Helpful Bear Promo Animations

Some friends of mine at a motion graphics company called Helpful Bear Productions have created some promo animations that I'm very excited to share with you.

Age of Dinosaurs from Helpful Bear Productions Inc. on Vimeo.

The first one (link to video) shows the Australian dinosaur stamp art magically transforming from drawing to painting. 

They also produced this trailer for my video ""How I Paint Dinosaurs".  (direct link to promo video)

Motion graphic artist Vidur Gupta explains the process:

"This was all done using the Adobe suite, (After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator) along with Cinema 4D.

"I wanted the video to stay in the organic realm and mimic the look and feel of a real camera and everything that comes along with it. The shallow depth of field, slow camera motion that follows the paint bleeding onto the drawing, and realistic lighting to set the mood.

"The “reveals” would ideally have been done by shooting cotton based paper against a light box and then pouring a mix of India ink and water at various consistencies over it and using that as a “mask”. However given that we needed considerably more control over the actual reveal, I decided to try to recreate this effect digitally.

"I discovered that animating the edges of the ink reveal is never smooth as the paper weave isn’t consistent. There is also a thin line around the edge of the ink that first makes the paper appear “wet” before it fills it in with the opaque ink. These observations enabled me to create this in After Effects using built-in plugins.

"The camera motion was achieved via Maxon’s Cinema 4D, using a combination of a target camera and then finessing the motion manually. Subsequentially, the camera data was piped into Adobe’s After Effects, where all the compositing and appropriate titling was done.

"The score was composed by Michael Brennan. He used the primal nature of the dinosaur world as a jumping off point and created something that is absolutely brilliant. It elevates James Gurney’s painting to an even higher level."

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Helpful Bear is a great little company that combines the talents of Vidur Gupta, Gilbert Banducci, Terryl Whitlatch, Michael Brennan, and David Bober

Helpful Bear Facebook page

Helpful Bear website

Australia Post's dino stamp website

Digital download of Australian dinosaur stamp art video

DVDs by James Gurney available at Kunaki