Green Team Logo Reveal

Here's a work in progress for the HBLL Green Team.

ScholarsArchive intro

ScholarsArchive from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

Here's yet another attempt to turn some dull library instruction into something exciting.  I figure that if the beginning 30 seconds are interesting enough people are more likely to stick it out till the end of the tutorial. Jeremy Stiborek pitched in yet again with his golden voice.

ScholarsSearch tutorial online!

Here it is at last, citizens.  Featuring the voice talents of Jeremy Stiborek and the jubilant acting of Mitchell Wright and other sundry folk, it's pretty exciting.  It's also the first BYU Library tutorial available in HD, so all you videomongers with big screens can check it out in all it's glory.

Dell Presentation

Matching Dell Final

This is a consulting presentation on Dell for a strategy class.  The group pitched in on analysis, I did the the design, everyone went home happy.

Scribd kinda messed up the graphics on a few of the pages.  Somehow the pdf got trashed in the embedding, but it actually looks ok on the Scribd website.

Draper Temple Footage - Wedding Video Greatness

On Labor Day my friends and I went up to Draper to shoot some footage with their new Canon 7D.  The resulting awesomeness can be seen here, and I'd say it turned out pretty great for their first time with the camera.  It features their buddy and business associate Mike in the staring role of the young man wandering the temple grounds and asking himself important, life-changing questions like "How is it that simple dolly moves can blow your mind?"

Luckily for the masses, these guys are starting a wedding video business, nay, a wedding video revolution!  Check out the video, forward it to everyone you know, and tell your engaged friends and family about the Sperry brothers' new venture.  They'll make sure the best day of your life looks amazing.

Olde Timey Time Fun!

Scholar Search Intro from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.


This is the intro to a tutorial that will soon (very soon, we hope) be finished.  Thanks to Jeremy Stiborek for his excellent voice acting.  Another project featuring his talents can be seen here.

Boom!

Stadium explosion from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.


This isn't hating on BYU or Provo or football stadiums. I really like all of those. It's just the result of messing around with the Corner Pin effect in After Effects while pondering the possibility of making an action movie with my friends.  After creating the illusion of flight from a still photo, the natural thing to do is make something blow up.

Quick Animation

Tutorial Intro from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

One of my coworkers designed this, I tweaked the letter spacing and added animation.

Corporate Presentations

Beleza Do Mar
This summer I interned at Excend Capital, a private equity firm in Salt Lake City.  Though my work there consisted of screening and establishing relationships with capital partners, I had the chance to do the occasional design project.  I created these corporate presentations from pictures and information we received from the Brazilian and Chilean firms looking to raise capital.  I'm particularly proud of the fact that I did it using only the Windows XP system fonts (I couldn't install any new fonts because I didn't have the admin rights).  If some of the tables appear out of place, it's because I took them straight from the docs we received.  Because the presentations were sent to potential capital partners after a non-disclosure agreement was in place, all the names, financials, and other identifying information have been altered or removed.  One thing that has not been changed is my estimation of the ridiculously amazing beaches in Sergipe and my desire to have a house there once I'm rich and famous.  Thanks to Greg Rockwell, principal at Excend for allowing me to put these up.

Corporate Presentation - Hacienda Maria Delgado

Updated Graphic

Egypt to China from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

This is one of the graphics that I created for a tutorial update.  I made the first version of this more than a year ago, and this improves on that in several ways, not the least of which is the move to HD and the fact that a much more reasonable aircraft has replaced the B-52 of the previous video. 

Unfortunately the compression kinda destroyed a lot of the olde timey time film artifacts; I'll have to come up with a more robust way to create them in AE.

Nuclear Launch Detected

Parallax experiment from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

This started out as an experiment to see if I could take a still picture and turn it into an animated matte painting kind of thing, and it turned into this.

China Motion Graphic

Inspired by the credit sequence in Sherlock Holmes.  It's HD on Vimeo

China motion graphic from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

Virtual Tour Online! Flash Catalyst saves the day!

Watch the BYU Library Virtual Tour 

After a titanic struggle of failed software, messed up codecs and behemoth files, my latest project is at last complete and was deployed online in a great celebration of mirth and revelry. You can see videos for the individual levels on YouTube.

The intended audience is students attending the BYU Salt Lake Center who are required to take a tour of the library for their freshmen English class.  This saves them the trouble of driving an hour south to Provo just to walk around the library for 20 minutes.

To create the tour, I took still pictures with a Canon DSLR then merged them into panoramics in Photoshop.  Then they were imported into After Effects and wrapped to a spherical background using the Trapcode Horizon plugin.  Once this was set up, it was simple to pan and zoom a digital camera inside the 3d environment and fly elements around in front of the camera in sync with the narration.  After the videos were completed they were converted to Flash video and sent to Adobe Flash Catalyst (which I began using after Adobe Captivate and Camtasia both crapped out on me.)  Flash Catalyst mercifully spared me the horrible non-interactivitiy of Captivate and the torture of writing endless lines of Action Script, for which I will be eternally grateful.  To me, Flash Catalyst is the way Flash should have been all along.

"Verily, Adobe because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to write ActionScript code: but from the beginning it was not so."

Virtual Tour Introduction

Virtual Tour Introduction from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

This is the introduction for the BYU library virtual tour.  I built it in After Effects, then used Final Cut Pro to add the sound.  It looks much better on Vimeo than in the tiny Blogger window, trust me.

Graduation Announcements

I wish I could say I was making my own graduation announcements, but alas, these are for my little sister's high school graduation.

Some old work

Administrative Council Disaster from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

I did this for work last summer.  It's part of a movie my department created for the HBLL staff retreat.  The protagonist goes back in time (ala Back to the Future) to save the library from this terrible disaster that wipes out the Administrative Council.  It was one of my first compositing jobs and could definitely be improved on, especially if I took the time to rotoscope some of it.  The gratuitous fire at the end is to cover the laughing faces of our "actors."  Apparently the thought of their own demise was pretty amusing.

New Poster Design!

I did this poster for the Highland Jazz Festival.  When it gets as big as the Montreal Jazz Festival, I will be remembered as the designer of their first poster, and then I will be famous!  It was reported that Wycliffe Gordon, one of the featured artists at the festival, really liked the poster and the brick background in particular.  I was going for an old jazz club look, like it might be from a place like the Village Vanguard or something.  Thanks Wycliffe!

After Effects Optical Flares Test

This is probably one of the dumber things I have ever created.  Video Copilot's Optical Flares is incredible.


After Effects Optical Flares test from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

Library Virtual Tour

Virtual Tour title from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.

Señior Pictures!

Over the break I did my sister's senior pictures.  Wife Queen Sarah told her how to pose, which was way more effective than me saying "Um . . . stand by that rock thing and point your head at me."  It was my first step into the perilous land of portrait photography, a scary place full of dangerous blurs, super-saturated colors and insane vignettes.  I found it thrilling and dangerous.

Scholars Archive Animation

Research archives--the final frontier . . . Personally, I think if I came across some engineering paper flying through deep space I would arm the photon torpedoes. I wrote the music for this too.

Scholars Archive Intro from Matt Morrell on Vimeo.