The last month or so I’ve been doing a lot of work in motion. animated backdrops for the Ontario Public Service and the National Aboriginal Health Organization through Leslieville and MediaStyle, on-site work at CUPE Ontario’s annual convention,

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I’ve been making use of my newly-minted storyboarding skills to nail down details as early as possible in the process to minimize revisions and do some away-from-computer visioning. It’s been a big help, and it’s an evolving art for me: the way I was taught storyboarding was geared more towards character animation in Flash, but most of the work I’m doing involves type and visual identities. So I’m adapting as I go and keeping an eye open for best techniques for storyboarding for motion graphics.

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The NAHO backdrop gave me a chance to get better-acquainted with After Effects. I’m looking forward to using it more to gain better control over movement, though I still love using Keynote for quick turnaround.

This past week, however, I’ve been spending a lot of time at Interaccess, my friendly neighbourhood electronic media arts centre. For $50 I’ve got a student studio membership and had access to their facilities to build my own TagTool mini, a fun little device that, when connected to a PC with a Wacom tablet and game controller, allows you to draw and animate graphics in real-time – usually to be projected on a wall.

My motivation for this was to have something kick-ass for Sunkissed, a rooftop patio party that went down this weekend, organized in part by a couple of DJ crews: Hot Sauce, Eclectic Groove, among others. Missruckus (of Hot Sauce) knew I’ve been getting into VJing lately, so she got me to put together a set. I knew there were going to be lots of artists in the crowd, so the TagTool seemed like a good fit. Even just between Nrinder, who was billed to do live painting, and Shingo (also of Hot Sauce), who is a professional illustrator, I knew we’d get some good material up.

And so, we did.

Make sure you check out the Tagtool building photos, too!

Update: Just noticed that MediaStyle posted a case study on our work for NAHO. Check it out here.