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.