The Day Job

I recently got the privilege of being asked to do an interview with Toni Pennacchia, the host of Spoiler Alert Radio. Now if you don’t know about Spoiler Alert Radio, it’s a very cool podcast about all things film, locally and globally. She interviews filmmakers and such from around the world about their films, their processes, how they finance their projects, and more: basically, all the stuff you want to know!

Apparently, she had seen my short animation, How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole, on B-Side and e-mailed me about a possible interview and sending my short animation to their film festival The MergingArts Short Short Story Film Festival, which tours the New England area in November 2008. I, of course, said yes to both! Then realized, “OH (Insert Your Own Expletive)! I’ve never done a radio interview before!!” Fortunately, though, I didn’t have too much time to think about it because a couple of days later I was on the phone with Toni doing the interview.

I would love to say I was as cool as a cucumber during the interview, but I was extremely nervous! But Toni does a good job of putting you at ease and I just tried to do my best to give more than the one-word answer … an interviewer’s worse nightmare, I’m sure. We basically talked about my first short animation, How To Put a Square Peg Into a Round Hole, my music videos for The Gaslights, Last Dollar & God, Guns & Glory, my day job career as a Designer/Video Editor/Animator and if I have any upcoming projects. I think I did okay … I definitely learned a lot from it! And if I’m ever privileged enough for another interview I think I’ll be more ready for it … although I’m sure my first thought will still be “OH (Insert Your Own Expletive)!!”

It aired live on Sunday, June 8th from 7-7:30PM EST on 88.1FM, WELH, Providence, RI, streaming at Brown University Student and Community Radio. And you can now listen to the podcast at Spoiler Alert Radio’s website by clicking here.

If you listen to it … well, first off, THANKS! and remember it’s my first interview … so be kind! ;b

Still Animated,
Mary

Well folks, I’m yet another casualty of the dreaded downsizing! So if you know of any video editing or animation freelance and/or full-time gigs out there … let a girl know.

You can direct people to my portfolio site at www.maryctaylor.com to view my demo reel, download a pdf of my resume, and find my contact info.

Thanks Everybody!

-Mary

Okay … it’s just my company’s newsletter, but still I got front page! You can check out the article here … PlattForm Podium Article.

This is a new commercial I animated for Keystone Technical Institute, minus the endscreen. It’s a stick figure animation. I did it a while back but haven’t had time to put it up yet. If I remember right, it took me about 3 days to get it all done, that’s illustrations, animation, music, vo, sound effects. We do it all here … there’s no specialties … which can be good because it gives you a variety of things to do but bad too because sound and such is not my strongest talent and I really believe good sound and music can really take a piece from being good to being great!

Click here to view the KTI Stick Figure Animation

I’m sorry it’s been so long to post this, but I was awaiting client approval before I put it live. Below is the final version of the Dine and Dash comic-book style commercial.

Click here to watch the Dine & Dash Commercial

A lot of times at my day job I will be brought in on a project that was started a long time ago but for one reason or another was never completed. It will then be placed in my bin to get done. Dash and Dine is one of those projects.

It’s a cool concept … comic book style commercial. And one of our guys in the print department, Bryan Long, did an excellent job with the illustrations.

The Characters

The Diner

For the last few days I’ve been working on prepping the artwork for the commercial. Creating the layout of the comic book and the individual frames and jazzing up the illustrations a bit with some dodging and burning in Photoshop.

Comic Book Cover

Comic Book Inside Layout

Unfortunately, while the illustrations are great they are not ideal for animation purposes and there just isn’t time to have him re-tool his illustrations. So for the animation part of this commercial, I think about the only thing I can really do is some camera moves in After Effects with the illustrations in each frame separated into different planes to give it some depth and some simple animation where I can.

So … I’m off to animate! More next time … same blog space … later blog time!

Well … I think it’s been quite a while since I’ve talked about what I’ve been doing at my day job. I don’t know where the time goes? Anyway, lately I’ve been working on an internal project handed down from the head honcho in charge. It’s a video for our website explaining our call center and somehow he related a 1957 Kentucky Derby Race to our call center. I know … it sounds like quite a stretch! But after a little bit, it gets to the point.

So for this video, the talent was shot on green screen, then taken into After Effects to key out and add graphics and camera moves. Sound effects and music will be added later. Below is the introduction explaining the horse race/call center correlation …

(There was a video here showcasing the work, but my current company now doesn’t want me showcasing the work on YouTube, so it has been taken down - you may still view it on my personal portfolio site)

I only put up the intro as it’s the most interesting and the part I had the most fun making in this 7 1/2 minute video about a call center … yeah, not very exciting stuff.

If you ever need old archive footage as was used in this video, check out http://www.archive.org/. There is tons of great stuff on there!

Next up at the old day job are a couple of cool animation based commercials, one a stick figure style animation and the other a comic book style animation. Look for posts about those in the coming weeks.

At work we have a bulletin board for each department … and every so often we change them out with new creative photos of ourselves. This time around we each chose a movie poster to photoshop ourselves into. I chose my favorite movie, Reality Bites. So without further ado, here’s the result …

Reality Bites featuring Mary C. Taylor

Or, not! Masking is not one of my favorite things to do, but on quite a few projects it is a necessary evil. I recently had a project which involved a ton of masking because of a dirty key (i.e. lots of shadows that made keying difficult and masking necessary). In this posting I will explain the process of keying out a green screen, masking out a dirty key, and adding back in clean shadows.

Original Green Screen Footage

For keying out blue or green screens I use Keylight in After Effects.

The Green Background Keyed Out

Notice how after keying out the green background there is the rest of the room on the sides and dirty shadows still left. This is where masking comes in.

After Effects Masking Screen Shot

Click on the image above to see a screen shot of my After Effects Masking Project. I used around 17 different masks with just about each one having to be animated because of the camera movement in the shot. Animating the separate masks is basically like animating anything else, you set your main keyframes and keep setting in-between keyframes until you have a smooth mask. Unfortunately, you end up basically setting keyframes for just about every frame. It’s a frame-by-frame slow process. This ended up taking me around 4 working days to accomplish.

Masked Footage

Looks pretty good in a still, but there was so much shadow underneath the chair that it made it very difficult to distinguish between his back foot and the shadow when he turns in his chair. To fix this problem, I added a dark circular shadow underneath the chair, so the viewer couldn’t really see his back foot.

Added Shadow Under Chair

But now the desk looks like it’s floating while the guy sitting in the chair looks like he is firmly planted on the ground. So I needed to add a shadow for the desk to cement it to the ground also. In order to do this, I just duplicated the masked out video layer, filled it with black, blurred it a bit, and adjusted it in After Effects 3D space.

Desk Shadow

If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to contact me and I will answer them to the best of my ability.