Celebrity Sighting!

No, not really. But I did get a chance to meet Mr. Ayato of ayatoweb.com at last night’s AENY meeting. I remember going to his site years ago and working through every one of his amazing tutorials. It’s nice to finally put a face to the man who has helped and inspire myself, along with 3+ million others. (Yes, his site as of 8/28/08 is at 3,141,247!) From what I heard, he’s been here in NYC the past couple of months working over at Eyeball. I’m really curious as to what kind of project they needed him to come all the way from Japan…

I’ve also seen Justin Cone of motionographer and Andrew Kramer of videocopilot at these meetings. It’s nice to see how tight-knit of a community it is thanks in large part to the people at the Creative Cow and Adobe. Last night was also the first night I won a raffle prize! Aharon Rabinowitz and Red Giant Software hooked me up with Magic Bullet Steady. Can’t wait to try it out!

Nike is Better.

I find that sometimes I am the most creative/energetic when it is really late at night. Something about the peace and quiet of night helps me get lost in thoughts and ideas. The past couple nights I’ve been sketching and designing away in photoshop for a Nike advert. When I think of the best brands in the world, Nike is definitely one of the first that come to mind. I can close my eyes and picture so many memorable ad campaigns, tv spots and websites. They are truly better than their competitors in many aspects of their industry. To simply put it, Nike is better. That makes enough sense to me to start designing… 🙂

Final composite (I’ll have this up on my portfolio site soon):

Assets that I used:

World of Warcraft Trailer

I never really got into the World of Warcraft series but the cinematic trailer for the newest edition, “Wrath of the Lich King” is insane. I tried to find out who created the trailer but no luck so far. Anyone know who created it?

Check it out here!

MTV Interview Part II

The last couple of days have been very hectic. Moving into a new apartment is very exciting but you never realize how much junk you have hidden away until you start cleaning and packing. In any case, its been a couple days since the MTV interview got published. Since then, I’ve had some interesting comments, phone calls, emails, and facebook requests. My parents also received some emails from Japan as the news broke in a bunch of japanese websites and blogs. Thanks to all the well wishers and also the cynics. I couldn’t help but laugh myself when reading some of the witty remarks.

Of course my website and blog were greatly affected by the interview. The good thing was that traffic spiked up by about 500%. The bad news was that my site dropped from a #2 google ranking to #6 when searching ‘Wii Yatani’. The google search results were flooded with News sites reposting the article. Damn you google search spiders!

Anyways, with all that being said, I enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame but now it’s back to unpacking, cleaning and making my apartment look like a page from an IKEA catalog. 😛

MTV Interview

Big thanks to Stephen Totilo of MTV News for a great article and profile – A Man Named Wii Describes How Nintendo’s Game Console Changed His Life. It was truthful, humorous and frankly, its just plain funny seeing me listed as #4 for ‘Breaking News’ on the MTV website. 😛  9000 views between MTV News and Gizmodo in a matter of 8 hours. Yikes, never underestimate the exposure power of Viacom! I see a couple other sites have picked it up as well…

A lot more on this later… I’m too busy packing

New site is live!

New site. New look. New work.

Check it out!

Visual Effects Compositing

A couple weeks ago, I attended an After Effects meeting organized by some of the wonderful people over at the Creative Cow. One of the speakers that really struck a chord with me was Pete O’Connell, a feature film compositor and VFX guy who has done work for major motion pictures such as Transporter 2 and Across the Universe. The tips and techniques he showed us for rotoscoping was very insightful. He showed us how tracking footage can save loads of time and even came up with a useful expression for guiding the position of the mask which I regret not writing down! In any case, he showed us an example of a scene from “Stranger Than Fiction” starring Will Ferrell that he worked on. Now this movie isn’t exactly “The Matrix” so it goes to show you how big of a role VFX plays in today’s movies. ONE scene that he showed us was literally 5 seconds but it took weeks and weeks to rotoscope and “extend” the scene. It was absolutely amazing and I have a so much respect for the amount of work that goes into each movie. He is a very knowledgeable instructor and you can purchase his instructional DVD here.