Promotions for sports need to be fast and one company that is keeping the pace is Flock of Pixels out of Phoenix, AZ.
Justin Katz established Flock of Pixels in 2008. Starting out in the business as a motion designer, he was soon taking on larger and larger roles and now is a talented Director, Animator, Producer and Art Director. At Flock of Pixels he is often asked to create broadcast quality spots with extremely limited time and budgets for television and web. It just so happened that one of their recent spots was for the Phoenix Coyotes NHL team and we were excited to find that this dynamic piece of editing used Trapcode Particular and Magic Bullet Colorista II, so we got in touch with Justin to tell us more.
“We had a script and hard drive full of photos delivered to us at 5:30pm on a Friday and were asked to have a full cut for sound design by Monday” Justin told us. “There wasn’t even a creative direction in place – they literally said “work your magic.” “Since the entire spot would be comprised of only still images we needed other elements to help bring further dimension to the Coyotes spot. I decided to approach the project so it would feel like everything was happening during a very brief moment in time by bringing the stills to life in ultra slow-mo.
“Since everything had to be done very fast, yet be consistent throughout, Particular was used for its speed and to help sell the effect of the super slow-motion photo-animation. In addition to the flakes of ice coming off of the skates, I layered elements of defocused dust/ice/confetti particles (made with Particular) at various depths to add dimension to the scenes and more interest. Most of the particles are the ‘cloudlet’ shapes (including the ice and dust) with the confetti being one of the few custom particles.
“We also used Colorista II to color balance and match each photo for a high contrast look/feel and to keep everything looking like they were shot at the same time.”
“I’ve been using Particular since around 2005 and it’s one of my go to tools – especially on very tight production schedules. It’s fast, gets the job done and lets you see results immediately. I had considered using stock elements for these effects, but in the end it was actually faster for me to create them with Particular than to search stock sites for the proper footage and then composite them in. This was also my first time trying to emulate super slow-motion with Particular – it’s physics time factor settings came in super handy.”
As with everything we do we wished we had more time on this project, but as my friend says “Things are never done, just due.”
You can see Flock of Pixels 2011 Showreel here:
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Tags: Colorista II, Particular, Red Giant Software, Trapcode Particular
