Tag: After Effects

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Wonder Pets: In the City

I am the Animation Producer/ Director at Snowflake Films NYC LLC. I head a team of in-house character riggers and animators. Our team produces, After Effects character rigs, reusable animations and effects for the series that then is shipped out to the animation studio in Ireland. We create the design and look of the show. I also worked on the first season of the original series created at Little Airplane Productions. The new series premieres on Apple TV+ on December 13th 2024

Apple TV+ Official Press Release

Parents.com Article

Awards

52nd Annie Awards Nominee – Best TV/Media – Preschool

One of the unique opportunities I had on The Wonder Pets; in the City! was using a skill I learned over the past few years which was 3D printing. This was something that wasn’t available years ago on the original series. I created quite a few 3D printed props for the show. Earlier on I was asked if there is a way to create cuter hands for Izzy the Guinea Pig. The solution I came up with was to 3D printed an armature, and learned how to felt on the hand and fur textures. Pictured below is an early prototype of the hand with 4 fingers and a thumb. But it was decided to lose one of the fingers to make it cuter. I would then pose the hand, it mount to a turntable and photograph every possible angle of each pose that would be needed. For the final rig we trimmed down the number of hands and color matched it to Izzy’s final design. Those hand poses then could be selected in the rig as needed.

Photoshoot test with final designs
Final hand style with fur
3D printed armature (test)

Another unique prop was Izzy’s sneaker. Jennifer Oxley along with one of our Lead Designers Etsu Kahata created the initial look if the shoe. The issue was that the shoe was heavily modified from the original source image for the concept art. And for production the character rig required multiple angles that did not exist. Etsu and I talked about how we could create these alternate angles. The process we came up with was that I would 3D print the shoe to match to her final design. I even used the real shoe laces as a scale reference when sculpting and printing out the final design. Then I shot all the angles that we would possibly need for the character rig. Etsu would then take the photos pass the finish line be color matching to the original design. For all 3D prints, I printed in a matte grey color which made it easier for the designers to color match the props to the original design.

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Elmo’s World

We were fortunate enough to produce six episodes for Season 53 of Sesame Street’s Elmo’s World. Each 5 minute episode had a mix of 2D animation, green/blue screen keying and compositing of 2D and live action elements. A huge thanks to the team that came on board to help with this production. They did a great job.

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Sesame Street: Celebrate Diwali Song! The Festival of Lights.

For this project I provided animated backgrounds and wipes. The animated Photoshopped backgrounds were composited in After Effects. I had to rebuild some of the lighting elements and use the “wiggle()” expression to have them twinkle. I also added lighting effects to the buildings for when the fireworks light up the sky. The fireworks were created using Trapcode’s Particular. For the wipes, the silks were created using Trapcode’s MIR plugin. This was the first project that I have used MIR. It has a bit of a learning curve but the results came out well. The colored powders were a stock footage asset that was keyed, retimed and recolored.

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Sesame Street: We’re Different, We’re the Same | Celebrity Read Along

In this video I composited live action green screen, 2D backgrounds and animated page inserts. Once of the challenging parts of this production were the book pages. It was easy to key the live action but the book incorporated enough of the similar color of the green/blue screen that I had to go back and build out the book again. To do this I would use Mocha Pro to track the planes of the pages and export tracked masks. Then I could mask out the pages and lay them on top of the green screen footage. I also used Lockdown for some of the tracking but in most cases Mocha Pro did a better job with less steps.

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Sesame Street:

Fathers (Friends Theme Song Parody)

Father’s Day Song

In this video I was tasked to add lighting to the 3D render of the water fountain. First I created a loop-able render of the 3D render. Then I used Projection 3D to create a 3D shape to roughly match the structure of the fountain using solids. Then I used that comp to project lights onto it. This worked well for adding more realistic lights to the contour of the fountain. I even added some caustics to the lights being projected onto the sides of the fountain as if the lights were coming from under the water’s surface. Adding lights to the water was just simple masking of the water layer and setting the layers to ADD.

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Other Side: Constant Music Video

Other Side: Constant Music Video, New York, New York

Compositor/Editor (Dec 2021 to Jan 2022)

Other Side, is the first solo album from Micheal Zodorozny one of the founding member of Crash Course in Science. I composited and edited on the video. I worked closely with Micheal on the project. He provided all of the original artwork. Some of the artwork were pieces he did back in the 80s. This is our second music video collaboration (Drive).

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Other Side: Constant

Music Video

Other Side, is the first solo album from Micheal Zodorozny one of the founding member of Crash Course in Science. It debuts February 14th, 2022. I composited and edited on the video. I worked closely with Micheal on the project. He provided all of the original artwork. Some of the artwork were pieces he did back in the 80s. This is our second music video collaboration (Drive).

Pre-order: https://electronicemergencies.bandcamp.com/album/other-side

Produced by Matia Simovich (INHALT)

Artwork by Michael Zodorozny

Mastered by Rude 66

Press:

Electronic Music Legend Michael Zodorozny Debuts Imaginative Video For “Constant”
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Washingtonia for Comedy Central

Washingtonia

This project was a step outside of usual projects I’ve worked on. Washingtonia is a spin off project from Stephen Colbert’s Our Cartoon President production. I knew some of the team from previous projects like Tooning Out the News. So it was an easy transition onto this project. I animated a few of the “spicier” shots in the movie, which was a lot of fun.