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Greyscale Gorilla Cinema 4D Tutorials

I’ve been starting to dive into Cinema 4D lately.  Mainly for the purposes of motion graphics but one day to hopefully be able to create some cool projection mapping stuff as well.  Baby steps first.

I was looking for the Cinema 4D equivalent of VideoCopilot.com in order to learn the basics and eventually the more intense stuff.  If you haven’t checked out Video Copilot it’s headed up by Andrew Kramer.  He is one of those rare people with a crazy amount of knowledge and creativity who can teach others in a way that’s fun and easy to listen to.

I started some tutorials on Lynda.com and they were good for starting from nothing.  They helped with the very basics of navigating the interface and were very helpful for that part.  As time went on though they got a little laborious and hard to follow (I’m trying not to say boring, ha ha).

GSGThe more I searched for Cinema 4D info the more I came across GreyscaleGorilla.com.  They have a couple of guys doing their tutorials and each one I’ve seen so far has been very good.  Informative, easy to follow, and almost most importantly, fun and engaging!

So all that to say go check out their site if you’re interesting in diving into Cinema 4D.  Especially now that C4D is included with After Effects I highly recommend at least knowing the basics.  Well timed with the launch of the integration between AE and C4D is a new tutorial series on Greyscale Gorilla, Introduction to Cinema 4D.

While I haven’t gone through that series yet (I’m about to).  From my experience on their site so far I’m sure it will be great!

Much like Video Copilot they offer unique products at a reasonable price.  This helps offset all of their tutorials being free.  At some point I’m sure I’ll be picking up some of their stuff.

So go and check out their site and start creating!

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Blender 3D Program

If you’re like me you occasionally need to do something in a 3D program but you don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars.  I want a 3D program I just can’t justify that kinda money, I don’t need it that much.

In going through the tutorials on VideoCopilot.net I learned about Blender.  Blender is a free 3D program and a pretty sophisticated one at that.  Even thought it’s free you still get a complete 3D toolset with materials and physics, pretty impressive.

I may dive into it deeper but for now I’m just using it as a tool to help composite in After Effects.  Using blender I can create some true 3D title graphics or create and edit other 3D objects to export into AE.  If I get real courageous I may use it to create some better models for when I use Light Converse.  I need some better people models in there.

That’s it, I’m not familiar enough with it to show a tutorial or anything but there are already plenty of resources out there for that.  It’s available on Mac and PC, go ahead and download it here.

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Planning Center Online

Planning Center is a pretty cool web based app that helps you to coordinate with staff and volunteers to prepare for your weekly services and special events. It helps by centralization all of your service planning and putting all of your contacts and service information into one place.

We switched to it about a year or two ago and it’s been great. As an audio team we use it to check the set list so we know what’s happening. Then we can prepare for rehearsals and services. For programming lights there’s a media player that’s lets me play the songs and make sure that I’m programming the right looks for the right songs.

Check out their site for more detailed information, Planning Center Online. Once set up Planning Center will save you a lot of time! They also have all kinds of cool apps to check out.

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VideoCopilot.net After Effects Training

I’ve been wanting to learn After Effects for a while now.  Now that we’re getting closer to getting our environmental projection setup I want to be able to create our own custom content when we can’t find something we like that’s already on content sites.

Adobe After Effects is an extremely powerful tool to create some motion graphics and cool videos in general.  Learning it though can be a little intimidating though when you’re starting from scratch.  When I decided to learn After Effects I stumbled across VideoCopilot.net.

VideoCopilot.net has been an awesome resource to learn After Effects in a fun way.  The guy teaching is pretty funny and knows his stuff.  Everything is done through videos and they even supply project files to use in the tutorials.  If you never have used After Effects before then start with the Basic Training series and go from there.

They even provide free files where you can just plug in your text or graphics and have really nice title graphics with almost no effort.  They also have some great products of their own that help support the site and keep the training free.

I’ve also ordered Adobe’s classroom in a book training for After Effects.  That will help cover some of the topics and basics that VideoCopilot doesn’t.  I used one of their books when I first learned Photoshop and they’re great.