Hello!
This is the first post since a long time not showing here, it’s great to come back here with a new piece. This one is a simply (almost) 30sec animation, done for my own purposes, within After Effects and Photoshop. It’s suppose to tell a simple story of love and ups and downs of this relationship. I’d like to ask you what were you’re feelings while you were watching this.
Animation: http://www.pinionist.com/twoglow.html
I liked it a lot. Very nice piece. It’s simple yet effective at telling the story. It was a bit too short in my opinion, but i did get a feeling of longing for someone and of distance. The movement of the flares was light and flirty, and uplifting, even though it was a cold environment.
Technically,
Just a thought, maybe its crap, but how about having the two flares a different colour, and maybe when they come together, they turn into a third for that brief moment? Also, i think the image would have more impact if the light source coming from the top was more realistic in the sense that near the top of the image its very very bright, almost white, but it falls off very rapidly ( like in real life, the inverse square law). a BIT like this http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/540.html , in the bottom left.
But really, other than that, i think its great. Well done, it works very well. Very moving.
Marc
Thanks Marc for kind words. Indeed, this light might be more defined, although the whole animation was based on illustration I’ve made, and I’ve tried to be as close to original concept as possible. Anyway, i like idea of this light, I might use it for another animation like this. Not to mention the fact that I’m Cunningham fan too.
MINT! Very nice work I likes it a lot very evocative 
tells a story but in a quick and simple yet beautifull way lights are good too and also the environment is good if you ever re-made this one and didnt use your illustration as a guide you could make this a bit longer and maybe have the lights move through a different area of the environment and have a “chase” camera 
U know like a camera following them through a long area and the two lights zipping in and out and dodging poles and such but maybe my imagination is getting a little two matrix with that
once again nice work 
nice job pinionist… very slick…excellent example for the evocative forum too (with little more than two glowing lights in a quite simple environment, this is almost purely evocative without distractions like ‘subject matter’ )
if it was me, i’d think it would be worth recreating this scene in maya to give you the freedom to move in exploring the idea…
assuming you don’t, heres a few things I notice about it…
the spotlight seems a little plain… maybe a little too central… and i guess the fact that its brightest in the centre strikes me as a little odd… i would recreate this element and model it off a real light, either cast at an angle onto a surface, or shining through misty water…
i can see where you have duplicated the bubbles loop in several areas… take each duplicate area and offset it by several frames so the patterns aren’t as visible… also in the beginning, there are 3 very distinct videos running (maybe i only notice it cause i’m looking for it) but it might be something which could be avoided with different placement
the animation seems to slide out of sync a little bit with the music toward the end… i’m assuming the lights are making the sound (i think thats what’s implied) so this effected is lessened by the time mismatch…
your background bubbles come in after the beginning of the fade in… it begs the question “why?” i’d just fade them in over a longer period starting from the beginning… (you could use an S type bezier curve on the opacity to fade them in if you wanted to allow space for the silence of the beginning to linger…)
where the lights join and illuminate brighter, i would create a layer of floating water junk… …like the dust particles which the light is obviously illuminating, but a layer of some larger particles floating in the water… (i’m thinking along the lines of the sorta stuff you see in the ocean… or the stringy bits of barely there protein in your eye you might see floating through your vision…) 10 or so… using the ‘brightspot’ as its transparency to give the appearance of the brightness actually illuminating and reflecting off the dust in the water, rather than just making a standard brightspot gradient sphere… you could use the same trick much more subtly in the background spotlight… again this would be easier in maya, but would still look great in AE given your obvious level of competency
the fade out at the end is a little fast for my liking… I would let it fade to black for a few more secs… then let your pinionist text fade out to black… then the music finished its fade out… then leave a few seconds of black… with the pace of it, you can afford to have your fades longer… I don’t like being taken to this gentle eery world of light courtship, only to be coldly and abruptly thrust back into the ‘real world’ with a quick 3 second fadeout, and a music fadeout that sounds like maybe momma light came home earlier than she was expected… 
its really outstanding work tho sir… (and i’m loving your website… the little fish polaroids are #$# excellent!)
Cheers
Lachlan
Thanks to all for nice comments!
This animation was first done as picture, which I’ve completed while designing my website (something more creative than html ), and after website was running on, I’ve put all of these layers into After Effects and started adding a bit more life to it. But thanks to comments such as Paraplex’s I think I’ll acctually extend a bit more this idea and concept.
Here’s the original image:
And here’s another image/project that I’ll start working afterward (acctually I have almost everything done except those fish, that I need to find way to animate - any ideas btw?).
Thanks again to all of you, I’ll get back to you soon with updates
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