May 31st, 2010
The process of 3D Animation is magical and obscure to the general public and often even some of our clients. This humorous video is an entertaining watch and goes a long to help explain the process.
The problem with 3D animation appearing so bewitching and almost anything being possible, is that people don’t understand certain 3D workflows can be extremely linear, and therefore certain things cannot be adjusted after the fact, without losing a great amount of work (this video is highly simplified, but it presents a few of these issues clearly).
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May 3rd, 2010
Facebook is getting saturated with various apps, the majority either mindless variants of farm, pet or city growing, or tiresome surveys/quizzes.
That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to create an application that can have impact in the real world. ”Giving Nature a Voice” is a Facebook based multi-petition application for Forest & Bird New Zealand. Their first petition was to encourage people to speak up and help prevent more mining of our conservation areas:
There are existing Facebook petition apps about (eg; Causes), but they are all bloated with unnecessary extra features and weren’t able to be branded as tightly as Forest and Bird required. A custom solution was the best course forward, not only as we could design as we saw fit, but so we could learn what makes Facebook apps tick.
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March 12th, 2010
For the past 18 months we’ve worked with the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology to help them create a large number of interactive animations for their Aeronautical Engineering courses. We’ve posted stills of a few of our favourite models below so that you can appreciate the quality and attention to detail in each animation.
Students enjoy being able to interact directly with each model and are able to visualise the functions in a step by step and hands on approach. They can switch individual groups of lights on and off in aircraft, watch an animated character demonstrate airtraffic signals or see how heat affects different metals by lighting their own virtual bunsen burner.
More pictures after the jump.
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March 10th, 2010
With another successful Americarna event done and dusted we thought it a good opportunity to look back on one of the more interesting campaigns that we’ve been involved with - the Miss Americarna 2008 competition.
At the inaugural event a year earlier the organisers had simply handpicked a girl to appear as the public face of the event, in 2008 they wanted to encourage more participation both from the applicants and the public. A competition presented a great way to achieve this and also raise awareness of the event 6 months out so it was decided to advertise for contestants and then allow the public to vote using the website and SMS based texting. Proceeds from the texts would go to the SPCA.
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February 15th, 2010
We regularly have the need to share assets with our clients - videos, images, mock-ups, documents, etc.
Instead of clogging up inboxes with huge files that can’t be easily found, or resorting to third parties such as yousendit we created a simple, clean online Client Area.
It is extremely easy to use - it simply maps our local folders and files to a tasty interface.
Got a new client? Just create a new folder with their name, and paste your assets into it.
Then just send your client the nicely formatted URL to their project.
Videos are recognised automatically and wrapped into a custom player (with timecode).
For security, folders are easily locked by a password.
For a public demo, check it out here: http://www.momentumstudios.co.nz/demo/clients/
The client area is an inhouse bespoke PHP application. Get in contact if you are interested, it can be easily reskinned and deployed.
February 8th, 2010
We always enjoy the inevitable challenges that occur when creating media to display on unusual screens or surfaces. So when one of our international clients who had just undergone a rebrand asked us to repurpose video asset for use on the eight story high NASDAQ Marketsite Tower in New Yorks Times Square we jumped at the opportunity.
The screen measures 1,000 square metres and uses more than 18 million LEDs on a display with a top resolution of 1280×1824. Compare that with the TSB Bank 40 square metre screen that we built and operated and you get a idea of the sheer size of the sign. As you can see from the short video above, not only is the aspect ratio quite unique but we also had to plan for the windows which this massive digital sign is built around.
Fortunately its less of an issue than you’d think, as NASDAQ provides After Effect templates which help to provide a guide. Since we had originated the initial video in 720P it was quite easy to conform to the aspect ratio without losing detail. It was pretty cool to be able to watch the result via live webcam and see our work displayed in real time on the other side of the world.
The video was shot on XDCAM EX using the Letus Ultimate and Nikon 35mm lenses, actors were filmed in downtown Wellington, at Kaitoke Regional Park and on a greenscreen in our studio. The asset was taken from the brand video that we initially worked on. Nicci Lock from Film Wellington was a great help with securing location permissions.
January 5th, 2010
Here’s something we ain’t blogged about yet: the portal of Taranaki, the beautiful region where Momentum was born. It’s a site-system that began as an effort to unify a family of websites that dealt with different aspects of life in Taranaki, like tourism, film, business, governance, etc. This was three years ago. Today’s Taranaki - Like No Other website has evolved considerably, and, like all good sites, that process is ongoing.
Allow me to guide you through some of the cool techniques we pulled designing this site.
The menu
The first challenge we had, was of course how to structure, and easily navigate such huge amounts of diverse data. Beyond the main areas (top-right) we still had enormous branches of information.
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January 5th, 2010
Momentum enjoyed the opportunity to redevelop the McDonald Real Estate site (http://www.eieio.co.nz/) from the ground up.
A real estate site is a great technical challenge - hundreds of listings and thousands of photos changing daily, as well as complex searches and regular content changes.
We decided to use a free, open source CMS called Silverstripe.
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December 11th, 2009
Momentum has a number of years experience with the installation, ongoing development and content creation for digital signage networks. As an example in 2005 we approached the TSB Bank about a digital signage network across their network of branches, and offered to work alongside them to manage the installation, help-desk, and the creation of content.
After gauging their initial interest, we set up a demonstration to showcase the hardware (screens and software), plus some digital content in the Banks house style.
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