What do Motion Designers do?

[Music] what's it like to be a professional motion designer it's actually a tough question to answer so we decided to take a field trip to Detroit Michigan to visit four very different studios they all do motion design but in very different ways and with very different styles our first stop is yeah house a small studio that creates beautiful illustrative motion design with a focus on 2d our studios you know it's kind of like a hybrid of animation and motion graphics I feel like it's evolved and morphed into like more design oriented things combined together with in After Effects co-founder Michele will let art background has given the studio's work a distinctive beautiful look I'm an illustrator come from an illustration background and I do think that like you should do what you want I don't want to be making something that I that I'm really excited about I start with like basics of paint like in just a couple colors usually complementary and then I start to build on it there's just so many plugins there's so many things you can learn there's only so much that you need but make something good yeah house has an amazing in-house team but they'll also work with freelancers like steeps ivali right now I have the fractal noise kind of driving these little things and then I'll start adding in little things like the long cross bars Devils in the details if it's there it looks good and if it's not it just kind of feels wrong doing great work with a great team in an awesome studio this is how it's done people will just keep doing this until just stopped coming in dude I get it they have a sock [Music] across town Lunar North cranks out amazing motion design in their own distinct style which relies heavily on 3d motion design for us is way more of like we're graphic designers first and then we are animators approaching the three-dimensional software with a graphic design mindset and doing more layout kind of stuff how can we make these designs feel more tangible now this is actually almost like building a movie set and then you can go through and work through all the corners and details the production techniques used by lunar north are technical but design always comes first the technical side is still big in motion graphics because the tools are constantly changing but the principles of design the principles of typography is staying the same so we're solving communication problems we're trying to like distill big metaphors into bite-size little pieces having the confidence to go after creatively and technically challenging work has given lunar north some amazing opportunities the tech blog the verge contacted us and they were working on a 360 video for Michelle Obama for the White House and we instantly said of course we know how to do that without ever having done that before and we've made in the eleven and a half minute 360 video in like two weeks storyboard design animation staying on the cutting edge of technology has helped the company stay nimble I think we found a pretty good workflow at this point and we're able to do lots of really heavy 3d car stuff lots of really heavy scene stuff you know these little things are rocks and the bushes and mountains are hidden in the distance we'll use a real 360 photograph to fill in the background and create a sky you can tell that everyone here loves what they're doing and it shows in the work so I think I'm able to kind of keep a hub here where people don't have to go to the coast all the time was a really big part of why I wanted to come back to Detroit and start this year we love what we do we were passionate about it next up we check out gunner who are irrefutable proof that you don't need to live in New York or LA to do world-class motion design the market is definitely at a point where you can be anywhere and you can do anything especially if you work really hard at it the studio's work has a ton of variety which is possible because of their teamwork oriented approach and there's something amazing about like when you just work and mix with people I think the biggest mistake you can make getting into this is thinking you have to do everything yourself it kind of water everything down or you get really good at one thing that you're really excited about and then somebody will always pick you and put you on their team like Rachel who is a traditional cel animator doing things the old-fashioned way for someone who loves to draw if you like to make things move as well then it's like oh I'm gonna draw this same character over and over and over again it takes a long time but it's like you're in your own little world and you get to make creative decisions sitting next to Rachel was John who was making animations for Google that will end up playing in an app on a phone the really interesting thing now is that there's tools that can interpret After Effects animations as lines of code so in code this animation actually looks like this a lot of gunnars work has a unique style and this comes from their old-school approach to inspiration you'll notice like the people that put out really amazing work and the work - you're like they're not referencing motion design they're referencing like paintings they're referencing art they're getting back into like the principles and the rules I'm like that's where I feel like the really good stuff is coming from like we're trying to not like leave out any styles but like still have like a stylized Jace this project for the motion awards shows you what's possible when a studio builds a team and a vibe like the one at Gunnar you can really feel the love that goes into everything they do we just wanted to make cool stuff like even as kids you just do our final stop is vector form a company that uses motion design in some of the most cutting-edge areas of technology we do a lot more interactive work as virtual reality and augmented reality and all the other realities start coming up on the market we're usually better equipped to start tackling those we focus on immersive storytelling the company isn't a traditional studio they create cutting-edge user experiences for some pretty big clients and motion design plays a huge role in the storytelling process we're creating the assets we're building the worlds are building the UI we're animating out all of this stuff I like the variety of it it's like I get to have my fingers in a lot of different areas and so that's really nice screen start to disappear now you have to find like how do you design on these different mediums of how do you actually get like something good out of that working in these new areas requires a new approach and a different breed of software after face does pre-rendered some fantastically but the problem is when you are dealing with virtual reality it needs to be a real time package like unity allows us to create things in a 3d virtual environment and it allows us to then interact with that environment the vector form team mixes old-school mograph techniques with real time technology to create some insane experiences that is wild if you look on the globe you'll see a pulsing effect that's After Effects everything else we did in unity or in 3d applications even though this stuff is built on the latest tech the skills that enable vector form to produce such killer work are the old-fashioned ones being able to think like a designer being able to break the problem down into elements and then solve it properly and my mind is more important than actually knowing the software if you can do good design and you can dissect the problems you'll go significantly farther than just learning the tools [Music] so to recap being a professional motion designer means mixing old-school techniques cutting-edge software and your own unique voice to create compelling work the field is growing incredibly fast and the future of mograph has never looked brighter [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 201,660

Rating: 4.9791541 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, MoGraph, Gunner, Vectorform, YeahHaus, Lunar North, Tour, Studio, Owners, Wacom, Filmmaking, Video Production, Jobs, Industry, Graphic Design, Character Animation, Motion Graphic, Motionographer

Id: p_18QZFLfcA

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Douglas_Fresh]

Great video, and all of those studios did incredible work.

[u/zimzam93]

Detroit represent!

[u/[deleted]]

School of Motion is so dope! Love their podcasts!