[Mark Suszko]

THAT’S Why I was having such trouble finding the adapters- I’d mis-identified Thunderbolt as Lightning.

…And started humming a song from 1972. Ain’t it funny.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s better to ask for Motion help in the Motion forum, but I’ll see what I can do. The version I’m using here is older but the idea is the same.

I made a 3-d camera, then used the rectangle tool to make a white panel, duplicated it, colored the second panel gray just so you can tell them apart. The 2 panels are all in one master group so far, (see image)

I dragged the gray one off the top of the white one and put it edge to edge with it.

Near the top left are some options for the cursor: hover/press the cursor until you get the circle with round dot. This tool moves the “hinge point” or center of rotation, to where you need it, from the default place in the center of the rectangle, over to the edge, where it would look like a fold in a single sheet of paper, if both panels were the same color/texture. Use the colored arrows to place that hinge point right at the joint.

Once it’s in place, select the gray rectangle, go over to the Inspector on the left side, find the rotation controls for X,Y and Z rotation, and see how you can now make the card seem to flap open and closed. This is keyframeable

Finally, collapse the two rectangles into their group, highlight the Group, and try rotating and moving the pieces as a unit. This is the fundamental concept behind how I would do your greeting card effects. Besides coloring the rectangles, you’d apply your text to them, and the text effects. You see only two rectangles here, but I would have made four identical ones: because your completed card has four faces. So I would make 4 sub-groups to “weld” two faces back-to-back in each of two groups, then connect the two groups by hinging one to the other, using the overall master Group, containing all the others, to manipulate the complete structure.

That’s a quick-and-dirty explanation. Hope it helps.

[Mark Suszko]

Absolutely, and that gives you the timing you need. The music is just another imported Asset.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, this is pretty easy to do in Motion. As it is in AfterEffects, but I like Motion.

Tell Motion you wish to work in 3-d workspace.

The card is going to be made up of multiple layers. Layer One is the card front. layer two is the opposite side of that card, and you put those two, back-to-back, in their own Group. Same deal for the other half of the card, and make THAT pair it’s own Group. Now make a Group that contains the two lesser groups within it, and define where the “hinge” goes between them, to connect them. In this group, you animate the opening action of the card using keyframes. That overall master Group will now give you control in 3-d of movement and rotation of the opening card in all three axes, using one simple control set. It’s easy to apply canned behaviors to the master Group and have the animation done for you.

Get back to that first Group: the one that has the card front and card’s first inner page. You can map a photo and/or textures onto the blank card face, crop and adjust until the look is right.

To get lyrics to type themselves onto the inner surfaces of the cards, you can use built-in text behaviors, applied to the proper layer, in the proper Group.

The main organizing principle is that you go from individual items to Groups, then Groups of Groups. if you keep the naming conventions easy to remember things like “front face group”, you won’t get lost.

If you feel most confident in FCPX, it’s possible for you to build each of the 4 card faces as single panels, with your art/textures and text builds done in FCPX. Then export each of the panels with easy to understand names, import those into Motion, create your Groups in the 3-d space and off you go.

[Mark Suszko]

This may be one of those jobs where the story is uncovered by finding it in the interviews. Your subject isn’t a linear thinker; neither was Dali. Throw out the conventional shooting script; you can’t force this type of artist into that mold. rather, use the right interview techniques, as well as the Socratic Method, to tease out the underlying fundamentals a bit at a time, from each piece “encountered”, and then a “debriefing” after having looked at the art together.

And maybe while you’re obviously trying to make a documentary, maybe all they really wanted was a catalogue video of the pieces: quiet interludes with montage segments built from close-ups and tracking pans across the work, etc. In which case, you go find OTHER people to depose about their reactions to the work, and giving bits of context, etc.

[Mark Suszko]

“Enhance”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbCWYm7B_B4
☺

Take a stepladder and/or extra-tall pole to let you optimize the camera location.

Based on similar experiences, I’d say use a better camera and add degrading thru color adjustments and fx plug-ins, FCPX I think has a canned one exactly for this kind of job, but you can make your own looks just as easily. Only you can tell us just how good the ultimate resolution needs to be.

[Mark Suszko]

You can invoke as many instances the multipoint mask as you need. The one in FCPX is amazing, BTW.

But for FCP7, do a deep google search with my name, the COW, and “multipoint masks” as the terms, and you will get a hit for a posting with free download links to an 8-point, 12-point, 16 and 32-point mask.

[Mark Suszko]

I think you all have a piece of the answer and here is mine:

In FCPX, what I do is, grab a still of the shot,take it into photoshop and use clone stamp to replace the text with adjacent textures from the original. That goes on the lower FCP timeline, a clean copy with the text goes above. use the crop tools or for more precision and better appearance, use a free 8,16, or however-many-point masking tool, to mask the texted area and apply a luma key filter to just the selected area. Underneath layer now comes thru and hopefully fills the text letters. I add some gaussian blur to the bottom layer. A new still has to be made for every scene change, every camera take.

[Mark Suszko]

There are several CGI-based solutions for making the “ocean”. And the 3-d printed model may be cute, but can’t have the flexibility in resolution of a CGI version. If you have enough scans of a house to model it for a printer, you already have what you need to model it in Alias, Lightwave, etc. and that’s where I’d point your project. To keep on schedule, hire out the CGI parts to someone who is already fluent in that stuff.

[Mark Suszko]

Sounds complicated and interesting – my favorite combo.

Not sure if you mean you’re going to put the life-size people into a composite on the tiny house model, or if you mean to see the tiny house “floating” at a distance from the full-size house, seen thru windows in the interior and from the porch… kind of as if everything got flooded except for these two homes?

Instead of paper behind the glass, consider applying matte finish green or blue vinyl or painter tape directly to the front surface of the glass on the inside of the rooms. Stick on a sheet and trim with number ten hobby blade Xacto hobby knives. The vinyl peels off clean afterwards.

I’d suggest blue over green for the windows because any spill /reflection situation using blue screen will look more like ambient daylight leakage, and not be as noticeable, where spilled green is unmistakable. once the glass is taped or vinyled over, it may make sense to add a few small tracking markers to help motion-track mattes inside and out. Though markers may not always be needed since windows are regularly shaped rectangles with easy to see corners to anchor on.