Vintage Signs for Adspace Networks

This summer Adspace Networks is featuring a collection of Driving Moccasins on its Essentials editorial program. Inspiried by the imagry of classic garages, gas stations and the open road, I wanted to create a graphic style that evoked an era during which driving for leisure was still common. Pulling in hundreds of old gas station photos, I proceeded to make my own collection of vintage signs for the animated posters that ran on Adspace's nation-wide network.

Here's one of 12 final spots after being laid out and animated:

More examples of this and other Essentials projects can be found by clicking here.

Backup is just digital paranoia

After I got my first computer in 2000, it didn’t take very long for me to experience the sting of data loss. An external hard drive I was using at the time (16 gigabytes – I couldn’t fathom ever filling it), stopped working and all the files proceeded to float into the empty void that is Failed Hard Drive Purgatory. Of course, at age 15 the data I had certainly wasn’t very valuable, but I didn’t like it being taken away from me like that. Since then, I’ve always been very careful to backup my data as diligently as possible.

How frequently and what methods one uses to backup seems to be a popular topic among computeroids. Special hardware and software is marketed to these groups to satiate every possible disaster aversion plan. As such, the less tech-inclined seem to think backing up is some mystical procedure that requires a lot of money and technical know-how. When really, all most people need to do is have two copies of everything! If you burned a copy of your resume to a CD, then congratulations, you just made a bona fide backup. File that sucker away and pat yourself on the back.

In the last 12 years, my data has changed. Some are still worthless files I could stand to lose. Some are synchronized with cloud services which have cropped up in recent years. Some are irreplaceable, like the gigabytes of photos I’ve shot in the past decade. Some are important documents, like invoices, tax forms and other “grown-up” annoyances that I increasingly find myself dealing with. But whatever the file, the thought of losing any of it is depressing and maybe even a little painful. High capacity hard drives, online services and even optical media are all so affordable that there’s very little excuse not to have – at minimum – two copies of all your data.

My solution:

My primary machine for the past 7 years has been a first generation Mac Pro. It’s been a great machine and provides lots of flexibility with four bays for hard drives and two for optical drives. But even if I had an iMac or a laptop, my solutions would work just as well using external drives – perhaps even better since external drives are much easier to move around and replace.

I’ve always liked keeping everything I use contained on one primary drive – it makes backing up that much easier. Luckily disk technology has grown fast enough to keep pace with my growing needs (or perhaps my needs keep pace with technology? Hmmm).

I always have two backup drives in my tower – each the same size as the primary drive. The first backup drive uses the software SuperDuper! to quickly synchronize with the primary. This is done every other night automatically. The other drive is setup to use Apple’s Time Machine system. These two backup solutions cost me less than $30 to set up (not counting the cost of the hardware, but I think that’s a given – plus, you could skip the paid license for SuperDuper! if you don’t need all the paid features).

Both of these pieces of software provide different types of backup, which is important to me. Should something happen to an individual file or folder, I know I can count on Time Machine to have a version saved on my second backup drive. If something more catastrophic were to occur to the entire primary hard drive, I can then simply reboot using the SuperDuper backup and be no more than 48 hours out of date. It’s very reassuring.

But what if something were to happen to my entire computer, like a fire? Well, offsite backup can protect against that, but it’s often tricky, slow, or expensive (usually some combination of two of those three). I attempted to use an Amazon S3 solution for a short time, and while I felt some cool geek cred associated with it, it was ultimately difficult to use and unnecessarily expensive. It’s reassuring to see so many online backup companies putting their hat in the ring, if only because it’ll encourage more people to protect their data. Unfortunately, the thought of sending upwards of 2TB of data over my poor cable modem is unappealing. If you have just a few documents and photos, then online backup is probably a great solution.

What I ended up doing was decidedly low-tech, but it provides me with good peace of mind. I waited for a good deal on external drives, picked up a few and filled them with all my data (again, using SuperDuper!). I then FedEx’d them to some friends and family who had agreed to store them for me. Does this sound paranoid? Insane? Perhaps. But in my mind I was able to protect my data for about $150 and a few beers next time I visit my friends and family. Should anything truly awful ever happen to my computer, I know my photos, my music, my movies and everything else I’ve spent over a decade acquiring is safe. It’s just my way of providing insurance for my digital possessions – much of which is irreplaceable.

I have other data that needs tending to as well. I have a media center with home videos, photos and plenty of iTunes purchases that I have no intention of losing. That system has its own independent backup scheme which, while not as thorough as my main computer, is no less important to have. I also have a work computer whose backups are my own responsibly. That system is more about rotating data to different storage formats as the data gets older. It starts with the production hard drive, then as projects age and more space is needed, they are moved (manually) to one of two overflow hard drives, as well as burned to either DVD or Blu-Ray for long term storage. While I've never found optical media necessary for my home backup, it's often a very good option for many users, but the key is organization. Nothing is worse than looking at a generic silver DVD with "May 2009 backup" scrawled across it, offering no real hint at its contents. The optical storage at work is cataloged using CDFinder and given a serial number to make the over 1200 discs easy to search through – this goes a long way to preventing such confusion.

The second half of the equation. Failure will happen.

Backup is often touted as something you’ll be glad you have if your hard drive fails. In reality it’s something you’ll be glad you have when your hard drive fails. So while having a backup of your data is nice, you always need to have your eye to the future of your hardware. For the rest of our lives, we’re now going to be playing a never ending game of staying in front of hardware failure. Backups are a good solution if you experience a problem and need to recover, but the best solution is to stay ahead of the failure. The moment I begin to notice my hard drives beginning to age (glitchy file copies, S.M.A.R.T. status failing, slow r/w times), I begin looking for good deals on a new drive.

Perhaps someday we’ll have flawless SSDs which have 0% failure over 90 year lifetimes, but we’re not there yet, not by a longshot. So for now, we’re always going to be in a race against data loss.

Raygun52 Process

Back in February I was graciously welcomed by Alex Griendling to participate in his Raygun52 site. The project collects ray gun (laser gun?) designs from a different artist each week. My assigned date of completion was April 10th, giving me just about two months to complete the project.

My initial sketches were fairly traditional. I don't think I've attempted to invent or draw any weaponry since I was much younger. I decided to browse the catalog of already-posted ray guns available on the site to see what inspiration I could pull. It's an intimidating collection.  I decided on a canon-style gun since I didn't see many of them.  I knew I couldn't necessarily match the talent of some of the participating artists, so I figured I’d work on making a video of my gun firing – at least motion graphics would play to my strengths a bit better.

I started to make my first sketches on the computer to determine what the structure of the final gun would look like. My biggest mistake at this stage was not deciding on a style. Creating style frames (especially for something imaginary) is a key step in motion graphics (or any design). I skipped this step without thinking and it would haunt me…well, almost immediately.

I began to pull photo reference and textures for some of the elements I knew I would need. I also began constructing others with shapes, fills and gradients.

I continued building and tweaking the gun and eventually got it to the place where I thought it was done. But I wasn't happy; It looked cobbled together.

I started gathering more photo reference, hoping it would inspire some sort of tweak I hadn’t considered. But it wasn't until I watched The Rocketeer (simply because I wanted to, not for this project) that it started to come together. I realized the gun lacked flow. If you look at the Rocketeer’s rocket pack, the profile view is very similar to my ray gun, except it has a great aerodynamic flow. The bottom of the rocket has a swooping diagonal cut which makes it look fast and sharp. Borrowing from these cues, I modified the ray gun, now known as the Radio-Lux.

My final step was animation. If you’ve ever watched American Chopper, this step is very similar to when they have to disassemble the bike for painting and chrome. I take all the elements of the gun and save them to individual files and then carefully reassemble them in After Effects. This newly composited file is then ripe for animation.

For you mograph heads reading this, I used a bunch of plug-ins for the effects in this animation: Optical Flares, Particular, Form, Lux, and a few built-in distortion effects as well. Sound effects, though not something I’m particularly well-practiced at, is always a fun exercise and I really liked the final *blast* sound I managed to get.

A lot of my joy came from the small details I put in the animation. Especially the few short frames immediately before and after the blast. There's a lot of very quick light and distortion effects that I worked on there and I think they go a long way to selling the overall piece.

I would have loved to have worked a bit more on the initial design style of the gun some more to perhaps get something that better represented my graphic sensibilities, but all-in-all I’m quite happy with how it came out. This project was a blast.

(I'm sorry.)

A Simpler Time

For Adspace Network's holiday feature on luxury gifts I decided to create an homage to the 1940's. With images of Miracle on 34th Street swirling in my head I tried to design as authentic a title card as I could with the product as the hero. You can see more examples on my Essentials page.

Things like this fascinate me

For their switch to HD, It's Always Sunny re-created, shot-by-shot their original opening sequence last year. Here's a comparison video with the newly-shot intro on the left and the original on the right. For something so simple there's a lot of attention to detail.

A weekend on the Street Pianos

Slow motion brings out the worst in people

Motion Graphics at SVA

Tonight was the end-of-the-year Motion Graphics showcase for the class of 2011 at SVA; and their work was nothing short of spectacular. It was both exciting and humbling to see such talent. My eyes were moving as quickly as my brain as I took everything in. I was thinking back to my class' show – just four short years ago in 2007 – and how much our work would look out-of-place amongst this year's selection. For the past few hours I've been racking my brain trying to analyze what they had done and the choices they had made. And while some were better than others, it was still an impressive showing.

While I certainly don't want to lump my former classmates in with me, I know I wouldn't feel comfortable showing my senior year work alongside this grouping. It just wouldn't stand up. They seem to have a much better understanding of composition and texture than we (I) did back then. They also used a wider variety of mediums and effects. Sure, I saw a few animation hiccups here and there and a few odd timing choices throughout, but the overall polish of these projects astounded me. It probably also helped that they were (almost) all in HD, widescreen...something I always envied later years for being able to do.

At the end of the day, I figure three things could explain this jump quality:

1. This class is simply talented. 
2. They have better tools (faster computers, more advanced software and plugins, cheaper DSLR HD-capable cameras) at their disposal, which in-turn creates more polished pieces, more easily.
3. Motion Graphics, as a medium is still young and paths blazed by earlier classes have helped propel the art-form further than we were able to imagine it – thus bringing us to this higher level of accomplishment. Basically, the entire industry is moving forward, getting better and learning more, faster – thus the students start with a greater proficiency from day one. (For example, I never touched After Effects until my first mo-graph class at SVA in 2005, however I had been using Photoshop since grade school. It's very possible that these subsequent students have had earlier and earlier access to After Effects).

Points 2 and 3 take some of the credit away from the students and faculty, which I'm not necessarily inclined to do. You can tell from the concepts and general style that these are bright people with great ideas – it doesn't matter if you're rendering on a G4 with After Effects 4.5 or a Mac Pro with CS5.5 – a good idea is a good idea.

It is interesting to see some of the style trends that many of the students were drawn to. A good number of pieces employed a "vintage/grunge" style which looked like something out of Instagram or Hipstamatic. Film, overexposure, grain and handheld motion were all present. Also excessively small typography in the guise of "delicate typography" was a recurring theme. I found myself wanting to see some of these treatments bumped up maybe 10%.  These aren't necessarily bad things, but speaking as someone who is still relatively new to the industry, it's intriguing to see new trends emerging.

As of right now I can't find the 30+ minute show online anywhere, but I've included some individual pieces below.

SVA Mograph Screening 2011 Invite from Monica Kim on Vimeo.

SVA Mograph 2011 ADC Show Opening from Monica Kim on Vimeo.

The Illusionist Title Sequence from Monica Kim on Vimeo.

Skype Text from Monica Kim on Vimeo.

PSA - Stop Smoking from KIMZAN on Vimeo.

Coney Island from Jeffrey Chong on Vimeo.

City of Melbourne Logo ID from Naomie Ross on Vimeo.

Video Wall Demo Reel

I thought I should post something a bit more substantial after last week's little video wall boot sequence.

Here's a quick sample of videos and motion graphics I've designed for our 3x1 lobby video wall.

For our new offices we wanted a way to display our logo that wasn't so static as just a sign, we also wanted to be able to show off some of our newest business ventures – so I helped come up with this video wall. Three 46-inch bezel-less screens hang in the center while an always-changing loop of content is played. The actual pacing of the videos is much slower and calmer, with static instances of our logo showing up between each vignette – the editing here is to prevent you from getting bored while watching what would normally by a 3-5 minute loop of videos.

3-Screen Boot Sequence

This is a fake boot sequence I designed for a 3-screen video wall. The wall was comprised of three portrait-format widescreen displays with ultra-thin bezels.