using this technique? Comment below with a link so I can check it out!

Running With the Wolves

Running With the Wolves is a dark comedy crime film.

Premise:

Jake and Mikey Turturo are chasing a bounty on The Boar, a notorious hitman, for fast cash, and to get close to him they weasel their way into the crime family known to associate with him. The boy’s cluelessness gets them into constant trouble as they stay just one step ahead of the police on their trail.

If you are interested in this project, please contact me.

Walnut - A Spy Short Film

Walnut is a short film I wrote and directed in 2008. It has been featured on the Ten Minute Movie House, The Best Short Films In The World .com and played in film festivals around the world.

Enjoy!

Walnut from Jordan Montreuil on Vimeo.

You can see a making of video for one of the shots here:

Walnut 1x05 and Breakdown from Jordan Montreuil on Vimeo.

The Week in Geek - Intro Video Proof of Concept and Breakdown

I just finished up a new piece for work for a new segment we are trying out called The Week in Geek. Its a weekly news show of stories that would be interest to geeks. The character is named Herbert Halflove and I decided to incorporate the character into the introduction. Check it below and if you are curious how I made it, catch the breakdown after the jump.

The Week in Geek - Intro Video Proof of Concept from Jordan Montreuil on Vimeo.

I started out with the text because the entire animation would be based around the text. I did the initial design in Illustrator and imported the splines into Cinema 4D, extruded them, textured them and animated them. I rendered out a basic test to import into After Effects to animate against.



I sketched out the character on paper and imported the drawing into Adobe Illustrator. I then drew over the sketch with the pen tool, fleshing it out and adding details.

Then I imported the artwork in After Effects and animated it with the Puppet tool. It was my first time using the Puppet tool for that effect so it had a bit of a learning curve to it. I used the basic test render from Cinema 4D to time the character animation against the text animation.



I rendered out the final 3D text and imported that into After Effects for final compositing and did the sound design right in the program.



The sound effects come from Video Copilot Designer Sound Effects and The Free Sound Project and the music is In Your Face from the one man band Brad Sucks.

Thanks for checking this out and please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Cinema 4D Global Illumination: IR Cache Trick

I've been working on a couple new projects in Cinema 4D using the Global Illumination part of the Advanced Render module. Of course, getting pretty pictures means waiting a long for a render. Thanks to Ross Gerbasi of Popcorn Island, I learned how to pre-cache the Irradiance calculated which speeds up my renders by a lot. You can see his original post at Popcorn Island.

However, I come across a little gotcha. If you don't have the Save Dialogue Box checked, Cinema 4D will not save the cache file.





Without the Save Dialogue checked, the Auto Save in the Irradiance Cache window will remain grayed out.

But, once you check Save (and you don't need either of the boxes checked for render destinations) Cinema 4D will auto-save your cache file for you. Assuming you have checked the appropriate settings. Check out Ross's awesome ( Rossome?) tutorial at Popcorn Island for instructions on how to set this up.





If you select Pre-Pass only in the IR window, C4D will calculate the IR cache and be done with it.

Just a short little trick, one that held me up from a render for a couple hours. Hope this helps you!

Special thanks to Nick Campbell at Greyscale Gorilla for his great work in educating the community.