Demo Reel 2014
by PixelPlex
Our new demo reel is now on-line! Inspired by the films Tron and Tron Legacy, we created a virtual world within which to show clips of some of our work from 2014. We were fortunate enough to have our reel screen at the 2014 San Diego Fall Film Festival. Read our blog to find out more about the film festival: http://www.pixelplex.com/blog/?p=297.
The main part of the animation (the dodecahedron planet, cubic asteroid field, and environment) was created entirely in Adobe After Effects CC 2014 using the Ray-traced 3D render engine. We chose to go this route, rather than use VideoCopilot's "Element 3D" plug-in, because we wanted to get true ray-traced reflections in our animation. We did use VideoCopilot's "Optical Flares" to create the star-like lens flares, as well as "Sure Target 2" to animate the camera for the first thid of the animation (the camera was animated manually for the last two thirds of the animation). We allowed the Ray-traced 3D engine to render the motion blur throughout the animation, but we used the "camera lens blur" effect along with a makeshift Z-depth pass to simulate the camera's depth of field (the Ray-traced 3D engine did not do a great job with depth of field). The content of the various video frames throughout the animation was created using After Effects with a variety of plug-ins as well as AutoDesk Maya in some cases.
The music is an edited version of Daft Punk's "The Game Has Changed" from the Motion Picture Soundtrack to Tron Legacy. We are licensing this track from BMI. Most of the sound design was constructed from elements taken mainly from VideoCopilot's sound effects package "MotionPulse", a few elements from their "Designer Sound FX" collection, and a few elements from various other sources.
