Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Steve Connor] “It is incidentally pretty easy to replicate Photoshop’s layer styles in Motion with a few simple tricks – which is probably the one thing that most users wouldn’t realise.”
What an interesting tutorial that would make (hint, hint)!”
Something like this.
Not at all hard to achieve and because you’re building the tools yourself you have much more flexibility than if you’re stuck with some of the limitations of Photoshop layer styles.
And of course it’s much easier to build animated effects into the “layer style”.
You could even publish a whole range of controls for use inside FCP X so it’s quite an interesting route to go down.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Steve Connor] “What an interesting tutorial that would make (hint, hint)!”
Now you mention it …
😉
Simon Ubsdell
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[Walter Soyka] “I’m even starting to use Nuke a bit for stills (managing mattes in Ps is frustrating — sometimes nodes just seem like the right solution), though I’m not yet as fast with the paint system as I am with Ps.”
Very interesting.
I’m glad I’m not the only one to have started doubting Photoshop’s advantages. As I say, I used to absolutely love working with it but then the lateral thinking involved in doing the same stuff in a motion graphics environment made me question a lot of what I thought.
Of course, as you say, Ae is really just an uber-Photoshop in so many ways and Nuke of course would be that in spades – almost any motion graphics/compositing application is going to have advantages over a Photoshop workflow.
That said, the stuff it does really well it still does better than anything else out there.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
As always a really great round-up from Oliver.
One thing that I might add to what he says is that surprisingly Motion is actually a really useful replacement for Photoshop, especially for those frustrated by some of the limitations of Pixelmator.
As Oliver mentions, Pixelmator “does not include some of Photoshop CC’s power user features, like smart objects, smart filters, 3D, layer groups and video manipulation”. With the exception of 3D (how many users actually bother with it in Photoshop?), all of those features are effectively present in Motion.
It is incidentally pretty easy to replicate Photoshop’s layer styles in Motion with a few simple tricks – which is probably the one thing that most users wouldn’t realise.
I used to use Photoshop a great deal more than I do these days until it occurred to me that a huge number of the tasks I was using it for were lot easier and more quickly achieved in Motion. The only tasks that I find easier in Motion are painting (obviously) and occasionally matte extraction where you need to actually paint into the mask. (But even that is more habit than necessity because it’s perfectly possible to do complex matte extraction in Motion.)
A lot of its other features now strike me as hopelessly clunky … and that’s speaking as someone who enjoyed working in Photoshop more than almost anything else.
OK, so it’s probably not going to be for everybody – but it works for me.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’ve generally personally found criticism directed towards me handy/verging on utterly indispensable to any small advances I’ve ever made.”
I’d absolutely agree on that.
Criticism, however painful if might be receive at times, is the one healthy thing that keeps you moving forward and trying to get better in this business and, I imagine (though I’m not an expert), in other areas of life too. Even misguided criticism can be a really useful catalyst for sharpening up your act.
As your mate Beckett put it, it’s all about failing better.
But, apparently, criticism of a piece of advertising from a large corporation is now embargoed. Not sure why, but there you go.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Mark Raudonis] “I applaud the creator, NOT the critic.”
I really don’t know what I’ve done to upset you so much and I do apologise again for any offence caused.
The OP was clearly inviting a discussion of the merits or otherwise of the piece rather than inviting us all to join in a univocal litany of praise: “Think NLE or Camera maters? Watch this.”
Equally, the entire thrust of the Bentley/Apple campaign here is to do with “design excellence” or something of the kind – if you’re going to be making claims of that kind you need to make sure that your communication lives up to the message both in form and content.
And I don’t think it does. I don’t think it’s irredeemably dreadful and the most appropriate description is probably your own: “innocuous”.
My point was that “innocuous” doesn’t really seem adequate to the scale of the collective ambition on show here. As a piece of communication, it fails by its own standards – at least that’s my opinion, though yours is clearly different.
I’m not clear why that seems so unreasonable to you.
I might love Grace of Monaco and you might agree with some of the critics who have been less than kind to it – it’s surely permissible to critique creative work when it’s offered for public consumption.
Clearly if it were some kid in his bedroom who’d knocked this together, I would feel obliged to temper any overly harsh criticism.
And if someone wants to pour scorn on my work in the public domain I have absolutely no problem with that.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Mark Raudonis] “I haven’t seen this kind of vitriol over a perfectly innocuous spot in quite some time.
Your vehement insistence that this spot is rubbish is quite over the top. The spot is what it is.Your reaction to it is puzzling. So, to balance out your vomitus spew of negativity, here’s my opinion:”
Ouch! Isn’t that a bit harsh? I think this piece raises some very interesting questions about a number of things, to do with marketing, with technical quality, with story-telling, with positioning and so on, and if I’ve overstated the case it’s just in the hope of drawing discussion rather than antagonising anyone, though I’ve obviously succeeded in the latter a lot better than the former, so apologies for that.
A couple of cheap quips about the Nouvelle Vague aside, I don’t think I’ve been unfair to it, to be honest.
I think we can all agree that technically this would be unlikely to get passed for broadcast without a special dispensation – the strobing headlights issue alone would certainly get it knocked back. The compression artifacts through the fade up on that opening shot as the guy walks to the car are pretty embarrassing. (The lens flare at 1:50 looks nasty too from this point of view.) If you’re making stuff for the web you need to be on top of things like this. The B&W treatment is also poorly executed – almost certainly a decision make in post rather than planning. I don’t understand some of the focus decisions if that’s what they are – to me they look a lot more like errors than stylistic choices of any kind.
As a piece of editing I certainly don’t “hate” it and I certainly don’t think and didn’t say that it’s rubbish, but then neither can I find anything to “LOVE”, I’m afraid. Content-wise it seems to me to be a very average corporate video with nothing remotely special to recommend it – quite what either Bentley or Apple think they are doing putting out something this humdrum, I can’t begin to understand. You’d have thought “premium” production values were at the heart of both brands, not to mention top quality creative … Those guys in the cars are bending our ears about design quality but an opposite aesthetic is being thrust at us in the visuals and the execution.
I would contend that in terms of “story-telling” it’s fairly weak – in particular the reveal of the hero feature seems to be very flat and lifeless. But I think what’s weakest is that there’s really no creative concept to speak of – or rather such a creative concept as there is (“we’re going to make this an iShoot”) is extraneous to the piece itself and is just not that interesting or even remotely original in May 2014.
(The truly bizarre thing for me is how lame a feature they have decided to highlight, but that’s another matter. In-car entertainment in a Bentley? Haven’t normal cars had that for decades by now? OK, so that’s exaggeration for rhetorical effect but surely an iPad glued on to a slide-out tea-tray has to rank as pretty unimpressive at this point?)
I think I find the assumptions behind the enterprise as a whole somewhat lazy. The big issue for me is really not just that the Emperor has no clothes but that the clothes he isn’t wearing went out of fashion about a year ago – and in today’s marketplace that’s surely a bit lame. I think at this point even tribes in the deepest Amazon rainforest are aware that you can shoot OK pictures with an iPhone and edit them on an iPad.
Also what is the take-away as far as the iPhone picture quality is concerned? I think the message is very confused.
Are we meant to be amazed at how good it looks? In which case it’s got to be judged a failure because it really doesn’t look amazing, surely even to the untrained eye.
Or are we meant to be seeing it as a new kind of DV-type grunge aesthetic? Probably not because that would be an odd kind of claim to be making.
Or are we just meant to be pleasantly surprised that it’s “good enough” and ask nothing else? Clearly it’s good enough for news gathering and the occasional insert where quality isn’t paramount. But the thing I find hard to understand is why you’d want to associate “good enough” with either of these brands. Since when did Apple start to espouse “good enough” as a marketing angle? Actually, don’t answer that because I’m rather inclined to think it has now crept into their lexicon and is here to stay. Which if it’s true is not just odd, but a downright shame.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “From a marketing point of view I think it’s done a good job. How many people would be talking about a new Bentley commercial shot on Alexa and edited on Avid? I think Bentley wanted to be noticed by the tech community and they certainly have by partnering with Apple in this way.”
I wonder whether the Bentley-buying community is as exercised about this piece as the two or three of us wittering on about it here. Somehow I doubt it.
As a piece of communication it’s a bit of a damp squib.
Lance mentioned that it put him in mind of the French New Wave and I think he’s right on the money with that.
For me it inevitably recalled the films of Alain Resnais: an eternity seemed to pass and nothing of the slightest interest or consequence seemed to be being conveyed.
Or maybe it’s actually some Dadaist spoof and I’ve missed the point entirely.
According to the only online article I could spot about this venture: “These sorts of partnerships aimed at showing off the quality of Apple design and camera performance have been done before. Burberry also used the iPhone 5S to shoot a fashion show shortly after the new iPhone was introduced last year.”
So it doesn’t even have the virtue of novelty.
Simon Ubsdell
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[Andrew Kimery] “I think it’s just the latest example of cell phone video being ‘good enough’ and, more importantly, it’s a cross promotional ad for Apple and Bentley. Apple gets to show off the quality and ‘professionalism’ of it’s iDevices and Bentley gets to bask in Apple’s halo. Why is that meaningful to Bentley? I’d say because a whole lot of 20/30-something millionaires are getting minted in Silicon Valley these days and I’m sure Bentley wants a piece of that action (as opposed to being seen as just an ‘old fogey’ status symbol).”
Yes, on balance, I think you’re right and that’s a fair assessment of what they were collectively trying to achieve.
It doesn’t change the fact that creatively this is poor piece of execution, and from a marketing point of view I suspect Bentley were sold a pig in a poke.
I’d also question whether the audience out there is sufficiently video-illiterate to think that this kind of image quality is “:good enough”. After all, manufacturers are hoping to be able to sell them 4K devices hand over fist. How’s that going to work if they can’t actually make a judgement call at this level? The “hip youngsters” I know are extremely critical of poor image quality and know a lot about what to look for …
Simon Ubsdell
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[Andrew Kimery] “You can, though that ship has been sailing for a long time now and eventually video production tools will be as common as pencil and paper. With that being said, the tools still matter.”
It really is a somewhat bizarre discussion.
Are we saying that really, in the light of this Bentley promo, Arri and co. should be giving up trying to sell us decent-looking cameras because all that really matters is how well you can “tell a story” and the audience just doesn’t know the difference?
It could well be true but I think I’d need a bit more convincing than I’ve seen so far.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com
