Animation – Karl Hein

03/14/2022 — Comments are off for this post.

Halo Championship Series Announcement Trailer

Vandyl, a new e-sports venture, is looking "to disrupt what it means to be a gamer, artist, creator, and human by facilitating the best talent in gaming, while producing groundbreaking original content." With a new Halo Championship Series team signed, they approached me to help them craft an announcement trailer that would set the tone for the rest of the season and help bring Vandyl's brand language into 3D animation.

Working with their designer, we developed a story revolving around "The Vandyl," a wandering cloaked being, with no defined figure or identity, moving through a world scattered with the remains of historic battles. Working first in Cinema4D for the initial character design, then moving over to Marvelous Designer for the cloth simulations, The Vandyl was designed to be a powerful but fluid silhouette, with his cloak obscuring any defining features except for the orange glow emanating from his boots.

Initial sketch

Cloth development in Marvelous Designer

Initial materials

Final design

The rest of the video was created in Unreal Engine 5 to make use of their Nanite system for handling complex geometry as well as their Lumen system for handling global illumination.

CREDITS

Founder/CEO: Justin Havey
Art Director: Audrey Stemen
3D Animator: Karl Hein
Editor: Xavier McAllister

Published by karlhein00@gmail.com in Animation, VFX

Tags: 3D, animation, VFX

04/27/2020 — Comments are off for this post.

Brave the Wild | Show Package

Brave Wilderness—a YouTube channel headed by Coyote Peterson—was making the jump from online to broadcast with their new show Brave the Wild on Animal Planet. I worked to define the show’s graphic aesthetic, and from there, oversee the production all of the assets needed for their first season.

We began with exploring the logo/title treatment, as this would inform the look and feel of the rest of the graphics that followed. NOTE: About halfway through the design process, the show's title was changed from Beyond Brave to Coyote Peterson: Brave the Wild.

From there, the team began building out the other assets needed for the show, including a fully customizable, realistic Earth that worked natively in After Effects. The template makes use of the VC Orb plugin as well as 8K texture maps. It also gave the Brave Wilderness team the ability to search for locations by name, and have the show's location marker auto-snap to that location in 3D space, making the setup and rendering of these maps (over 15 in total) simple and easy.

Another huge undertaking for this project was the illustrated animal fact portion of the show, known as infopods. Our idea was to present these like Coyote himself takes notes in the field—through a journal. For these sections, we made over 50 custom illustrations of interesting animal facts and brought them to life through subtle camera moves and animation.

Credits

Client: Wilderness Productions | Animal Planet
Director: Karl Hein
Producer: Kate Wilke
Designers: Karl Hein, Jonny Sidlo, Audrey Stemen
Illustrator: Christine Lee
Animator: Karl Hein
Editor: Kurt Keaner

Published by karlhein00@gmail.com in Animation

Tags: 2D, after efects, graphics package, show graphics, VC Orb

06/13/2019 — Comments are off for this post.

Storytellers Series

Wolf's Ridge Brewing wanted to start producing more social content to promote not just their beers, but some of the stories behind the beers. From this, I developed the WRB Storytellers Series, with each video showcasing a member of the staff talking in-depth and improvisationally about their favorite aspects of the restaurant or brewery.

The biggest challenge for this series was the budget. With only a limited amount of hours we could spend, we had to develop a system for these videos that could be executed quickly and efficiently. We landed on a very crude, cutout stop-motion style—heavily influenced by shows like Tom Goes to the Mayor. We quickly became well-acquainted with Photoshop's "Select Subject" tool, and created an FX preset for After Effects that handled all of the character styling.

Director: Karl Hein
Producer: Mike Gillespie
Designer: Audrey Stemen
Animators: Karl Hein, Audrey Stemen
Audio Engineer: Kody Orris
Photographer: Justin Havey

Published by karlhein00@gmail.com in Animation

Tags: 2D, animation, beer, brewery, collage

04/07/2017 — Comments are off for this post.

Scoreboard Graphics Redesign

With (at the time) the biggest MLB scoreboard being installed in their stadium, the Cleveland Indians approached us to completely overhaul the design and animation of their in-stadium program.

Our team did an in-depth analysis at the information hierarchy of the scoreboard, taking into account what the people in the stadium needed to see, wanted to see, and would be nice if they saw.

Previous Design // Proposed Design

From there, we developed an updated graphic look for all of the in-stadium materials including bumpers, big play graphics, and player intros. To manage the huge amount of animation this project took, we developed a custom animation template that could be share between artist easily. This kept all of the graphics consistent, no matter which artist was working on the project at that time. All in all, this was an amazing project to work on, especially for the Indians fans in the studio. Go Tribe!

Final Scoreboard Stringout

Additional Graphics

Director: Karl Hein
Producer: Richard Charney
Designer: Karl Hein
Animators: Steve Tharp, Marco Cardenas, Morgan James, Josh Studabaker, Jeremy Patterson

Published by karlhein00@gmail.com in Animation

Tags: 2D, animation, baseball, Cleveland Indians, motion graphics

10/21/2016 — Comments are off for this post.

Baskets: Promo Concepts

For the second season of their hit show Baskets, FX Networks came to Spacejunk asking for a creative pitch for the promo graphics they would run throughout the season. We presented 3 concepts, all based around the show's main themes, with a dash of Paris in each. While we ultimately didn't win the pitch, the work was stellar and we all had a blast developing the ideas.