Student Showcase: Design for Motion

[Music] ah that's right it's time for uh talking about design i've been waiting to do this for so so long you are at the student showcase focused on design some of my favorite classes that we have here at school motion and to get this thing started we also have another person here that's gonna be talking design with us uh can we get frank on this call where's frank i know you're in there somewhere hey what's up everyone what's up dude um how are you doing today frank are you excited are you as excited as i am i am super excited to talk shop about design this is one of the topics that's become hot uh off the press yeah are you surrounded by all your favorite are you surrounded by all your favorite designers i've got all my nerd books here i'm surrounding myself with the gods the design gods of the world um we have been dying to do these student showcases and ej knocked it out of the park yesterday talking about 3d but especially for design i think it's the the hidden gem in terms of um whatever you want to call it verticals specifics like whatever electives whatever you want to call it for me even though it's called motion design i think a lot of us forget that design is still part of the title of our industry in the name um and i i think um the solution to all of your motion problems actually lies in design most of the time you can fight me later about that if you think so but frank what before we get started what are you so excited about to see today to to see from the different classes that we have oh well i'm super excited about the lineup of students that we have uh we have some great work that we want to show and just really talking about design as i've ta a lot of classes uh from animation to design it's the one topic that always comes up it's like the common denominator that no matter if you're doing like starting in in animation or you're doing vfx or you're doing like even expressions design is always the question that comes up and so to me it's like if you get this it's like a superpower because no matter what you're doing you're going to be able to to solve a lot of problems what do you i this is a big question all the time you hear people throw the word design out all the time like oh you got to get better design you got to know the funnel what is design in your book like you have do you have like a pitch or like a one line like elevator statement about like what's design why is it important if i'm an animator who cares totally so i talk about this actually in tab which is a new course that we're going to have soon for teaching assistant boot camp it's only for rtas but i talk about briefly the difference between art and design and obviously art is something that is done just for the sake of it so you don't have to have a reason for it but design has to be functional so it has to serve a purpose whether you're communicating an idea for marketing or entertainment or whatever it is it must be able to hit the mark and so design differs in that sense so it has to be able to communicate well through the principles of design you know uh which are many we can probably geek out about that later but it has to be able to serve a function in your work well we we better be geeking out about them we better be talking about the specifics so i will say yes and i also feel like while we're trying to learn everything right we've got unreal we've got blender we've got procreate we've got all these tools coming up and like hitting us in the face that we have to learn but the one software package that i think if you learn well and you learn it once you never have to learn it again design is just another software package just like after effects just like photoshop just like cinema 4d it takes a while to learn you have to do the 10 000 drawings right you have to put the time and you have to have somebody that can tell you when you're doing it wrong otherwise you're making the same mistakes but i really think it's like one of the most valuable things for anybody anyone if you're an animator if you're a designer if you're a rigger if you're a producer i really feel like design is like the hidden you said it perfectly the hidden superpower and it's the it's the language that binds and ties everything else you're ever going to do um i'll probably talk about later but i have some big theories about like how a lot of your biggest animation fears or worries or concerns are actually design problems but we'll get inside that yep that will come up sometime i love that analogy you're using by the way i want to steal it you know it's like the one piece of software because a lot of us don't think of it that way we think like design is like this thing out there that you gotta learn it's so vague but it actually has principles and if you learn it like if you learn a piece of software the great thing about it is like adobe is not going to come and like update it exactly everything about it you're going to be able to learn kind of like the design principles you need and you're done max that's not going to change the interface like it's not going to happen i mean i i that's a great analogy though too i think as well is that you know like in cinema 4d the the day you open max on you know anything from accent you know that there's like complete tool sets that you may never touch in the program right but you know that they're there for you designs exactly the same way right like you can as long as you have an understanding of the fundamentals of each of those right of contrast of type of color of shape layout of foreground background interactions like if you know the basics you don't have to dive into all the individual specific tools but you have the understanding that they exist right and they'll come a time when you get to play with them and experiment them so i i really in my head i actually do think of it like there's just a bunch of menus and i'm pulling down this shelf today and i haven't touched it in like a year or two but i'm coming back to it um so i want to explain a little bit about the showcase just the the concept how this is going to work for everybody so we have um four officially four design courses um photoshop illustrator unleashed um that's kind of like your entry level you're coming in the door and you just want to learn the tools but we're going to sneak some design in there while you're learning the tools once you're coughed with those tools there's also design kickstart which is essentially teaching you all the fundamentals you could ever possibly want to know and you're getting exercises kind of learn them at like the most rudimentary value it's really like um learning how to work out it's kind of like going to the gym and working out but then design boot camp is kind of like getting in the field and playing the game it's all project based um everything is kind of mimicking what you would get if you're in a studio if you're a designer working for a motion design studio um so you're taking all those things you're exercising and you're actually creating you know final products with them hidden in there is an amazing class called illustration for motion from sarah beth morgan that a lot of people probably don't think of it as a design class they just think it was like a drawing class but all the design fundamentals are like reaffirmed and it's probably actually the most thorough of all the design classes but it's kind of hidden under the surface so we're gonna talk about three of those um the it'll be psai unleashed illustration promotion design boot camp we're going to do a critique we're going to roll off to a pre-recorded video that frank's gone through to show you if you take one of these courses what a critique is going to be like what you can expect you know in terms of thoroughness and how we um try to elevate you through kind of the critiques themselves and then um we probably will do a little bit of talking about the class talking a little bit about the person's work and then move on to the next class and this is going to culminate in when we're talking about a specific person design bootcamp that we're going to have live with you so frank who are we having live with us for a design boot camp we have the amazing gina with us today gina taylor and we are super excited about her work she has just taken a lot of our courses and done a lot of the homework assignments but she's put her own spin on some of these and her design work is just fantastic so we're going to be able to see kind of design from the design boot camp but then also how she applied it to a little bit of other classes so yeah super excited to talk to her before we even get to her i just want to say one of the things i love about gina and almost every class that i've looked at our homework is that you you can take school emotion a lot of different ways right you can just show up you can do the assignments and learn the tools learn the fundamentals you can save it for a rainy day and just kind of like shotgun it over the course of a couple weekends if you really want to but what gina does is i think the optimal way of doing is that she takes the class with the ta with the other people but she almost always makes the really important assignments her own so if you've seen the same assignment over and over and over you don't see that with gina you see her take the the concepts but she makes it even in some of the animation classes she's taken she's redesigned the assignment from scratch and it becomes an amazing demo real piece right it becomes an amazing showcase piece so um i think uh in the chat um if you have any questions for gina definitely they should be dropping in her website take a look at it um in a little while she'll be on live and we will be able to take your questions and be able to forward them straight on to gina um so we'd love to have it even be as close to a conversation as possible but i think we probably should jump to photoshop and illustrator unleashed frank tell us a little bit more about just like this class who it's for and what the assignment kind of goals are within it yeah totally uh this is a class stop by jake bartlett the amazing jake bartlett and it is just jam-packed with not only how to use the best workflows for photoshop and illustrator uh but then how to think about using them for for motion uh you know prepping up your files the important thing is that you know even people that say oh i know how to use photoshop i know how to use illustrator like i went through the class and i learned a bunch of like little tips and tricks that i was like oh my gosh i've been using illustrator for 10 years and i know i can do this or i can do it in this way so you definitely learn from jake kind of best practices to use and going back to the idea of design it is not technically a design class because we're learning how to use the tools but there's no way you can use the tools if you don't design in other words like you're going to use the tools but the way you're going to practice is by designing so design is kind of implicit it's kind of like you know the air that you breathe if you there if there's no air you can't breathe and so if there's no design you can't use the tool so definitely there's design uh involved in there and it's geared towards beginners so it starts off you know very simple how to use the tools how to use the shape layers in in illustrator the pen tool and so yeah that's that's basically the plastic i i will say i i think everybody out there unless you are a professional like designer working in a studio odds are even if you've been using both the tools you probably feel a little bit biased towards one or the other right there's probably one where it's your sweet spot and there's another one that just doesn't make a lot of sense for me it's illustrator it's like my least favorite tool but going through jake's class he does a great job of balancing if you've learned something one way this is how the other tool works and why you would want to reach for this tool at this time right like there's reasons for using the shape layers there's reasons for using the pen tool or the type tool within it and it's all integrated also into how you work with motion at the same time which is a really great thing and the last thing i will say about this class is that i have to get a plug-in for demo real dash because the one of the assignments we have is to actually make a title card and 90 times 90 of the time i can always tell when i'm looking at someone's demo reel from the very first shot with their name whether or not they are a designer or they're just faking it until they make it and it's almost always just because their use of and choice of type and all the ways of fiddling with type so um that's just a little hint that like if you listen to that out there people this is important this is this is a guy that sits down and was looking at hundreds of demo reels to hire people and within the first two seconds he would turn something off just because of type so you may have an amazing reel to put together and then if your type is like that good it's sad but you know you have a work to do and you're like super busy and you're trying to squeeze in a lot of demo reels and maybe your demo reel is not making it to the right person just because of the type design thing so yeah it's sad to say but sometimes when you're watching dumb rules and you've got a stack of them you're looking for a reason to not keep going and design is like the easiest one to just be like well if i'm hiring somebody's a generalist i need to know that they can design i can't train them to be a designer and just that simple thing your color your type your layout those three things are super important i think this is a good time to talk about who our critique is going to be for psa unleashed it's kaitlyn murray she's taken a lot of different classes she's taking c40 base camp and psa unleashed before we dive into the critique do you want to set this up at all frank in terms of what the assignment was and what you kind of see all the time from people uh putting this assignment up on the uh on the homework lockers yeah totally so if you watched the stream yesterday um we had the awesome luis miranda he did a couple of critiques and you know one of the things he said on there is like you know this is a critique so we always have to have a critique on there and you're going to notice that probably for my first two that i'm going to talk about today these were already final assignments that had already had a lot of critique prior to this point so at this point what i'm doing is i'm kind of showcasing the work and why certain things are working so i'm going very deep into like okay this is working because of you know this design principle and this is working because of this other design principle so it may not be so much like changes here change that there because these assignments are kind of like the final ones uh she really took this assignment and and ran with it she had a very specific style that she was going for and i think it worked out pretty well this this assignment is kind of the combination of all that you learn in the classroom you're going to be using vector files you're going to be using photoshop you're going to be doing color correction you're going to be doing typography you're going to be doing uh texturing so it all come kind of comes in you're going to be doing uh outlining images with hair so you're really just putting all your tools into this one assignment so it's exciting to see awesome i think let's uh to the man behind the curtain back there let's uh let's roll uh the critique and we'll come back and talk about it some more [Music] hi caitlin this is frank and this is a review of your either tiger boards which came out awesome i'm super proud of the work that you did and yeah let's jump right in so i kind of want to tackle this from two separate places one is the actual execution of the project itself this is a photoshop and illustrator unleashed class and so we're learning design but primarily we're trying to focus on using the tools correctly using photoshop using illustrator and understanding when it's best to use one or the other understanding some basic workflows and how to be able to create a design using the tool so in the actual execution of the assignment using the software you nailed it you have really good use of the software and there's a couple of things that i want to point out before i move on to talk about the actual design which is very well done a lot of things that are happening here that are working well is your use of typography you're using your illustrator files as well to make sure that you bring in vector images in here so that that's working really really nicely one thing that is also working very well in your use of photoshop is the way that you were able to integrate all the images to look cohesive and yes this is part of the design process but it also takes some knowledge of how to use photoshop and i just want to focus on this first image here for a second because this is a good example of that we had a 3d element we had kind of these you know photographs we had text we have an image and yet somehow you were able to bring it all together to have a cohesive look even with the bears here and when i look in your file i see why it's because you spent really a good amount of time going in here and really making sure that things had the right color correction and the right treatment for it to look cohesive so if i don't take these uh adjustment layers here you know i can see kind of where the original artwork was the original image and let me do that for the rest so we kind of get a sense for you know just how different it was this was so this was kind of the original actually it didn't have a stroke this was the original and you can see how they you know the styles don't match this looks kind of 3d uh this looks very flat but yet by you adding all those elements and there are stroke uh to to bring this into the same style language the same design language as the rest of your piece it's working very well then you know the color correction where we're adding all that saturation and flattening the image uh you know it's just really making it much more cohesive did i miss one in there oh yeah these right here there we go so now by adding all those adjustment layers in there you were able to bring the image you know into that kind of cohesive look where everything looks like it's part of the same design uh almost like it was drawn in there so really really nicely done in terms of the execution and using the software uh then the rest is just really good design decisions um overall let me let me kind of start from the end your final rendering or your final kind of bringing everything together is really well done you're using textures very well and then you're also adding noise to everything which is kind of helps solidify everything so uh you know that noise kind of carrying through on every image it's just when you look at it as a as a whole it's working very very well so execution top-notch really well done really nice to see uh you master the software and be able to you know cut things out and do things in a way that's really working together in terms of the design i i really think that you you know you nailed this very very nicely as well now you're going for kind of this retro kung fu uh almost um comic book feel to it of nostalgia and i think it's worked very very well anyone that grew up in the 80s and maybe was used to seeing a lot of these images can know that it feels authentic in in the images that you've chosen you know a lot of high contrast a lot of uh you know kind of lower detail in some areas but a lot of high contrast in the colors and that is really really nicely done as well that's helping the design to stand out and breathe even though it's kind of this uh throwback to design that was probably over the top and put together in a way that was you know maybe nowadays we wouldn't design things this way for you know products but it definitely fits within that style that you were going for so uh definitely as a as an homage to to the style definitely nailed it so really really well done and some of the things that are working well here i just took some time to draw up some lines these are not perfect but very simple rules of thirds and if i go kind of in here and i look at you know most of your images uh a lot of them a lot of your designs are falling within those you know places where the rule of thirds are and you know this for people that are starting out in design this is really you know a lot of the key is start simple use tried and true methods of design that work well you know this image for example you have your bear lined up in one of the lines and you have your title in in another one of the lines and another one of the corners you're also using a very strong use of repetition here you know this repeating the the bear kind of in in the background with less contrast but it's you know that repetition is really drawing the eye into to create a communication with with this image and the and the other image kind of this back and forth and it's really helping the design as well so these aren't just kind of random things that work that can see that you put the effort in in making these work again your main title is along this line here uh you have your ladders here you have your titles here uh and everywhere i look i just see that you really used your rule of thirds and it paid off well it really helped to make the design work uh cohesively even though there's so much going on in terms of images and titles and even different fonts which is super tricky to get right if you would have not thought through your design and the placement of your titles even you know this this would definitely not have not has worked as well so kudosi for making that work some final thoughts overall i think your color palette is really well picked out and i can see on here i just kind of hit it but you were really referencing your color palette throughout and that's something that sometimes the students we can miss is the importance of keeping things consistent and i can see that you had it in three different places which tells me that you were looking around and making sure that you followed your your color palette and you were being consistent in your choice of colors are really nicely done and yeah i think overall this is a fantastic work super proud of what you did and super proud of you finishing the course amazing i hey kaitlyn i i think caitlin's in the chat hello caitlin nice to see you um we're going to just rave about your work for a little bit longer i think one of the things that impressed me the most about this is that it's so easy to get lost in type especially when you're using really stylized type that's being used to create like a specific tone it still needs to be readable right it still needs to be legible there still needs to be a hierarchy in in each individual image but then also like across the images um see if i can do this um i love see if i can share my screen let's get this going um i love just the range of stuff that's going on but it still feels holistically all part of the same thing right like i love just taking stuff into like sections like it's a story right or there's there's a first a second and a third act and even in here right like this is a really difficult frame to pull off there's so much going on but like it'd be very easy to just like have the type all stacked on top of each other i mean let's count one two three at least three different fonts that are very stylized right it's not just like a serif and a sans serif these two fonts would normally be really fighting for attention to each other right but because of the flow right like if you look at this there's almost like literally visually an x there's a circle in the center to draw your attention but there's places for your eyes to go there aren't really any tangents there's nothing that's really like even down here it doesn't feel like it's sitting on top of each other yep there's just like at every level like at a macro level and at a micro level the stuff works and i think one of the interesting things you talked about was how there's a lot of stuff that acts almost like the glue between these very disparate parts right like choosing red over the top of green that helps your eye go straight to here this is the highest amount of contrast color wise right but then your eye flows there's literally like a flow like introducing flows all the way through here and then your eye kind of circles back and goes up there's no wasted space the only thing that was like even if you're getting super technical is like right here they're almost touching a little bit too much like you'd almost even want to make it a little bit smaller but it's like the tiniest like dumbest little thing yeah i love what you talked about like tying these photographic elements into something that felt more like a wheat paste poster or a billboard poster and i doubt this will come through in the stream but there's even just this really nice level of like grain it's not noise but it's some type of like textured grain that goes over the top of it the other thing too is that if you actually um were to desaturate this and just make it black and white you can see the levels contrast are working as well right like you have the color contrast and then you have the darkest black and white connecting to the darkest black and white there's just so many things like we could talk forever about each one of these if we wanted to but i think um there's great storytelling there's great individual imagery um there's a lot of variety as well too like she's not using the same trick every time to flow through here we actually have the you know type actually breaking the frame there's still that really great use of like value contrast the highest contrast is the thing we want people to read on the roof and then everything else has been pulled down the darkest darks are not as dark as the actual type and they've been unified to sit in the background with the color it's a cool color against a warm color for the type like we probably should stop and move on at some point but like uh there's so much there to really like study and learn um i i i struggle to try sometimes with these the assignments to like find things to critique but that's also when you realize like someone achieved the actual assignment right this is the end of however i don't know how many weeks is it 10 weeks is it 12 weeks this is a eight week course eight weeks that's a lot to learn that's a lot to learn in eight weeks because everything we just talked about actually was design fundamentals we weren't talking about like mastery just now about like specific tools right like one thing i think is a really good sign of somebody who knows the tools on top of the design is when you go in the files and they're clean enough for frank to actually go in and critique them the the use of things like smart objects of adjustment layers inside nested groups um layer styles blending modes even going into the layer styles where you normally would play with like the procedural strokes and the glows and all the kind of cheesy stuff there's some blend if kind of fun stuff that you can play with there to help like blend stuff together in a way that's very hard to achieve otherwise all that's on display here like it's pretty amazing that it's all in one place um before we move on i also just wanted to like see if we could um make sure that we show caitlin's instagram because you're definitely going to want to um follow everybody that we show here we'll try to show everybody socials as much as possible but caitlyn has a ton of really cool patterns and they're not just kind of just like illustrations or just spot colors they're really cool repeating sometimes characters um i'm a sucker for anything to do with ted lasso and she has a really funny led tasso um post so definitely check out caitlin murray we'll probably link it up but take a look at her instagram for sure to uh just get more of an idea of like the character behind the work that someone's doing as a student um this is one of those places where when you're getting assignments at school motion a lot of times they can look and feel the same as everyone else but if someone is interested enough to follow you or to look at you this is the place to really start putting your voice in your vision as a designer like i get a really good sense of the two or three kinds of jobs i can think of right away right there isn't like 17 different types of designs there's like three themes in there right there's some cool illustrations there's some type design and then there's all those patterns it gives me a really good memory of who this artist is if i need to call on her so instagram is a tool sometimes instagram can be your portfolio or your demo reel it doesn't have to you don't have to have the full on website um anything else you want to say about caitlyn before we move on to our next class no i mean just just i think you nailed it um i mean the only other thing i would say is it's the way that she the reason why that works so well is she created a mood and mood as part of uh design as well making sure that you understand kind of if you're trying to mimic a particular style the fact that she nailed it so well from the beginning we can almost overlook a little bit of what we were saying like the type is so close to the border and the edge and yes those are things that nowadays if we print or if we do video it it may not work but because it's like listening to word all yankovic like the moment that you know you're gonna listen to him like your mind goes to that place right you know it's gonna be quirky and it's gonna be weird and it's gonna be you're not like oh he's just an accordion or you know he's saying weird things your mind's already like oh i know what i'm listening to and this to me when i saw it i was like oh i know exactly what i'm looking at i did all it all kind of like it was convincing so that's part of paying attention which design the last thing i would say is design is a lot about paying attention to the choices that you're making if you're just randomly putting things together most of the time you know you might get lucky and strike gold just because you got lucky but it's it's not going to happen consistently so pay attention to the basic rules your colors and all those things because when you do that you're going to get a better result so yeah we'll talk about this more when we get to design boot camp but that is kind of the hidden trick to getting better and faster at everything is design it almost is because design's not just the final concept it's also a method for thinking and a method for approaching how to solve the problem that you get handed as an artist working for a client um but we'll get more into that design bootcamp is a really good place to talk about that up next let's talk about illustration from motion and i i love this class like again we said that it's not necessarily something that people think of immediately as a design class think of it as a drawing class or it's a an elective of an elective but it really is a core expression of a lot of the stuff that you learn in psi unleashed and indesign kickstart um tell me a little bit about uh the person we're gonna be talking about tell me a little bit about marcus odom who he's taken a bunch of classes there's path to mograph animation bootcamp level up thank you um illustration for motion was one of them that he took as well but what caught your eye about marcus's work um and his experience in illustration promotion yeah no marcus's final assignment just blew me away in the sense of uh he really put a lot of you're gonna see it now when i talk about it but you can if you see that work it almost encapsulates everything that is being taught in the class from the use of color from the use of contrast the use of perspective force perspective exaggeration i mean it's all in there texturing um illustration for motion is probably from the classes that i've ta'ed i it's probably one of the hardest in the sense that it has it'll kick your butt really hard but the great thing about it is that it's all based on like every single assignment feels like a like legit real client project like i i see the assignments and i'm like yep i've had a project like that yep i've had a project like that it all feels like if you take this class and you make it through you're going to be ready for yes become a better illustrator but overall you're going to be able to understand what a pitch is how to work with you know revisions um how to think critically about the choices you're making in terms of your characters and all that kind of stuff so it really is a design class at heart but you're gonna get to learn from from sarah some of the missing techniques on illustration texturing um how to like go out of your comfort zone and like do exaggerated stuff that you feel like that's i don't know if i can do that it's like yeah try it just you know exaggerate the head or make it small and and you start to see like oh wow it is neat you know it is cool uh it is a contrast tool that i can use so yeah a lot of neat things in there i can talk about it all day i love like i know i i love that class and i i 100 coast on everything you're saying i think the other thing that's really cool about a lot of the classes we have at school of motion that are something for motion is that you can take a lot of different drawing and illustration classes there are a lot of really good ones there's sites there's schools that do it there are very few schools that teach you illustration specifically for motion design so part of that is on the technical side how do you design and prep for something that an animator can use sarah goes over that the other big thing though is like how can you take whatever style that you have that you are starting to cultivate and take all of your inspirations whether it's photography or it's film and tv or it's cartoon character animation from you know feature films from the 80s sarah has an amazing ability to turn that into a very commercial sensibility right like there are house styles out there there are expectations for what a character should and shouldn't look like in motion design right now for better for worse sarah is really great at showing you those techniques that you see all the time but also allowing your own personal style your own personal interests your own personal kind of obsessions with illustration to find a way in and i i think that is like the the secret about that class is that it's not about illustrating it's not about motion it's about how to do all those things together and also be employable right like to be able to work in the trend but also understand how to subjugate the trend into your kind of vision as well so i i love that let's dive into the actual um critique because there's a lot in this one marcus is a workhorse like he puts the time in and you can see it in this critique so let's go and roll that now let's do it [Music] hi everyone frank suarez here and today we're taking a look at marcus adom's final assignment for illustration for motion it is called gone camping and this is just really a fantastic case study for great design and for putting all the tips and tricks that we learned in illustration promotion into the final assignment so i want to dive right in i want to kind of break it down because he has a lot that he turned in for this final assignment and we're going to be able to kind of peel back the curtain and see why his final assignment is working so well the boards are actually broken down into some very rough sketches at first then he has a color blocking stage then he does a more refined kind of value study of what his value system is going to be and then he finally has the the final renders of the illustration so there's a lot of principles here from the class there's also some principles that you learn in design kickstart and design boot camp so let's dive right in first off we see these very rough boards and what's really great here is even though we have a lot of loose lines and we have a lot of loose drawings we can already start to see the energy that we're going to have on the shots at this point you're thinking about contrast you're thinking about figure ground relationship which is basically the relationship between your foreground objects and your background objects you're thinking about things like energy lines perspective and all those kind of things and that's what you're trying to block out in this very rough stage right away we start to see you know this idea of this element in the foreground and then elements in the background and just with scale we're able to see you know that difference in scale is helping us to see okay so this object is going to be further back and this object is going to be even further back and then this object is going to be right in front of camera so just by establishing scale we can see a hierarchy here for example here we have this idea of force perspective with this kind of big shoe coming at us and then quickly receding into the scene so we can already start to see some ideas of you know where our perspective lines are going to be our camera is going to be a little bit off kilter and all this is already starting to set the mood for this energetic kind of powerful uh sports like adventure scenes that we're getting here same thing here look at the perspective lines kind of this one point perspective but instead of being all linear we're getting this idea of you know curves uh we're getting this idea of dynamic characters with poses so all of this just from some rough lines really really fantastic same thing here figure ground relationship you know we have this very strong character in the foreground and then we have our background that is receding and if you notice you know maybe here with some rule of thirds very roughly laid out you know we have our character on that main axis and then we have kind of our leading into you know this point right here so just very nice use of design very basic principles but they're working very well same thing here we have our character in the main part and then we have kind of our receding lines here into this main point so just from these rough outlines we can already start to see that these very basic principles are going to be what's guiding the rest of the design the next thing that he did was the color blocking and again this is really really fantastic to be able to see this process because this is already kind of getting a bit more detail in terms of the illustration we're starting to see the main shapes of our characters we're starting to see the main kind of idea for our scenes and this idea of using color as a way to tell the story and as a way to see which colors work well with each other so when you're doing color blocking all you're doing is you're trying to see okay how are my colors working with each other right so we have complementary colors here with orange and blue and then we have also the green for the trees but the greens have two tones where we're going to be able to set a darker tone maybe four expressing shadows and then a lighter tone to be able to express that we're closer to camera so we're using color also as a perspective tool we're using color to help guide the eye to see the the hierarchy of where our scene is again really nice use of force perspective here where we see this you know very quirky uh shot with a shoe very close to camera and then look this character is smaller than the shoe but then look how quickly it recedes into the the background so this is already going to establish our eyes in this you know first part and then there's communication with this other part but everything else is leading our eye you see how it leads our eye towards this you know main part of the scene so very well thought out we can also see it here with this very forced perspective look at this hand how big it is but then how quickly it recedes into the background again with this calf you know just up in your face and then you know the use of that forced perspective which is something that we talked about in the class and it's being is being used here as a contrast tool right because we're contrasting the idea of this foreground with the with the background we can also see this great design idea of a triangle which is something that is a very strong compositional use and here our main character is kind of in this three-point perspective so it feels like he's gigantic and enormous and so it's giving him a sense of scale it's giving him a sense of of being a powerful mighty figure within our shot so another thing that marcus did is this value study and this is also very very neat because a lot of times you may work out your colors you may work out your scene but in this part of the study of him putting together his illustration he's really trying to figure out how is value going to work within my scene to be able to tell a story right so for example we see things like hints at texture so this is going to get some value maybe through texturing of lines uh over here we're going to have a value system where we have kind of lighter objects in my scene are going to be lighter and then as they recede they will start to have a value system that goes down so all these ideas of using value to be able to lead the eye and have a well-balanced composition this this idea also of contrast can be seen not only through color but also through shape so we have this obviously enormous shape here of a character and he is being contrasted against you know these other shapes which are also big but because this character is in our in our background you know we're going to interpret that as this being a giant or this being a huge figure so this display on contrast with characters and with shape is something that we learned in class as well being able to use shapes and force perspective to kind of have a more dramatic design and be able to draw the eye of the viewer so these are beautiful just as they are i mean great use of line repetition pattern really really nicely done and still very rough at this stage but really hinting at you know some of that character design just really great powerful poses really great to be able to get a behind the scenes look at all this fantastic work just go through these just beautiful work and then here finally we have the rendered final designs and you can see how everything comes together from the the color blocking from really setting your scene with the perspective to the colors to the textures everything is coming together to work as a cohesive uh design and this is something that a lot of students may not get right away it's the sense that you know you see a design like this and you think wow you know it just came together all of a sudden out of nowhere but really it's about applying the principles of design and then also being able to go through the process of understanding color understanding value understanding perspective understanding contrast so that at the end you end up with something that is compelling that is really powerful in terms of design and communicates well to your viewer so great job marcus on this this really turned out fantastic the character design is beautiful the perspective work is beautiful the color choices are working very well together you have this quirky fun energetic design that is really communicating well and overall these are just i mean i these are just beautiful to look at honestly this is one of my favorite shots just really great communication here there's this triangular design where you know you your eye is kind of bouncing around looking at this character balancing this character and then looking at the eyes of the counselor being you know surprised by all the energy that is going on really really beautiful work and then this off kilter design is just fantastic as well to convey energy and com you know really conveying a lot of kind of a three-point perspective from the camera looking up it's really well done uh i can almost see this being cell animated we have principles of animation here already being hinted out with you know some squash and stretch here with these dodgeballs uh just you know look at the energy in this shot with this very forced perspective coming in right up to the camera so cool love the shot as well just the energy and the face the energy in that axe you know the the counselor kind of being in shadow there by by the other character and just this kind of dual going on here again it's just this idea of leading the eye if if we were to just draw some lines uh in here you know this is not by coincidence this is not by chance we have you know our design kind of leading us uh you see that everything's kind of leading up to this main area of action with the character we can also draw some real thirds here and we can see that mark is also a very basic principle of design just to use your rule of thirds a lot of photographers use it and it's you know very simple tool but you know you can just see that the main action is right here and that's drawing our eye right into that character really really well done and then our lock-up screen this is just really beautiful work and if i'm finding nothing wrong with it you know definitely there's things that we can analyze if this was a client project you know did it hit the mark was it on budget this is basically really really great job all the way from the initial designs to our color blocking techniques to then doing a value study to making sure that we have good value for the piece and then also incorporating all those tricks with force perspective and really exaggerated proportions to be able to create contrast and create interest between your foreground and your background elements so great job on this marcus you really knocked us out of the park congratulations on finishing the course oh man so yeah this a lot during this whole thing but i'm not worthy yeah sometimes it's amazing to watch this because you you if you're a creative director or an art director knowing you have to speak to a client you want to be able to have like one of your jobs as a designer or an animator is to be constantly feeding your team things to keep the client happy to keep them moving forward to keep the positive momentum and the the steps were so clear that you know even at that very early sketchy stage even before color block like it's very easy to read like okay this is the arc of the narrative this is the arc of the story these are the places we're going to go these are the the rivalries these are the points of tension and then as you get to each stage marcus is probably doing it because he needs to like limit the amount of variables right it's very difficult to think about value and layout and composition and eye flow and color and texture all at once it's very difficult to do that so breaking them down almost like a scientist into their like core components and then building on top of each other not only does that smart as a designer it also gives you know you become the art director and creative director's best friend when you can do that right because it makes it for a much easier discussion versus kind of slapping like like different elements of different times or i've got everything finished on one image right like you could have just that camp yowzer final image and that could have been all the time spent or he could have fleshed out the entire story so um that's just another great thing i think illustration for motion in a lot of ways is actually storytelling promotion you know like i think there's there's almost like a major title and then a minor title for most of the school of motion courses and you don't know it until after you've taken it but you actually find out a lot of times in in these classes like there's a lot of storytelling that you know how to draw an eye to a different spot on a scene how to handle editing how to move i think um you know when writers really good writers write you can hear the lyricism you can hear the music you can start to hear the score as you start to listen to it right like you start to get a sense of tone that way when really good when really good designers start storyboarding you can feel the pacing and you can feel the movement right and i think that that's one of the best compliments you can give to marketing is that this thing is just it's dying to be animated but i think almost everyone watching this already knows how it's going to move from however many seven eight simple frames you know the arc of the story but you also kind of even get a sense of like what this is going to do and it again like it's a standing ovation for people to manage all those different things you know at once in your head so totally no i can totally see this being a spot for like buck or something like that yeah and there's something interesting that happens in this class if i can just share it quickly is in illustration for motion uh the progression to get to characters it ramps up so at the very beginning of the course most of the assignments are just working with basic shapes uh working with limited color palettes and when i say limited i mean like two colors yeah no characters and there's this interesting tension that happens because a lot of students want to use more colors they want to start using character and of course they can you know this this is an experimentation so you can do the assignment in any way that you want to stretch yourself but the interesting thing is that those students that in many ways start to use character and they realize how hard it is at the beginning without having all these tools i mean when you see the character work at the end you see this like it's not like linear it's like whoop there's this progression of like oh my gosh that went from like i would not show this to a client to i want to show this to a client um and even in marcus's work so you know if you go back a few assignments you see that his work is starting to get better and better his use of texture his use of perspective his use of color he was good at the first assignments but it's just i mean this final assignment it's just like okay dude you're ready for prime time if you want if you want to get an assignment for you know uh a big client so that's the power of just like 12 weeks of you putting in the time and doing all the homework it's not like okay maybe in three years i can get there it's like you might be ready by the end yeah if you really put in the time and do the assignments so that that's goes back to the thing we talked about is that there's a lot of different ways to take these courses but when you're putting the time it's not just putting the time in but it's putting the time in being an active participant in the community being an active participant with your ta not just submitting something and saying thanks afterwards but you know like reworking it really really like like we said you can turn 10 000 drawings into a thousand drawings with the right people the right pressure and the right attention to like the feedback you're getting um one time we have to do one of these showcases where we just spend the entire hour with one person from the beginning to the end of the course and just chart like where was the moment where you found the confidence where was the moment where you had the the light bulb over your head because some courses it happens at the same place every time right like i can say in design kickstart there's a very specific moment where mike frederick pulls up these really beautiful style frames right like a pitch for a title sequence for a contemporary tv show and it's got 3d and it's got particles and there's like extreme depth of field and all these big things and then he turns all of it off and he shows the first thing he did in about 10 minutes and it's literally black and white type and shapes and the shapes are literally like they're not complicated they're not like vector shapes pulled from like a like a repository they're literally like squares circles triangles and it's how he works with overlapping how he works with figure ground relationships and how he tells a story and implies camera movement and scale and like you said moon and tone which is these simple things right and then he just puts all them back on and everyone in that class has a moment like now i know why design is important but you have to get to that you have to get three weeks into it to really have that moment so i i think it'd be awesome to um be able to chart someone's like journey and just have them on live and talk like okay well like how was this assignment was it tough like where did you fall apart where did you need your ta where did you just give up where did you take off because i think it's um some people it's very different but it's it is fun looking at marcus's uh his path i think marcus is on the chat as well um shout out to marcus and i didn't know this i was looking at your linkedin it sounds like you're repping chicago so that's awesome it's good to have another chicago person around school of motion um we're going to skip design kickstart as a class i had to get that little bit in there because it is if you've been listening to us and wondering a lot of the things that you're hearing from frank talk about like he's talking about leading lines he's talking about convergence he's talking about tangents contrast is one of the biggest things but there's so many flavors of contrast right like contrast has like eight different render engines that you could be using if they were a tool right like you can be talking about value you can be talking spatial contrast you can be talking soft versus you know versus hard curves versus straights um there's almost an endless amount of it but almost always when you find an image that is just like haunting or arresting or you can't stop thinking about it most of the time it's because there's three or four elements of just contrast at play if you want to learn more of those things they don't necessarily make sense to you while we're talking about it but they're interesting design kickstart is the place to be for that mike will will get that into your head and he will exercise it into your your arms and your hands and your brain that there are probably eight to ten fundamentals and you gotta do a lot of it but once you know it you know it forever and then you'll be ready for our next class for design bootcamp totally i'm just going to say this it's going to sound cheesy but i've been designing for a while and i went through mike's class and i literally felt like i was being plugged into the main perspective now i know kung fu you know it's it's it's like these principles that i was using but i didn't know why they worked okay oh no it makes sense there's like a science behind it or there's there's a reason behind why these things work instead of me just like kind of yeah it looks cool over here let me try it over there and let me just kind of guess yeah so totally recommend it well that design bootcamp is this the class i tell this story a lot that like when i started working at big studios i was very much like an intuitive designer i didn't know what i was doing and i could occasionally fall into a decent frame but when you're working on the floor with a bunch of other designers you walk past them and you're like i would get in early i'd get it like 8 8 30 in l.a that's a big deal like people come in at 10 10 30 and i would be just like scrambling like mad i would actually have to have a seat where nobody could see my screen because i was so like imposter syndrome psyching myself out and i would just be doing anything i could to fill up a blank page based off of you know the assignment whatever the client wants and i would struggle and struggle and struggle and by like two o'clock three o'clock i might have a frame maybe two like a frame and like a sketch of an idea but not a co not like a full like concept not four or five frames that are telling the story like what marcus showed and i always was sitting next to like across from this guy who'd show up at 11 he'd have his coffee around 12 31 o'clock he'd go get lunch he'd be gone for an hour and a half and at the same time i'm sitting there sweating bullets because at the end of the day i gotta give these to my you know creative director to put him into a deck he's already got two full sets of four boards and i'm like what like were you working on you hadn't been working this at home you must have gotten the assignment early like what's going on right and he's about the same age as me a lot more experience in a studio like that and he's like man he's like it's easy man it's just design he's like that's all it is he's like i i he's like he already sees what he wants to do before he goes into photoshop because he understands and he has the the muscle memory of being like okay well you know what i've done this before where i need to make something feel imposing so i have you know like something white in the background and i have two black things in the foreground then something white again and he's doing just like stacking of shapes and then he reverses those both in order and the shape and the value contrast and very quickly it doesn't even have to look final but he can go and be like to the creative director at three o'clock i'm like there's anything you want me to change like it's much more easy to art direct somebody when they're still working with just the fundamentals versus when they put what mike likes to call the jazz hands or the glitter like when all you do is just put a lot of glitter on things if somebody says hey you know what can you um flip the foreground contrast can you you um you're so attached by that point and it's so hard to go backwards right like you you've spent you spent 90 of time putting the paint on but you didn't build like the structure of the house so you're almost like cool i can do that i need another day because i have to start over i'm not just moving things and then like so that was really the key to me that's like it's one thing to hear the names of the terms design it's another thing to intimately know them and have executed them so you can pull them up the same way people know like all the settings for redshift to get you know each like people know subsurface scattering and they know how to get caustics and they know how to do like all these different things design is exactly the same way to these people that honestly every shop you love has three or four of these people that you will never hear their names they're ten times better than ash thorpe they're not interested in celebrity but they are lightning fast they're incredibly creative and they are just design wizards yup you just never hear about them um but someone we did hear about is gina taylor who's going to be with us in a little bit gina has taken i don't know how many but it looks like illustration promotion animation bootcamp level up design bootcamp expression session cab advanced motion methods are there any classes left that she hasn't taken demo dash i think that's it um tell me tell me a little bit about gina and and i can tell you why i really wanted to talk to her for a specific assignment when we were looking through but tell me just a little bit about what you know about gina and her background yeah totally well gina was my student uh in advanced motion methods and i believe it was the last session or the session before that i can't remember right now but uh there are certain students that when you start to see their work there's just something about the way that they're doing things that you know just kind of stand out whether it be their i remember early on she redesigned part of an assignment and i was like whoa not only did you redesign it but it looks it looks really cohesive with the artwork which is something that other people have tried to do and you know they they don't get it right so they get the design wrong and then the animation doesn't work but her design was like spot on her animation was great and i was like oh gina someone to uh keep an eye on just you know progressive class and of course i look forward to all assignments from all students but there's you know i'm i'm kind of thinking like i want to see what gina does next uh and and you know hint out there you know your tas are kind of looking for that because we also get excited to see people progress and do work you know we got excited about everyone we also have students that are just starting out and we have to spend a little bit more time on that we love doing that as well but you know it's exciting to see someone like gina just kind of like you you're looking forward that she submits something well this is something there's something that happens in every school too like this is important for people to know that like there are always those moments where and and school of motion is just like everyone else we have a slack and when somebody does something that shocks someone or is new or they're even trying to do something a little out of the ordinary crazy and kind of announce it eyes are on you at that point for some for some reason like all of a sudden there'll be something in one of our slack where people like well this person is trying to redesign all of the amm final project it's hard enough to just get it done what are they doing and it's almost like people line up to be like okay let's do you think they're gonna actually get it done like you would be surprised to know how much behind the scenes there is a lot of discussion and churn and people will try to like guess what's going to happen so it's kind of a tip if you want to get the attention of people maybe try redesigning something but also know like at the same time you're putting yourself on a tightrope that you know it's gonna be difficult but public service yeah yeah several times gina has pulled the trick of doing the higher wire act and make it to the other side but also kind of like doing some flips and gymnastics along the way to really like impress everybody um one of those that we wanted to talk about was what you critiqued i believe was the the mission to mars assignment from design boot camp um maybe we should run it and then i'll talk i i specifically saw this piece and was like whoever it is that made these decisions that did this we we have to like get them on the show so let's run um the mission to mars design boot camp critique [Music] hi everyone frank suarez here today we're going to be reviewing gina's expedition 100 mission to mars boards what we're trying to accomplish in this assignment is creating a couple of style frames that we can use for a project called mission to mars and essentially what we need to do is just be able to pull references and then kind of use those references as a guide for us to be able to show a potential client what our style is going to be so this is what this assignment is about so we're going to take a look at the two options that gina has presented and then we're also going to dive a little bit into the photoshop file because there are some neat things that i want to kind of look at in there as well so so this is our first board and we have two style frames that gina has put together for us kind of the first treatment idea for the style frames and as you can see here we have some references that gina pulled together which are really cool we see this idea of like a little bit of double exposure we see this idea of using a lot of negative space with minimalist type we see some ideas of using blocks or simple shapes to outline certain parts of our design we see kind of the idea of using type to kind of cut through the images so a lot of really great preferences here for a particular mood that you want to show to your client we also have something really cool right here as well and that is that she gave us a sense of a few terms that we can think about as we're looking at these boards and this is something neat that you can show to a client if a client is not really sure of your direction you know these words here really help to kind of solidify the the concept more so we're talking about a desolate place very technical you know very vast area rugged so all these terms are kind of helping us come up with an idea a mood or a concept that we can also pitch to the client so these are the the two style frames for this particular treatment and as you can see they're working really nicely and the cool thing is gina actually came to this idea through experimenting in another assignment and it was through a kind of a happy little accident of turning on a kind of a gradient layer on top of everything and then she saw that everything kind of had this cool contrast idea to it and kind of ran with it and said you know this could be useful in another opportunity so this is the cool thing about experimenting and trying things out is that sometimes you're going to find that a mistake can lead to an actual idea that can work later on in another project or in the project that you're working on so i'm just going to do some very basic lines here just so we so we get an idea for like rule of thirds but it's basically you divide up your frame into kind of three segments vertically three segments horizontally and then wherever you have these corners where they meet this is kind of like the access that you want to align a lot of your design to and you'll find that your design will be a lot more interesting or balanced instead of lining everything up to the center so here for example we can see that our text is uh you know near this corner we can see that a lot of our negative space is in this area here of interest but we have you know just kind of this element here kind of poking our eye and making us look this way we also have this low contrast black and white image with this pop of color that is helping it to just stand out and obviously there's a play on words here because you know the word cold but then we have a warm color so there's an interesting use of contrast in terms of meaning of word and color so that's another way to add contrast to your image and here as well we can see you know if i just kind of do some rough these are just very rough they're not perfect but just so we get the idea we can see that our element is right here very near that point where they meet and our text is kind of nicely sitting on that on that line so we'll get to this frame in a little bit there's some really cool things going on there but overall these look really really nice and i think it goes well with the themes that you've chosen here so let's take a look at the second option really cool as well now on this one we're missing a second style frame usually when you want to show style frames to your client you want to make sure that you at least have two just so that they see what the continuity is going to be throughout the shots you have to do a style frame for every single scene but two is kind of the minimum that you need so a client can understand the mood or a theme that you're trying to establish let's say for example you want to establish these lines as a theme then you definitely want to make sure that you have another frame so you can reference it and the client can understand that there's an idea being used and repeated so again really cool idea just giving us some words here oppressive unknown hostile dramatic and definitely all of that is being conveyed here in the design the references are fantastic i mean this reference right here uh i think it's really the one that's um probably the one that's leading the most in terms of use for example we see obviously the the great use of mainly two tones the yellow and the red this idea of kind of glow from this light source and we have that kind of being presented here as well very cool again just to you know keep keep repeating the point this idea of uh you know some basic rule of thirds it's helping to really get the design uh to be balanced to be pleasing so that's working really well so let's actually open up the file for a second because there are some things in here that i want to just point to that make a difference when you're putting together some style frames or when you're designing that you know we can pay attention to and i want to look at this frame as an example particularly when it comes to our image because if we look at the original image i'm just going to turn off the filters this is what the original image looked like and obviously is very different and it does not work together as well in the design when we see it this way but because of the treatment that we have on it we can now see that you know the levels adjustment is really helping to bring those shadows up so that we have a lower contrast design on our image and that lower contrast design is working with the rest of the design but then also you know the saturation just bringing it down a little bit i would have potentially moved them just a tiny bit more this way just because it feels like it's so close to the screen so maybe you know just bring it ever so slightly over and then with that also bring our text just slightly over uh to have more breathing room so you know these are just minor adjustments again these are just to kind of show your client potentially what the mood of the of the piece is going to be so for this they work really really great i think that you've managed to put together two strong concepts and great job with these boards again those are great i am awesome i yeah i i want to get gina on as soon as we can but i just have to say that i took mission tomorrow all right i took the design boot camp class i did the mission to mars assignment i've stared at everybody's assignments for like every semester every session that they come out it is so rare that someone makes the simple basic design decision to do warm text over a white void like just literally like for some reason everyone just doesn't have the the intuitiveness or the courage or the insight to go that way and it's amazing how much like that simple decision allowed gina just grab your attention but then the three or four examples that she chose were really interesting especially for the white one that there's i think only one image out of them that even has anything to do with science or outer space or anything like it's so refreshing to see design references that aren't literally just spitting back with the subject matter or what previous explorations of the subject matter have done right like that was like you can feel immediately when you look at those two couple of images that there's someone with a thought process here right there and then as soon as you start adding that type even if those words aren't reflected in the final image it's really interesting when you're putting a pitch together when you're putting a deck together whatever you chose to choose to show the most of it almost becomes noise if you choose to show one other thing once right so there are i don't know six seven eight images on there but the fact that there's just four words grouped together those individual words carry so much more weight with the concept when someone is just handed the page and they have to do the thinking for themselves before you get to talk or explain it that like it's very powerful of a decision to just drop those four things in and i i don't think that those words especially in the second one are necessarily like a one-to-one connection to what that one single image is but it colors it so dramatically so much more than all the rest of the style frames all the rest of the mood boards just by choosing that i think it was a really i i don't think it's part of the assignment to do that but i think it's a really interesting tactic to take especially really gonna throw one board like that's probably we probably should bring gina on because i feel like that that's in some ways you can do that in a in a job and it's a mic drop moment if it works and if it's not you basically get the finger pointed like you really thought you could do one board so gina tell us a little bit about why was it was it time but did you just believe in the idea so much or where did you come up with just doing it's a good board and and the the examples around it really explain where the rest of the boards could go but do you just think that was the best board and you didn't need to do anymore um i really wish i could say that was the case um it was honestly just that i'm going to be honest and say i had such a hard time with that assignment it really felt like i was banging my head against the wall trying to come up with something especially once i'd got like that white concept done and i was like okay you know this has turned out quite good i'm happy with it and then you have to come up with a whole nother concept and it's like i've already just poured my heart and soul into this and i've already just managed to scrape by and now i have to do it all again and so i just managed to do that one frame and by that time like you know the next lesson was out and we were on to the next assignment and i just thought i can't bring myself to do it so yeah i'd love to say that it was intentional but it wasn't well and i i still think it works really good we have it up on the stream now just so if you can take a take a look at it it's a great frame i mean i i love the again there there are references that you know that you've seen before but when you see them in context with each other plus the type together it feels totally different i i almost wish it could even be pushed even more like i love that yellow column of light i i it just draws your eye directly towards this like small person that sets the scale for this desolate kind of very dramatic image but um even just the little things you did like where you're you're cutting out the background and scaling and offsetting it it's such a small little subtle thing but the same thing we were talking about with marcus where when you see marcus's boards you can tell what's going to happen i already get a sense from looking at this like how this could animate how it can move and that's a rare thing to be able to say with one frame right normally you at least need two frames to understand motion to understand movement understand like the feeling of how it's going to animate but you're able to do it with one frame so congratulations for you doing that it's funny that you mentioned about that one um reference as well with the kind of like the shaft of light i don't know what it's from i'm guessing like it's from a film or something but um yeah for that one that that was actually the only reference i had from the start and i really struggled to find like the other two to go with it i did i would have wanted a couple more but i was like this um kind of sums up how i want it to feel so well and like with the including the words i'm i'm a very kind of like a word-based thinker so anytime i start a project it's all lists my i have like i buy notebooks without lines so that i could draw and then i end up just writing in them that's awesome but yeah so like i had that one reference and i had like the words so i knew in my head kind of what i was going for and it's just kind of you know spending the time trawling through pinterest or whatever trying to trying to get enough that you could communicate that to someone else yeah i think if i could say that one thing that is so powerful about the way they put the boards together is uh those words they really they really do help as someone that's just seeing this for the first time particularly a client right we know that most of the time style frames don't end up being what ends up you know going in the final piece because style frames are just kind of to set the mood and to really help the client see you know it may it may end up going in slightly into a different direction but you've made those words kind of like their own frame because those words encapsulate what the mood is right and so when i if i see the image without the words i you know i can start making my own ideas but the fact that you've kind of implanted that little seed in my head i'm seeing the image with those words and so i think it's a clever use i mean it's it's it's risky because you know the client might be like well this is exactly what i don't want it's like oh great well now we know we can pick some new words exactly there's loads of them we'll just you know go and find the synonyms and we'll just replace them but um you know that that was cool can you tell us a little bit about the first frame because i i know daniel was your um donald trevor was your ta and you mentioned to him like uh this was just kind of like a happy little accident that i was on another assignment i put in a gradient by mistake and i was like holy smokes this looks awesome uh and then you kept that little mistake for later on can you tell us a little bit of that story yeah i can just one thing quickly first though huge shout out to daniel because he was absolutely fantastic he's a brilliant ta every critique was like detailed and thoughtful and like you know we'd go back and forth and we was like collaborative and he was excellent so yeah just shout out to daniel um but yeah with that the um the kind of white gray style for that it was on the the assignment before the mission to mars is the one called tokyo throwdown where it's kind of like about a dance show and you get these kind of like it's very kind of like i don't know early 2000s kind of style is the way that it's kind of pitched um and i was just using a gradient map on something and i accidentally applied it gray instead of pink and i was like oh hey that looks pretty cool anyway i guess i'll just carry on and then and then it wasn't until next week i was like oh man that that thing i accidentally did because i messed up my keyboard shortcuts that could actually be really useful here that's that's that's so fun uh paying attention you know just you're paying attention to the process and everything kind of has a meaning so i like that you used a mistake as a part of your next idea in your toolkit so i would say that's one of the most fun things about design is that pretty much any experience you have in your life anything you see anywhere you go you can draw that in and use it in your work it's like in one of the other assignments um the diesel one like the week before i'd just been like mindlessly scrolling on the internet or something kind of saw a photo of um it was a set list like that someone had picked up at a nirvana concert and they they framed it and it was just like this crumpled bit of paper with like some scribbles on and i was like oh man that person paid that much for it anyway whatever and then the next week we were doing the diesel boards and i was like oh hey you like a set list you know because the diesel assignment for people who don't know is um it's like a festival or a concert or something where you have to show these three artists performing and kind of get that across on your boards and just because i'd seen that the week before i was like oh that could be an interesting idea so it's it's a great excuse to like be able to do what you want and play video games and read books and do whatever it's research my work so yeah i think that's one of the biggest things about both bootcamp and kickstart and for the design is that they just open your eyes to like how you experience the world like you you do become kind of like um a sponge or like a collectionist or like a completist or you're like i gotta take two more pictures like people start walking away from you very quickly while you're just like hanging out in a place like staring at the ground or i i find myself um adobe has a really great app for color palettes and like if i'd go shopping with my wife i ended up staying in the place longer than she would because i'm like nah i got to get this i got to get these three colors i don't know what they are i gotta get just like let me get them and it's uh it can become a hindrance with a lot of people that you're hanging out with but it does open your eyes into like oh man i've been missing out on so many things you know like so many things that can imply story or can imply tone or a theme like frank's been saying earlier um we got a question from someone because we i think we talked about how many classes you've taken um i'm hoping it's gonna be a design one but what's your favorite class that you've had at school motion out of how many have you taken um i think six maybe seven including level up yeah that is a lot of classes yeah oh boy um but yeah my favorite is actually a funny um answer in the i would say i've got a joint favorite and the two classes couldn't be more different um so the i would say it's joint between illustration for motion which is the first one i took and expressing the session which i absolutely love like it was just it was so much fun like it was completely new to me um but like the way that it kind of builds up it was perfect it was all it was like completely opposite experience from illustration promotion which is so full-on um but yeah that's what i think is great about school of motion is that you know you cover such a broad range of things and they can be so different but it's all kind of done to that same level did you you didn't happen to take them back to back did you yeah i did oh my god back-to-back yeah probably not recommended yeah so it brings up a question kind of a good segue is tell us a little bit about like your your current path in your career because you you know obviously we've seen kind of the power of your design and you're you're really good at it uh but you know you're saying now expression sessions as well like what is what was your path to mograph and what are you doing now and how are you applying all this to your career can you tell us a little bit about that yeah for sure so at the moment i'm a freelance designer illustrator animator i like to kind of spell it out rather than just put motion designer because i feel like such a kind of nebulous term um but i've only been freelanced for three months so before that i was working in-house at a software company here in the uk um so i was just a graphic designer in marketing department and honestly prior to taking illustration from motion a year ago i'd never even really heard of the motion design industry i didn't didn't really know i don't know like i feel like there's a lot of creative industries that as like a lay person it's really not obvious obvious that all those jobs exist but they do there are so many of them and like at so many different companies um and so it it it was a real eye-opener for me and i think especially taking illustration for motion sarah beth kind of it's really comprehensive in that she covers illustration yes but as you were saying it really is like a design course but then she also talks about like cinematography and animation so it's really comprehensive and i feel like it was a great introduction to the industry just because um you know she really puts things in context like this is the illustration part but here's how it it fits in with the rest of the process how so can you just say the number again you said that how long ago was that you even discovered just like motion design as a term or an industry how long ago was that um so i took illustration from motion in spring 2020 so probably probably just like a little bit before then okay well then what we need to do then is that yeah so people who are watching this just so we can understand like what taking the course as seriously as gina has like we've talked about it she she has redesigned assignments we give you tons of material to work with so you can focus on the specifics of whether it's amm with animation but multiple times over gina has basically like started from scratch and built it and gotten them done in time i would love for us to be able to play your reel knowing that a year in change ago you started playing in this world would that be cool with you gina if we show you a reel yeah absolutely all right let's fire it up and let's show people just so they can see like how far you can go in a short amount of time [Music] i'm not going to do a full-on demo real dash real review because there's so much good stuff in there but i think um what i loved about it was that there is a mix of things that seem somewhat familiar but have a like freshness to them right like that's something that i think is difficult when you're at school of motion if you do two three four classes like how do you take all the stuff and make it your own and there's just a nice mix of like like this is one of the most diverse reels i feel like that we've seen from somebody who's been at school motion let alone motion design for a year right like there's stuff like these things that look like they're for product there's things that look like they're self-motivated there's stuff that's referencing harry potter there's stuff that looks like it could go know on a commercial right now but the thing that i think that's that's like the the thing that ties all together is just the attention to detail and craftsmanship right like if it's animation things aren't just looking like you threw easy ease on them right like there's even in that one where there's the six up of all the stuff that feels like an app like there's such an attention to just like offsets and like textured timing that you don't get if you're just like okay cool i gotta set some keys and i'll hit f9 and i'll just pull them three frames apart in each one like there's uh there's a curiosity that feels like whatever it is you're doing your illustrations your designs even that moment where all the logs drop and it says oh dear like there's a hint of personality that should not be in someone's like first row within a year so like that's um there's a lot of lessons to take from there for like how to approach a short reel that's very nicely dense but also um has a lot of variety like that feels like a true like junior generalist reel i see a lot of people who just say generalist because they're like i don't know what to do so here's all the stuff i do i'm a journalist like this feels very different than that yeah it's interesting you mention it actually because it's something that i've um sort of wrestled with myself is that i really feel like i am a generalist but then because i'm so kind of early in my career it's like well am i just a junior or am i actually a generalist so i think that's just one of the things that the longer you do it you can kind of figure it out maybe i'll specialize maybe i won't uh but i'm looking forward to finding out well i i'll say like watching that i feel like um i don't feel like it's junior like if you wouldn't have told me like what your background experience was i would not have put you in the pile of like junior i would say like a middleweight generalist who has like definite curiosity and illustration a different curiosity and keyframing um it feels a lot like when i first met sarah beth and she was designing but she would you know she was with tyler and tyler was animating some of her designs and you could see she was trying to figure out which way and i think just today i just saw that um sarah beth has rep as a director at hornet and she just released her first piece as a director um for bed bath beyond so it it's funny that i saw that and then like you're real it's the first time i've watched it it has a lot of the same resonance of like someone who's curious and you're pushing yourself but it's not like you're like i guess i'm a generalist it feels like i am a i can't wait to figure out what it's going to be but if you can express those kinds of things in reals like where you can feel someone's joy or you can feel someone's curiosity that does so much more than just being like that's a really cool very stylized on trend thing um it's a hard thing to to be able to evoke like your personality in a real so i think it's um it's a good job very good job yeah thank you i appreciate that one thing i would say also is the fact that i mean it's a year that's like such a short amount of time there's four sessions uh to be able to you know you probably already had a good design idea but to be able to see where there's there's work that's not in that reel that i know you know you probably cut a new reel and even get it with newer work that you have on there the one thing i would say is you have the design part whereas a lot of people have been animating for longer than you do not and so if a studio is hiring and they're saying can i hire someone that you know knows animation very well but you know really does not design or someone that you know it's it's getting better and better at animation but really has a strong design background yeah you know it's really something that is going to help you because you're going to have the design ability so uh i just thought i'd say that and can we do we have time to show her advanced motion methods uh redesign i thought that was cool too yeah i'd love to see it in there yeah if um i don't know who can i don't think i have it pulled up but um while we're trying to get to it gina amm it's already a very difficult class right it's a very heady class it's a very technical class you have very intimidating materials to work with what strikes you that on top of all that you feel like this is now the time to also rebuild and redesign everything from scratch i don't know i just can't help myself i'm kind of a maniac like that you could just say you get like sanders designs it's okay yeah the thing is because i've done it before on other sessions like i redesigned the expression session final piece the animation bootcamp final piece going into it i knew how much work it would be and yet like i still just couldn't stop myself and i think part of it is just because like school emotion courses are a huge commitment and especially because the first first one i took was illustration for motion like you know everybody gets the same brief but they everyone comes out with such different ideas and so just you know in in that 12 weeks that i took that course i came out with probably like i mean you you saw them in my reel there's still like probably six ifm pieces in my reel um so i think after that experience with any courses i took next i was like well i would love to have like more real pieces i could use in my portfolio and so to kind of put in all that effort to tackle the assignments especially for some of the older classes where they've been running for such a long time right that you know people are used to kind of seeing um the homework that students produce i was like well if i'm going to dedicate all this time anyway i would love for it to be like something that i can kind of use and keep kicking around for a while yeah i mean it's a brilliant instinct because i know even as somebody who has had to hire people you can only see so many ice sculptors or like lightsaber ping pongs before you even if the animation is wonderful it needs it needs some kind of freshness just to like be able to examine that level of skill um i wanted to ask you because common kind of philosophy common knowledge of school emotion is that you take a class and then you try to find some breathing room and you take some time off or you take one of the shorter classes and then you come back for more when you feel like you've absorbed it you've done the exact opposite you have taken all of your courses back to back and and you've excelled but you've also like pushed beyond i feel like there's a certain wall that you can break through and then the momentum like the collective momentum of having taken so many of these does that actually provide more fuel for you to to push yourself even more versus i bet most people would think like i'd be so exhausted to do two in a row or three and a row but somehow you've found a way to flip it and and push further um partially i think so i think in in like an ideal situation if i was to say right i'm going to sit down and really kind of like optimize this in the best way i would take time between the courses just to kind of like because after every course you're kind of like buzzing with ideas like oh i learned this thing and i could use it in like this and i'd love to do a personal project using this technique that i learned and so i think having that time to kind of reinforce the things that you have learned probably is the optimal way of doing it um but for me like just the situation that i was in i i was kind of like you know i'd been working as a graphic designer at this company for three years um prior to that i was just an admin um but like i was starting to kind of already get a little bit frustrated i knew that i was going to be moving on at some point and then the pandemic here so i was like well i'm not going to be able to leave so i need to do something and so i was just taking these courses and kind of like making the most of that situation and that's the great thing about you know being a creative working in-house is that they will pay for all of it so they paid for me to take those courses which is fantastic like i'm so grateful for you know everything that i've learned is kind of because of that um so yeah i would say that you can make it work either way but if people have time to take the session off and then do one that it probably is like the more sensible approach well i mean on top of all that also you know doing these classes doing the work um you're not you're not slow on your instagram as well i think uh if we can pull it over can you just talk a little bit about like what's your what's your habit and some of the stuff i definitely like recognize but some stuff i mean maybe it's stuff that i'm just not familiar with but what's your what's your attitude towards just like using instagram as somebody who's trying to level up are you trying to post all the time are you trying to just use your assignments for it what's your kind of philosophy because i think a lot of people do get caught up in like oh my gosh i've got to put something up every week or we got to put something up every two days like how do you approach it because there's a lot of variety like i see some of the the home is where the the hut is like that has a strong brought up the being like house industries vibe like there's something very different from that compared to a lot of the other stuff so how do you how do you approach instagram yeah it's an interesting question i would say that it's still not something i have a definitive answer for in the i think everyone's just kind of finding their feet with all this stuff um it's a tricky one i used to be really selective about what i would post and sometimes i still am in the sense that i would i would like one thing i absolutely love is creating work so like i love making mood boards or like you know stuff like that just seeing how it all looks in the feed and i think about like oh if i post that one and it's this color those ones will shift down and that's how they'll look to you and at a certain point it it just feels like a bit silly like i should just be posting the work especially like a lot of the times i used to do so a lot of that old stuff i used to do loads of calligraphy um loads and loads of it and i just hardly posted any of it because i was like oh this isn't very good like no one wants to see this i don't want this to be out there and looking back i really wish i had posted it and like i see that same pattern in myself now where i i make things and i'm like oh i don't want to put that on my instagram because what if someone sees it i don't really like it but i bet in six months time i'll be like i should have just posted it and so i feel like yeah i'm kind of leaning more towards that now um but but it is tricky because i don't know it feels very kind of like exposing to like you know post something and then if it's not kind of up to you know people go on about you're judged on like um your your weakest piece of work so that you kind of always have that in the back of your mind like oh is this bringing everything else down yeah i know i i bring that up in demoral dash all the time and i i hate even saying that loud especially when you can a talented artist say it back that it's a fear it's an inhibitor but it is true that anytime you put a body of work if the work is good you tend to like we're saying contrast right like even design principles in real life in terms of like looking at people's work you go to the thing that you're like okay well if you could set type like this and if you were so great at calligraphy and if you have these interesting colors how did that piece get there right like you you at least want to lean in and know the story about like where it came from so it is that there's some fire underneath that like the smoke of like oh man but i i would die to see you do some kinetic type honestly like having scrolled watching the scroll going through and seeing some of the really intricate stuff for the the really nice balance of like calligraphy like like getting hand-drawn and calligraphy playing together in a very like unique way like a very unique voice we have so little of that animated emotion design now like kinetic type used to be a thing but now it's just like frank and i were just doing some connect type it's just like can you pop stuff can you make stuff you know just keep people's attention for the half a second they're on but some of this stuff is like it's dying like i love that the the not the circus not my monkeys like those two fonts playing together like we were saying earlier sometimes you see things and you can already feel the movement you can feel the movement here you can see like like there's going to be a certain type of action with it um and not just like wiping it on but like there's you know there's a nice like mix of like kind of like fun and kind of reservedness in that that it'd be fun to see that stuff animate yeah and i think it was hand drawn right yeah yeah it was all done by hand nice and then just like um you know i brought it into illustrator and kind of pen tooled it up afterwards but yeah i think you know going back to what we were saying about instagram i think for me it's about having that distinction between my portfolio site and instagram and really seeing them as two separate things like you can have your your portfolio site and have that be like where you keep your professional stuff that you this is how i want clients to see me but then have the separation of well instagram is where you can maybe um be a bit looser with it as i think i just need to keep telling myself that and then i'll post more yeah it's hard i think i think people are starting to try to solve that by having kind of like their like doodles or stuff or junk kind of like on their website and it's literally just like a link to their instagram but it it's nice because it automatically starts to just like say who your character like what your character is and what your interests are besides like what you've been assigned i mean i honestly my most time when i'm valuing people i go straight to their like not the work page but the like here's just what i do when i'm screwing around or this is what i'm kind of interested in and i don't know if i want to include it in my body of work like that is such a bigger insight into like who you're going to end up working with if you hire them so frank do we have any more questions for gina i feel like anything more we're just going to be standing ovation at the same time yeah um did i think that's that's pretty much it i mean we're we're wrapping up here at the at the end let me scroll through here really quick see if there was anything else if there isn't then i would love to use the time to ask you guys some questions please i was going to ask you all i wanted i wanted to see if you had any because it's it's a rare opportunity for us to both be on at the same time yeah i was going to ask um actually just what you were talking about in terms of you know being able to see more of the personality of an artist um particularly because you've done so much hiring before that section on my site like below the main projects where i've just kind of thrown some stuff from my instagram and it's some like you know bits and pieces some collage stuff if you when you see stuff like that on someone's site is that does it kind of put you off is it too random like it makes me think of you know when you see someone who's fresh out of school and they've got like life drawings and like here's a watercolor i did once yes exactly it's hard to know if like is it veering too much into that or is it kind of okay my opinion would be if it was not collectively as good as this is i would be like nah put it on a separate page right like put it don't put it below the fold where people are trying to learn more put in a place where it's at least like you listed as bits and pieces like even if you list those pieces or bits or stuff or drawings or scribbles but because it you know there's common color palettes the use of type is at such a high level i think it's like a a force multiplier right like there's nothing in here that i look at then i'm like oh that's embarrassing or that doesn't fit because everything is well composed the color palettes are reserved there's like any time i see solid use of type that's automatically like two grades up because it's like okay there's somebody who knows the rules oh there's somebody who's playing with the rules oh there's somebody who actually like loves type foundries or likes making their own stuff like those are all lean in moments right like that's all you're looking for on your real on your website is just like okay strike someone's curiosity get them to lean in get them to click and like look for more and try to build up like i'm always trying to build a story of who i'm gonna call before i call them and this is all storytelling to me when i see this stuff like i don't think it's there's not too much there's not a lack of variety it's not the variety isn't too wild like it it all feels cohesive i do think if it's like so across the border that's like oh i have two things of ui ux and i have a sock puppet and i have a picture of me and my dog like then definitely like save that for the about you or the like kind of just like learn more about your personality but here i don't i don't feel that at all i would definitely like lean in and want to know more about it yeah i agree and and also something you have to remember is that when you have your instagram feed people that want to hire you that want to kind of see your work they're going to scroll all the way down and they're going to see like wait this is a year ago and it's still good but now he got better yeah where is she going to be in another year like you know this is i'm hiring someone also with a vision and so that's important as well so the fact that you're saying you know some of the work that's in there is good it's great you know maybe you don't do it as much anymore but the fact that a potential studio or a client that's going to hire you says you know what we don't have any projects right now with this kind of calligraphy or those kind of things but there's something coming down the pipeline that may work and she was working on it before and we may not need it right now but you know she can go back and use it as a as something in her toolkit yeah so don't underestimate the power of that as well people are going to look at your work and see if there's a progression and in your case not in everyone's case it's a very fast progression which tells people she's a fast learner she you know puts in the time puts in the work um and so that is also part of the equation when you're looking at people so don't underestimate that yeah i would extend that i'd say yes and also like a general journalist is not a dirty word especially when you can express personality right like that is like if i can see that you have a certain like a common like level set of skills like okay you you understand enough of the basics that you wouldn't get in trouble by you know having you team with another person then it's just like okay well what else what else is there about this person like i didn't know that you had the interest in calligraphy from watching you're real right like but then as i rolled down to see what else is like oh that's like it it's like hanging another lantern to build the string of like this is the story of who you are these are your interests i think sometimes people think generalist just means like you don't you don't know what you want to do so you call yourself a journalist but like generalists can be like you're a generalist with a major and a minor or you're a generalist with like a couple software packages but you have obsessions or curiosities or interests that that color the fact that you're a generalist like it's but so many times people literally just put their name on the title and they say generalist or they say motion designer and then they've like given they've let all the air out of the tire right like it's like oh there's this cool mystery of like what's this person gonna be like and in the first shot you're basically like oh there's no mystery i don't have anything to offer like like then it's just like you're competing on rate or you're competing on like and that's the opposite direction you want to go which i like i don't think you have that issue but just for anyone listening like generalist can be something you can rally around it doesn't have to be something like oh man i'm not a specialist yet when will i be one like you can build up i i also think like a generalist is also honestly like a specialist because if you're a senior like a heavyweight senior generalist that means like you're somebody who an art director can let run with a team while they're going and pitching another job or fixing a fire somewhere else and that's one of the most rare things you know like it's not a dirty word it's like a a huge plus at that point so yeah that's good to hear because like maybe later down the line i i will want to specialize but at the moment the thought of like limiting myself and not being able to kind of like explore all those avenues like that'd be such a bummer well and you know what i think that's what i was struggling to try to like figure out how to say to you and i remind myself all the time what i feel like you're expressing isn't that your junior isn't that your generalist is that you have a a wild curiosity across software across styles across stories you want to tell and that like that like very positive enthusiastic curiosity with taste is again like one of those really really rare recipes that the right studio will find you and will know how to nurture you will know how to they will be excited about being like oh you know what we need to get gina sitting next to sarah beth morgan and when she's leading a project gina will do the design for her right or you'll be an assistant to design because that will allow you to grow into a place that no one other than that studio or that creative director that company could could offer right so like that that's the kind of thing at the stage in the career you want to be like presenting you want that to radiate out which it is yeah there was an interesting question in the chat and you don't have to answer it actually out of privacy maybe you shouldn't but i think i know where the question uh where the person asking may be coming from they're asking like how old is you know gina and again you don't have to answer it but i think the question is leading into like wow she looks very young and like she has already all this mature body of work in such a short amount of time and maybe the question is is it is there an age where it's too young or too old to become a motion designer or become a designer and i know everyone's kind of on a different path but um i do think it's a fair question like for me i started very kind of i'm a late bloomer i started in my late 30s and so you know yes a lot of students ask like is it too late for me to become a motion designer is it too late for me to study animation and follow my passion or should i just resign myself to you know my my boring nine-to-five job and the answer is if you put in the time and you put in the effort yes there is a chance for everyone uh for someone as young as as you because you seem very young or someone you know older we've seen some older students really do very well they they just you know they kind of had it in them they were kind of some hidden talent and they put in the time and the effort and the work and you know now they work in the industry so yeah the question was going yeah i would say like like to your point about instagram like everything is just based about trajectory and growth right like and a studio is looking at like the opportunity cost right like if i bring someone in it doesn't matter how old you are it doesn't matter like how expensive you are it's a you're starting here and with my unique set of factors that i can surround you and support you you could turn into x right and that could be someone who's 17 who's decided not to go to college and that could be someone who's like 42 and i'm gonna totally apologize frank you're gonna know this person's name but um i know we have a ta who also has taken classes who's not 17 or 18 years old that did a like 100 style frames project and i feel so bad at forgetting their name yes he is amazing and his work is stunning and if you want to do the same thing you can do with gina you can go to tony's instagram and go back to when he was in the the one two three four five of he made a style frame and then he post the next one and they're all nicely formatted so they match and it is one of the most impressive like documentaries of growth and like personal like rocketing trajectory of anyone regardless of age right and and he has a completely different like work life situation now than what he did when he started trying to be like maybe i should be a designer maybe there's something else i could do so i i fully believe like it takes a lot of work either way right like there's benefits of being young but there's also benefits of being a little older and having the experience of seeing different things and knowing how things work and maybe you go down a few less blind alleys because you also have the ticking clock um but yeah i i especially i will say to anyone listening right now motion design needs you now they need you yesterday if you're watching this right like there are so many jobs and so many opportunities and so many gigs where they need five people and they can only get three and they're desperate to find more people who want to do the work you want to do to the point where they're willing to take on someone a little bit more junior or someone remote or someone freelance that they would not have two years ago like the world is ripe with opportunity and motion design right now i don't know how long that's going to last i hope it lasts for a very long time if not forever but now is the time to like take advantage of that opportunity that's one of my favorite things about being involved in school of motion courses actually is seeing like the the range of other students taking the courses and you get to see like they come from all these different interesting backgrounds and i think sometimes people feel kind of embarrassed like if that they don't come from a design background or you know maybe they're a bit older and they they've already got a career in a different industry but actually i feel like what they are bringing with them from those experiences is like such a bonus because they've learned all this stuff that they can now transfer to this um this new industry and that that's what's going to kind of differentiate them it's like there's someone i saw on the square who i think she's recently switched to motion design but she came from um documentaries and i was like oh that is so interesting because i bet she's got like this eye for certain things that no other motion designers have and so i feel like that kind of cross-pollination of industries and disciplines is kind of where you get the most interesting um kind of people yeah i mean that that's where the community part of school motion like i've always said the tas in the community are really the secret sauce if you put your time and you really start trying to connect with people and you really work with your tas that's where the career changes that's where the trajectories start booming is really utilizing those two equally together yep so speaking of the older ones i think uh becoming kind of close to the time where our children are starting to uh ask for uh my kids gotta eat as well but this has been so much fun like i can be here all day this is so much fun to talk about design talk shop i i really really have you know it's it's really to me the most rewarding thing as a ta is to see you know the genus to see the marcus is to see the the caitlyn's the progression it's it's so rewarding at the end of the session to see someone be like yes you know i i got this project so this is why i got into uh school of motion and i love to see people kind of progress so i'm i'm always like in love talking to students and you know seeing their progress it's so fun yeah and this is this is another really cool thing about school motion is that you know like this is where you start building those connections right like i remember when i think i was in design boot camp and jordan bergeron was in there and nobody knew his name nobody knew who he was and he was just starting to like just starting to get momentum putting some really cool design frames together and starting to get the sense like oh this is something he can do you can be in the course with someone like gina and like work alongside and have the growth alongside them and those become relationships those become networking opportunities those become potentially ways to like find the next job or start the next company um i want to ask you gina before if we go are you taking another class next semester and if you are what class are you taking so the only thing i am taking this term is a break focus well-deserved yeah you've you've definitely earned it not to say that there aren't ones i want to take it's like so tempting but i know that would be absolutely the wrong thing to do right now i would be so burnt out well for anybody who's not burned out we just want to say for sure let people know that um the fall session starts i think next monday october 4th registration is still open um we have our grid of all the courses that are available that are out there we talked about the design ones i will also say um just as a wild card out there if you are into 3d at all lights camera render in my book actually is a design course it's a cinematography course it is a filmmaking course it is a storytelling course but all those design principles we were talking about now if you've ever wondered how those come into play when you get into animation or you get into 3d lights camera renderers is the place you put all that stuff on display so um other important thing to let people know is that some of those courses that are in that grid that just got shown they will not be available winter session not this session but the next session after we're going to take a a hiatus on a couple of these so if you've been thinking about trying to improve your demo reel or you really want to get into um octane and learning how to light and render and move a camera those courses it's the time to take them is uh is right now is these uh signing up this next couple of days before the sessions start up um and i think with that gina thank you so much this was amazing this is our first showcase you were the spotlight edge final showcase we are going to hopefully do these more often so you might be able to follow in gina's footsteps um if you catch the eye of a couple tas and there starts to be some buzz about the work you're doing redesigning all the different work that comes through or whatever it might be um but hopefully everybody's enjoyed this gina thank you so much we've been i'm so lucky to just sit down and talk to you see your work um here like your growth is insane it's uh it's very exciting to see well thank you so much for inviting me on like i don't really know anyone who does motion design so it's just like a rare treat to get to talk to someone about this so thank you well everybody who's watching you should at least go and follow gina on instagram and um at least reach out and say hello say you're a fellow motion designer do it awesome frank thank you so much hopefully this will be the first of many many uh student showcases uh thank you for all the critiques and um until then we'll uh we'll be seeing you soon we'll be seeing you hopefully in a couple of days actually take care everyone thanks so much bye [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 4,558

Rating: 4.944056 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: NCmIErIDEi0

Length: 111min 30sec (6690 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021