When the economy tanked in late 2008, I was forced to look at my business and figure out how to best combat the severe downturn in revenue. We have primarily offered post production services since opening in 2004, but what happens when there’s not enough post work to keep the rooms busy? Aside from the obvious solution of trying to increase the client base, there is also the option of adding other services so that you get a bigger piece of the overall project pie. Think of it like being in the stock market. All of my “stock” has been invested in doing post work. That’s great during the good times, but being more diversified will help when things are slow.

So throughout 2009 we’ve added a few new services to help us retain a larger chunk of every project we do.

Production

The first thing added was production services by way of purchasing a Sony EX-1 camera package and lighting kit. This helped by landing a few new jobs that we would have normally only done the post on, but we now had the whole job start to finish. What made this possible was having an editor on staff that is also a great videographer with years of experience shooting. It was a natural addition, and the camera package has already paid for itself.

Motion Graphics

Next we decided to raise the bar on the kinds of graphics that we can offer. Most editors can create graphics using Motion, AE or the like, but I’m not sure I would call all of these editors Motion Graphics Artists. I know many great editors that are not very good at the graphic side of things. Our goal was to bring some of the work back in house that has typically been farmed out.The first step toward this goal was to block out time to focus on new training, tutorials and some very specific goals/milestones.

One of the big challenges for any editor today is the expectation that you need to learn MANY things, not just editing. As a result,  focus can be a bit scattershot  when you’re trying to build a skill. You may spend time in AE one day, Flash another and Photoshop the next, and  no single area shows any significant benefit.

To help remedy this, I officially declared 2009 “The Year of AfterEffects” and asked that any and all tutorials being done on company time be focused on AfterEffects and only AfterEffects. Period. The results were immediately evident in the work being done, and clients noticed. Within a few months we took on 2 new jobs in house that we would have previously lost to an outside artist.

3D Graphics

Building on that, we decided to start down the road of offering 3D Graphics. This is not as easy as sharpening your AE skills, since the learning curve and time investment can be quite large. But nonetheless we spent the last year training a staff member on 3D. While he’s not quite far enough along to do paying jobs, he’s getting closer every week now. He’s also done a great job on some internal projects and has really impressed me with the speed at which he has picked things up. I have some 3D experience in my past (dating back to the golden days of Electric Image) so I know what a challenge it can be. My estimate is that this effort will start to pay dividends later this year and be in full swing in 2011.

Live Production Services

Finally, starting this year we now offer Live Netcasting of corporate events, conventions and the like. This is a natural fit into our already popular travel editing packages. For example, this week I’m in Nashville to do onsite editing for the IGA 2010 Global Rally. It’s the usual job with events being shot, edited and played back onsite. But in addition, we are going to be live streaming the awards night banquet live to the web as it happens. This will allow people around the world who were unable to attend the conference to tune into it and even chat about it as it happens via live chat. The client can choose to charge for this access or to make it free to the viewer.

What makes this attractive to the client is that we offer it as a total turnkey solution. We bring all of the Netcast cameras and studio gear needed to  do a live switch with multiple cameras,  roll in pieces and lower thirds, and send it up to the web in high quality, even HD. We provide the hosting, web page design, and if needed handle the sales and access to the broadcast.  The added benefit is that sometimes there will be extra editing needed before the event to create extra roll in pieces or graphics as part of the show.

So this will be a very busy week for me, having both on-site editing and on-stie production of the net event. The schedule worked out that I could do both, but in most cases I would have somebody dedicated to take care of the netcast alone.

BTS Production Photography

One other thing that I started to offer clients, more out of my personal interest than for the sake of increased revenue, is doing production stills on jobs. This is a pretty easy up sell when I’m already on the job to edit. For example, this summer I’m booked to do a editing job in Sydney Australia. The client on that job asked if I could come out a few days early and take some production stills for a shoot that she’s doing in New Zealand. So I get to travel out a few days early and provide her with some great behind the scenes photos that she can use to update her professional blog as well as her website. And for me I’ll get some extra travel to a great location and have fun taking the photos.

The SuiteTake

If you find that you don’t have enough post work to keep yourself or your staff busy, it may be time to take a look at what other offerings you might be able to present to your clients. Ask yourself what else you might be good at, or what else you’re interested in doing. Do you have a passion that is untapped?  I would not recommend offering a service that you’re not interested in or not  very good at.  That would do nothing but hurt you in the long run and possibly degrade a good relationship. But most of us have diverse interests and skills, and could probably find at least one other thing that we would enjoy doing (and enjoy billing for).

Take the time to evaluate your interest and skills, and you may find a new revenue stream for yourself or your company.

No longer do I have my routinely standard nightmares about homeless people dressed as clowns doing dental work on me at the bottom of the ocean while being chased by radioactive super sharks. No folks, they have been replaced by nightmares of what I’m doing in Cinema 4D! Wait, maybe nightmare isn’t the right word. Maybe I mean dream, yeah, dream is the happy one, right? Sorry to potentially mislead you with the whole nightmare thing. I’m actually having decently pleasant dreams about my future in the 3rd dimension. For those of you who possibly read my first post on getting started with Cinema 4D without any previous morsels of knowledge of any 3D program, this is simply a followup of some of the progress I’ve made, and whether or not I’m on my way to be working on Pixar’s next one-word-titled movie, or if I failed horribly resulting in an enormous amount of embarrassment causing irreversible damage to my relationships of my family and friends.

So as the title obviously states, here is an update of my top 5 recaps of advancements I made in Cinema 4D during 2009. This is part 2 of 17 posts I will periodically make throughout my life time. Part 17 will come on my deathbed, and will focus on trying to do a pre-visualization of my upcoming funeral. I expect my last words before I die to be something in the area of “god damn these splines!”

5. Turning a Real Life Object Into a Cinema 4D Object
So after all my initial messing around in the program, I realized that a standard practice that I would probably need to do for jobs would be to turn an object in real life into a 3D computerized object. I’m cool with creating random stuff from scratch, no one has any expectation on what an imaginary object should truly look like. But creating a replica of something requires, well obviously, that it look just like it…

So I thought I’d start simple and just try and recreate a product box. Going into it I figured the first thing I’d have to do is create the shape of the box. So out of what appeared to be logical thinking, I got a ruler and measured the Tiffen UV Protector box I decided to make, resulting in some dimensions of each side in inches. But there aren’t any places to input inches into Cinema 4D… So I just plugged the inches into new photoshop documents for each side of the box, converted the inches to points, and hooray!, I can input points into the dimensions of the box in C4D.

Then I just scanned the sides of the box at high quality, and put them into the photoshop sides I created and imported them as materials. Cool beans! I have a 3D version of a box I’m holding in my hand! Slap on a camera zoom with motion blur, and I now have a product box animation. I know it’s just a box (big deal, right?), but it was still cool at my amateur level of expertise. If I keep trying to recreate things, I’ll be well on my way to making a surrogate to clean my house in the near future.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

4. Being Able to Actually Render Stuff

One of the biggest problems I was having when I initially started learning C4D was that I was able to do some neat stuff, but I didn’t know what to do with it after I created it! I was very happy to finally learn how to render and output things, so that I can actually use them. They don’t make it very obvious to someone unfamiliar with the program how to do something as simple as export a quicktime movie. I was definitely doing it wrong initially, while trying to figure it out. I was just doing a “Make Preview” quicktime.

Then output it as a decent quality preview, and when it finishes I just do a “Save As…” in quicktime and I have a new, incorrectly outputted movie. I guess it worked for saving a quicktime of the project, but it wasn’t of the highest possible quality, and would probably be scoffed at if I attempted to use it for anything real. So then I finally figured out that you have to set all of your settings before you even consider rendering in the Render Settings, such as dimensions (I did an entire animation in the wrong dimensions, and tried to change it after the fact, yeah, I had to re-do almost the entire thing, OOPS, lesson learned), and which format of quicktime you’d like, where to save it, as well as how many frames and whether you’d like motion blur, etc. You could spend a good several minutes just going through the settings before you render each project.

After all of that it’s actually extremely simple to make a quicktime movie, because once all of your settings are set, you just click on “Render in Picture Viewer”. That title doesn’t make sense to me for making quicktime videos, but well, that’s exactly what it will do. In full resolution.

And in reference to my first post on this subject, I wasn’t able to make a quicktime of the crappy slap animation I created on my first day of messing around in Cinema 4D, but now I’m able to! Here it is in all its crappy glory!

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

3. Creating Abstract Still Photo Art
In addition to making neat animations, I was happy to learn a little about how to make cool still images as well. Photoshop is one of my favorite programs to mess around in, and it was fun to learn how to insert 3D objects correctly into still images using camera mapping, which seems similar to doing Vanishing Point in ’shop. This just gives me another option to do cool things with still images that I might have trouble doing in Photoshop. Like making a client’s logo hang out in the desert for some reason, or giving a family on a picnic a pair of pet cubes.

2. Being Able to Bring in an Illustrator File and Animate it
One thing I was excited about was being able to bring in Illustrator vector images and play around with them in 3D. It’s more complicated (or annoying) than it would initially appear, but it makes sense how it works. For instance you can’t just flat out import a complex Illustrator logo and expect it to work perfectly. You have to separate the layers first, then re-assemble them in Cinema 4D, followed by creating and adding materials to give it some colors. There is a great tutorial I watched early on (located here) on Creative Cow on how to go about separating Illustrator files correctly and doing basic camera moves. I took the logo of our friends over at CBH Video, and jazzed it all up 3D-style. I surprised them with it and their reaction was “This is pretty cool, but I’m on a conference call, so please stop yelling in my ear…”

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

1. Moving Cameras on a Spline and Creating a Scene With Stage Objects
Splines are frustrating to me. I’ve tried to draw them freehand and then straighten them out by making them B-Splines, but that only works to a certain degree. It’s hard to get them perfect. But I do realize that it’s even harder to just smoothly freehand animate a camera movement. It’s nice to have a visual line representing where the camera is heading.

Then having another camera starting at the end of the first movement and continuing in a new direction by using a stage object adds another dimension of animation. I’ve never really been that good at After Effects (I get lost somewhere when expressions come into play, then it’s like freshman year math class all over again) but I was amazed at the ease of using cameras in Cinema 4D.

In my opinion it just seems more fluid and intuitive than using cameras in AE. But I was just happy that I pretty much grasped the concepts of a basic animated scene, which points in good directions for the future of scene making. It’s harder than it looks to pull it off smoothly. Or I guess it’s easy if you’re good at C4D and you want to be a jerk about it…

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

The Suite Take

I’m still learning, I’m not all around that great at Cinema 4D yet, but I’m looking forward at getting better! I know one sure sign that I’m not that great is when I go to the C4D Forums over at Creative Cow, and the way they talk about stuff makes it seem like they aren’t even using the same program that I’m using. Then I realized I was in the MAYA forums. But then I went back to the C4D forums and it was still relatively confusing. But I tend to understand more of it in each passing week.

I’ll let you know what I do next in part 3 of 17, which will be written entirely while skydiving! (Note: part 3 may only be two sentences long and full of typos).

Have you ever seen one of those movies where the kid from Montana, fresh off the farm, goes to Hollywood because he has dreams of becoming an actor, because he was the best actor in his 75 student high school’s rendition of West Side Story? Then he gets to Hollywood, with his suitcase and his cowboy hat, and he’s walking down the street wide eyed and astonished at all the bright lights and weird people that inhabit the area, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself or where to begin? Well, I feel like that farm boy, except instead of going to Hollywood I’m using Cinema 4D, and instead of seeing freaks everywhere, I’m looking at complex menu screens and lots of buttons that I have no idea what they do. I mean, look at this interface, it’s scary for someone with no background in 3D to open this program!

A decision was made by the high council of elders, at their shrine resting on the peak of the volcano, that I would be the chosen one to learn how to use a true 3D program. But I have no experience whatsoever in this area. This is my first job in this industry out of college, and to be honest, I didn’t even use something as basic as Photoshop a single time while I was in college! Let’s just say the most experience I had working on 3D was when I watched WALL-E a couple months ago. So I was nervous at the thought of learning this program, but at the same time excited at the possibility of what I could potentially do. I suppose the purpose of this post is to show you what it’s like to first delve into a 3D program if you have no idea what you’re doing, and possibly how it’s not as scary as one may think.

To help guide me along this journey, I enlisted the help of a tutorial on lynda.com by Larry Mitchell, titled “CINEMA 4D R10 Essential Training”. It’s actually not as complex an interface as you’d think by just looking at it. I’ll go into the details of that in a minute, but first I’d just like to note an occurrence that happened on my first day ever working in this program. Mr. Mitchell, in what seemed like he was possibly saying it in passing while talking about the content browser, mentioned something about accessing human models for use in in the program.

I shifted my eyes back and forth, as perhaps the computer was trying to tell me something, or someone was playing a joke on me, by giving me this glorious information now. Then Larry said “So, if you hit this Inverse Kinematics button, you can start to animate this human, but we are getting way ahead of ourselves here, back to the content browser.”

HOLD UP LARRY MITCHELL. You’re telling me that by just clicking this one button I can mess around with this human figure, make it do whatever I want? I’m sorry, but I am going to have to take a break from this tutorial, as I now feel obliged to mess around with this. So it wasn’t long before I figured out how to use the dimensional arrows and scaling tools to simulate the fake woman kicking the fake child.

And with a third human figure at my fingertips, how could I not add in the grown man doing a leg sweep…?

Through just futzing around in the content browser without any supervision, I figured out how to add texture to objects and even a sun!

Then as I seemingly finished amusing myself with this, I started playing the tutorial again, and not a minute later, Larry is saying “Oh, just press THIS button RIGHT HERE for quick easy animation keyframes.” …Really, Larry? Do you even want me to watch this tutorial? Next thing I know, I’m going through the content browser like a madman, building a house from basic shapes, adding grass, making brick textures, and animating a 90 frame woman to man slap for the ages (I’d have exported a real movie of it, but I don’t know how yet!)

I guess I wanted to show these displays of polygonal violence, because I came from no experience whatsoever in 3D, and I was able to do all of that while just messing around with stuff just 2 and 1/2 hours after I opened Cinema 4D for the first time! Not that any of this could be used for a real job around here or anything, but I learned a lot about how to move objects, and how to use the interface just from playing around. I got much more comfortable. (And if you’re wondering why I instantly resorted to violence, let’s just say I played a lot of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas my junior year of college, so I have a natural urge to harm people made of polygons)

After all that fun, I decided to resist the temptation of messing with the human figures anymore, and decided to continue with Larry Mitchell’s tutorials. Up next on the list was to create a spoon out of a cube. …OK? I like the idea, but even that seems strangely overwhelming to me, as morphing a cube into something of value is something that you would have to know what you’re doing in order to complete. But I guess it all starts with selecting a cube (and again, you can credit Larry Mitchell for this, I didn’t come up with it on my own).

OK, so now that we have a cube just sitting there, what’s next? That will be a spoon at some point…? Well, if you move those arrows on the cube with the scale tool, you can make it better, stronger, faster bigger, longer, flatter.

The four screen display was frightening at first glance, because I figured it would involve some insane complexity to use them. But they are actually pretty useful, as they obviously give you a top view or side view look at the 3D object, sort of simplifying it into 2D. And maneuvering between them is easy as pie, you just click the button in the top right corner of whichever screen you’d like to work in, and click it again to go back to the four screen display. Or you can just work in the four screen display if you’d like.

There is still a vast list of tools that I have no idea what they do yet, but I do know one thing, it takes a knife to make a spoon.

The knife seems like the most basic and useful tool, as its purpose is to segment polygonal shapes into, well, segments. And it works just like a real knife, just cut it across the shape while dragging the mouse.

And don’t make the same rookie mistake I did when working in a 2D viewing screen, and make sure you are cutting all the way through:

Cutting creates points in which you can select, and making new shapes becomes a very simple matter of selecting those points with the live select tool, and scaling them using the big colorful directional arrows with the scale tool.

So it was pretty simple to turn the cube into a lamp or a jousting stick or something, but a sweet little feature called HyperNURBS makes it unbelievably easy to turn a lamp into a Q-Tip. By clicking on the cube in your layer menu (which is comfortably similar to that of Illustrator or Photoshop) and then option clicking on the HyperNURBS icon on the top menu bar (which looks like a cube trapped in a cube prison) and all of the sudden you have instant curves, that work in a great way.

Then it’s just a matter of scaling and adding depth to the, i don’t know what it’s called, the “food” part of the spoon. And then I end up with a pretty good metal shovel.

Of course after some more fine tuning, cutting with the knife, scaling, and trying out some wood swatches (just for the fun of it all), I have a pretty good giant wooden 3D spoon.

If only I had a giant 3D metal pot so I could use my giant 3D wooden spoon to stir some 3D spaghetti meat sauce with polygonal sausage and peppers, I’d have a fantastic fake meal in the works! (don’t forget to HyperNURB the diced mushrooms!)

The SuiteTake Take?

I know making a spoon and animated violence with pre-made human models may be no big deal to someone who uses 3D programs a lot, but to someone with no idea what their doing in Cinema 4D, I just wanted to show how easy it is to start working in 3D, and it’s not as threatening as it may possibly appear to a novice. Just look at me, I made a wooden spoon out of a blocky cube 4 hours after my first opening of a 3D program!

In the future I’ll do a follow up post to let you know how my training has progressed.