Motion Design Love -

So, tell us a little about yourself, who you are, where you work now and how long you’ve been in the industry?

I’m Neil, I’ve been dabbling in moving image for about 10 years now all over the show. I run a video design agency called Fat Free Media. I was a plain n’ simple video editor for a long time before motion graphics and animation got my attention. My first primitive experiments was trying to motion track text manually in one of the first versions of Final Cut Pro back when it was powered by mice wheels and then thought “there has to be a cooler way of doing this”. It was a long long time before I opened After Effects for the first time but by then it was too late, I was hooked.

It was a case of widening the toolset, coming from a broadcast background where people have specific roles, and then moving into independent production meant meant I had to do more than just edit. I had always done animation work for fun, stop motion and hand-made work, but diving into a nicely planned out motion graphics workflow meant I could do the job of a team of people with just a handful instead.

My favourite part is not even at a computer. It’s the bit with the paper and the pencils. I sketch, storyboard, describe and a lot of the time make pretty weird hand movements to just capture and demonstrate an idea, a camera move or a special effect. In client meetings I get carried away and do the sound effects too, I could be the mograph version of the guy off Police Academy. My second favourite part is after those few hours of setting up, finding the look, layout and feel of a project and for it to all fall into place. When you’re sat with a client and you have a digital version of all your A3 sketches scattered around and it just…worked…you can’t beat that.

I did some visuals for a fashion event in Barcelona and got invited to go. I loved seeing hundreds of people seeing my work in real time. Designing for web and DVD can be quite limited, you never get to see the faces of the people watching it. But seeing it live is great, it really worked and everybody loved it. I also did some animations for a transport company, they liked it so much they rented a van with a HUGE screen on the side and drove it round universities for freshers week. I never saw it but is till get comments saying “Oh yeah i saw that!”…mograph could turn into street art…it could work!

Patience, dedication and vision is obvious. A good taste in music is as important though in my view, you know a killer track is going to make or break your finely crafted peice and some designers just get it wrong.

Get inspired, but not by other showreels. Music does it for me mostly, or photography, illustrations, print design. I’d much prefer to get insired by a photgraph and imagine how I would make it move rather than get inspired by somebody’s showreel and imagine how i could make it look like I made it. I think an organic approach to inspiration breeds the best work. But time constraints don’t always allow that.

I plan to keep crafting a style, a workflow that feels natural. I should say I plan to learn Maya/C4D/Nuke and take over the world but I don’t. 3D isn’t my thing, I bring in others to do that. I stick to my strengths and work on making them stronger.

So, After Effects is your main software of choice, what do you like about it?

I love the interface, the workflow, the adaptability of it. Some may not agree but it just clicks with me. The best way of describing it is that I don’t feel like i’m using software when i’m designing in AE, i just feel like i’m doing work. Like a painter it’s always aware he’s holding a brush, just paints. I really realised this when I tried to push a Motion 3 bandwagon a while back saying “Yeah, i’ll give it a go!…let’s start a revolution!” but then 5 minutes in I was banging my head on the table asking for AE back. Motion is a horrid piece of software.

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