Experiments

Ciaran O Connor

Motion graphics shorts I make to learn new methods of doing things, workflows, plug-ins and all that fun stuff…

1. As a kid I’d always spend hours pouring over an “artist’s impression” of a wormhole, space colony or black hole in all the science & space books I had – these days the glut of information about all this is overwhelming, but accessible and everywhere.

I always love learning about space travel, the formation of stars, planets, the universe and other fun stuff like string theory, infinity, general relativity, along with all the other cosmics physics shenanigans that absolutely melts your head once you start giving it any thought, such as the double slit experiment, distortion of time with respect to velocity, multiverses, the Fermi Paradox. Can’t say I understand the maths & calculus behind it, but it is fascinating.

I did this with several layers of Trapcode’s Form for the basic galaxy structure and stars, Particular & Mir for the explosion and Mir again for that wormhole/singularity thing at the end. The make-it-look-epic button comes from Optical Flares. No basis in scientific fact, reality or accuracy – there shouldn’t be any noise, nor should there be 2 explosive shockwaves and it could probably do with a little less movement on the camera to give that impression of scale – just a proof of concept to see if I could do it…

2. Vote UKP, Get Ebola
Farting around on Twitter with intent can actually lead to a moment of clarity – so cutting the foreign aid budget is a good thing then? No chance – this tweet from David Schneider a short while ago struck a chord with me, it got me thinking and this is the result.
Original tweet – twitter.com/davidschneider/status/522289670970179584

3. Sangria

• Make a ton (seriously, shitloads) of small circular shape layers or masked solids to act as your fluids –
• Tweak an untold amount of settings god knows how many times and watch the Gangster of Love slow to a 5fps crawl while it works out the physics calculations on a couple of hundred layers.
• In a nutshell, you need the fruit & ice cube layers to have a density of 8-10 in comparison to that of the circles which make up the fluid (0.5 – 1 or so).
• In my experience with dynamics in Newton & C4D, it takes a lot of tweaking and testing to get it loosely close to what you need – this is definitely a hack use of the plugin.
• When you’re done with Newton, to make simulation look like liquid, add Fast Blur (here it was 10-15px), then Simple Choker and tweak to your taste. add some track mattes where the fluids seem to sit outside the bottles, add Tint & change over time to make the different liquids merge and then add all the design flair you can handle

It’s not perfect but for abstract, flat 2D mograph, it’s wicked. Newton 2 has huuuuuge potential, gotta use it more. Sound effects need a proper kick up the arse too, heheh…