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.

Library Floor Map Animation

This is to convince people that the BYU library is in fact awesome and to get them stoked to watch an online virtual tour.

Poster

WorldMap Project

iLearning Tutorial: Traveling Indiana Jones style in a B-52.

BYU New Student Orientation bookmark

Designed for Summer semester New Student Orientation

Library Poster

Pictures from Mars Pathfinder + Apollo missions + Atacama Desert + Oregon lavafield + way too many hours = acceptable lunar surface.  I created everything but the text in Photoshop.

For those unfamiliar with the BYU library, here's a picture:

Movie Poster!

At last I have finished the poster for the Studio 79 production "A Dame a Dozen" which has been hailed by critics as "awesome" and "the best neo-noir production in the history of cinema or even the world."  To see the film go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0cu9A5XgWI.

Digital Painting

I did this for my dad for Christmas.  It's hard to tell when this isn't poster-sized, but there's some Leonardo da Vinci sketches in there and the dark blue book is a paper he wrote with one of his grad students at ASU.  (The title is composed of extremely large and complicated words which I will not utter here.)  And then there's the Fibonacci Spiral.  It's an academic overload!

Young Sparrows

I designed this with scalability in mind, specifically with the option to blow it up large enough to cover the side of a Boeing 747.  It was going to be a template for the paint job of a corporate jet for my roommates and I, but in times of economic crisis corporate jets are generally looked down upon so we scrapped our original plan and hung it in our living room instead.

The best sectional shirt ever

This is the T-shirt graphic for the 2008 BYU marching band trumpet section shirt.  I did it as a collaboration with the great Landon Scott Sperry III.  Nothing captures the values and ethics of trumpet players like one of their own shooting flame from his horn while mounted on a savage beast.  They thought it was rad.