First three weeks in Helsinki Media Lab

It's been little bit over three weeks since I started studying in Media Lab. The Media Lab is a unit in the Department of Media, at the School of Art and Design inside new Aalto University. Yeah that's little bit complicated :) There's great talented people in Media Lab and I've been really inspired after seeing all the great stuff my fellow students have done. Now I'm trying to find my focus area where I want to specialize. I know already it got something to do with future of television, interactive cinema, realtime video manipulation etc. but let's see how things work out and what I'll find the most interesting. Anyway once again I think it's really great to be alive!

Two Particle Backgrounds for Apple Motion 4

Just spent some time learning Apple Motions particle/replicator engine. While learning I built two backgrounds (first one using particle engine and second one replicator) and thought about sharing my experiments. So here you go. Hope you find these backgrounds useful and feel free to use those as you like.



Download Motion projects here.

MA in New Media - I'll be a student next fall!

Yeah I know... Haven't updated in a long time but it'll change because next fall I'll be a student! At last I will get some time to get really into these things I find interesting. I just got information that I've been accepted to Media Lab Helsinki. It's a unit in the School of Art and Design of Helsinki. It's a two year program and I should graduate there as a Master of Arts in New Media. This is absolutely great and I'm really waiting next fall.

Trailer Editing Workshop

It's been long time since my last update. Anyway just spend four days in Oulu studying how to make great trailers. We had Craig Protzel & Sohini Sengupta from Mark Woollen company to teach us some great techniques. They are an award winning editor/producer team who have worked on some the most memorable recent movie trailers in Hollywood (Such as Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, 500 days of summer). It was a great workshop and I want to share some great trailers I saw there from Mark Woollen company.

Fake 3D + Drop Shadow Tutorial Movie

Zak Peric has released "Green Grass" video tutorial where he uses Fake 3D and Drop Shadow filters from my Tapio's FxPack in Apple Motion. Big thanks to Zak for this!



Zak Peric is a freelance artist and lecturer teaching for Creative Computing at Tower Hamlets College and London College of Communication. You should definitely check Zak's great tutorials from his website http://embryo.me.uk/ to learn some great tips and tricks from Apple Motion.

Tapio's FxPack 1.1

Just added Light Sweep filter to my Fxpack. I know it's overused but I still missed it from After Effects so I created my own to use in Motion and Final Cut Pro. Hope you find it useful.



Fake 3D (host: Motion, After Effects)
Works by replicating object in Z-space. You can get similar effect in Motion with replicator but this one renders faster and is easier to control.

Light Sweep (host: Motion, Final Cut Pro)
Generates light sweep and highlighs edges based on alpha channel. Quite similar to After Effects Light Sweep filter.

Drop Shadow (host: Motion, Final Cut Pro)
I mainly made this for Final Cut Pro because FCP's own drop shadow has some terrible artifacts when you add it to video with alpha channel and have fields enabled in your sequence. This is standard filter so you can add multiple copies of it to clip. It also has "shadow only" option.

Numbers (host: Motion)
Generate counting/random numbers in Motion. Very similar to After Effects Numbers filter.

Grow Bounds (host: Motion)
Lets you grow bounds of individual layer inside Motion.

Download Tapio's FxPack 1.1 here.

Registered version of FxFactory Pro 2.0.5, Mac OS X 10.5.5 and Apple Motion 3 required. This is total freeware and was made as hobby. So there might be some bugs. Use at your own risk.

Concept is the King

Let's face it. As nice as it is to make great looking spots and promos, without good idea those are mostly waste of time. Some time ago I thought I should read some books about advertising. My friend suggested me Pete Barry's - The Advertising Concept Book and I must say it's really good and can warmly recommend it to anyone interested about creating great concepts in advertising.


BTW it's only 20 euros in Amazon so it's practically free for such amount of great information.