Featured Student Work: Ryan Haury

This is the first in a hopefully ongoing series featuring student work along with a short interview about their process.

For one of the first exercises in the Motion Graphics class this Winter students were asked to create a short-short animated sequence interpreting the theme “Circle beats Square, Square Beats Circle, Triangle Wins.” Below is short interview with Ryan Haury about his work above.

Describe a little bit of your thought process in addressing the project brief; why this solution?

When I saw the project brief, I automatically thought “make cool battle sequence”. My first idea was to mock one of the sequences from the Matrix when they’re dodging bullets, but I figured that would take a lot more work to make look cool; Tron would be just as engaging w/ much less complications.

Describe a little bit of you working process. Did you seek out tutorials? Were there any difficulties you encountered? Or did you just know it all?

The basis of the animation was really just animating masks and parenting. The only problem I had was turning the lightbikes while keeping a “light wall” behind them. I ended up just creating new walls and masking out the old ones since they were all parented to the bikes. As for tutorials, I found the “retro film look” and the “3D Letters” online at Graymachine.com (“Retro Style Graphics Tutorial”); I think they definitely help the video look more “Trony”.  

While some of the inspirations are obvious, what other things inspired you?

Besides Tron itself, the Graymachine.com tutorials definitely paved the way for this animation. They set the guidelines for me and I did the rest. Oh yeah, and definitely the “Tron Guy” from youtube. He proved to me that the 27 year old movie still kicks digital ass.

What did you gain from this experience?
This is the first time I actually used multiple cameras simultaneously in AE-it felt like I was actually making a movie.

Anything else you would like to add?
One thing that I discovered myself is the “faking” of 3D objects. Since AE is 2.5D, it’s hard to create an object that’s fully 3D, and that’s not a cube. The best way to fake it is to create multiple layers at different depths (z-space), then blend camera work and motion blur together. If the camera/object moves fast enough and/or the layers are close enough to each other, motion blur will likely do its job, and blend the layers together, giving you a “3D” object (or at least enough of one to fool the viewers eyes).